India’s Long-neglected Agrarian Problem

Gloucester's show
Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow, snares relenting passengers.

                        — Henry VI, Part 2 — Shakespeare

The ancient belief has it that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their victims. Though not true, it’s very applicable to politicians, especially those who claim allegiance to the Congress Party who have, of late, been shedding copious tears on the plight of our farmers.

There has, for instance, been such an almighty hullabaloo about the death by hanging of a farmer from Rajasthan at an AAP rally. (That it later turned out to be an Agatha Christie mystery is another story. The so-called destitute farmer had a family land holding of 20 odd bighas with a six-room concrete house and handsome Rajasthani safa-tying handsome side income.) Shan’t we, in this light, drastically revise the Suresh Tendulkar definition of poverty to suit the current definition of agrarian destitution?

There have been – let’s not forget – over one lakh suicides by farmers during the inglorious decade that the Congress-led UPA ruled the country. So, if there’s a single party responsible for the deplorable state of our agrarian sector, it’s the Congress party.

Desperate State

For over six decades, the Grand Old Party has, in the name of pseudo-socialism, been giving doles and handouts to farmers instead of providing them basic facilities like irrigation, roads, markets and financial help. No wonder, therefore, an overwhelming majority of our farmers live in a state of desperate poverty. In fact, the situation is so desperate that even if one crop fails, it spells ruin for them. An Indian Express columnist lately observed that an “average Indian farmer often makes less money in a year than beggars make in the streets of Mumbai.” No wonder they flock to nearby towns in search of some work just to eke out a living. The much-publicized Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) devised to enhance the livelihood security of people in rural areas by guaranteeing hundred days of wage-employment in a financial year to a rural household who volunteer to do unskilled manual work, has made no dent to the long-neglected agrarian problem.

Classic Description

May I refer here to the 1996 classic Everyone Loves A Good Drought by one of India’s most intrepid journalists, Palgummi Sainath. He wrote it after touring some of the poorest districts in the country to know how the poorest of the poor citizens of free India live.The book was a collection of reports that the author filed during his tours. Some of the reports kicked up controversies and in a few cases even led to some action on the part of the authorities. It is another matter that Sainath opended just a window of the house steeped in utter darkness of centuries. In reality the scenario is far more grim.

Sainath’s main findings can be summed up in just one word - apathy. Apathy towards the victims of chronic rural poverty is a specter that haunts our polity. Around this theme Sainath – who knows the rural poor as few people know – wove the stories about real people of flesh and blood who were – and still are – victims of grinding poverty handed down from to generation after generation – people who lie hidden in the great piles of statistical data that our politicians mouth as rural poor.

Sainath discovered that while there are schools without buildings and teachers, there are schools with buildings and teachers too. Except that while the ‘buildings’ are used for storing fodder and tendu leaves and the teachers teach non-existent students.

He told the story of the residents of a village called Chikpaar. The village was first acquired in 1968 for the MiG jet fighter project for Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) in 1968. Some 400-500 families were evicted on an “angry monsoon night”. They moved to another location (on the land that was owned by them) and resettled there. Nostalgically, they named the new village as Chikpaar.

In 1987, these very families were evicted again for the Kolab multi- purpose project. The villagers again resettled at another place. Again, ‘development’ chased them to their new place of residence and the residents received eviction notices for the third time.

The book was a scathing indictment of the elite in this country who like our leaders visit the remote areas in a jeep, get photographed and scurry back before sunset. What Dr. K.N. Raj termed as the “two Indias” pithily and epigrammatically came out in the study.

Sainath was describing in words the protest of the adivasi in Govind Nihalani’s film Aakrosh (a role brilliantly played by Om Puri), whose tongue has been cut off and despite being the victim, is actually hauled up in jail.

Persistent Dilemma

That India lives in villages is a tired, stale cliché. We all know that the basic problems of Indian polity – social as much as economic – have agrarian roots. During the last 50 years, while missing no opportunity to acknowledge the importance of the agrarian problems, we have done precious little to tackle what F. Tomasson Jannuzi of the University of Texas calls India’s Persistent Dilemma.

The fact that a foreigner has studied in depth our festering agrarian malaise – while most Indian economists took it for granted – illustrates how readily we learn to live with our problems rather than do something about them. And most (if not all) of the discredit for this failure squarely belongs to Jawaharlal Nehru who had the opportunity – an opportunity that comes in centuries – to initiate a long-due action, but didn’t have either the inclination or the will to do so. The result is as Jannuzi sums up:

As a result of the Government of India’s failure and the failure of most Indian states to enact into law and implement agrarian reform measures designed to transform its historic land systems so as to confer new rights and economic opportunities on actual cultivators, India now faces an uncertain future. India’s existing political economy is one that denies generally its rural majority the socio-economic changes long ago promised by India’s Founding Fathers and made explicit in the Directive Principles. The existing political economy in rural India is shaped mainly, as it was prior to independence, by the interests of a minority of landholders whose political and economic power are derived from secure rights in land.

Heart-rending indeed is the account of our failure to devise a systematic national program to bring about the much-needed agrarian reforms in post-1947 India. Had Nehru the foresight to facilitate such a program and win national support for it, we would have emerged from the long-lingering shadow of British colonialism into a truly democratic era rooted in an empowered mass of humanity which had been ruthlessly exploited for centuries. The account of our failure to do what we could have done on this front is the most telling commentary on Nehru’s post-1947 business-as-usual approach. All that was done in the name of agrarian reform was to conjure up a camouflage to ensure the continuity of the old order. In Jannuzi’s words:

If the government of a country is dominated or strongly influenced by landholders, the very persons whose powers and prerogatives are to be curtailed by agrarian reform, no one should expect effective measures of reform to be enacted or, even if they could be successfully enacted, to be implemented.

Those who Mattered

Allow me a small diversion. Before Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Indian independence movement was an upper middle class Xmas week diversion of resolution passing. It was he who gave it an altogether new dimension by involving the Indian peasantry, whom he egged on to stop paying lagan. He gave the clarion call: “Swarajya is my birthright, and I shall have it!” And this was the demand of a new generation. No wonder the British colonial rulers called him “Father of the Indian unrest.” In the fitness of things the newly-awakened masses conferred on him the honorary title of “Lokmanya”, which literally means “accepted by the people (as their leader)”.

Tilak’s mantle fell on the shoulders of Gandhi. He went a step further to involve the peasantry. Remember his Champaran campaign in North Bihar. And this made the independence movement an unstoppable juggernaut that the ever-opportunist upper middle class clambered on realizing that independence of India is on the way. Ironically, once again as usual the peasantry was let down when independence finally arrived.

Let the present generation be reminded that our independence movement was given a mass base by Gandhi only by successfully mobilizing the peasantry. Emphasis on land reforms once we were independent was a recurring theme whenever Congress leaders talked of their priorities. Even after 1947 the exercise continued perfunctorily. The First Five Year Plan document pompously proclaimed:

The future of land ownership and cultivation constitutes perhaps the most fundamental issue in national development. To a large extent, the pattern of economic and social organization will depend upon the manner in which the land problem is resolved.

However, the reality is entirely different. What goes in the name of land reforms was supposedly implemented in two phases. The first consisted of the abolition (on the statute book) of the zamindari system, conferring on the tenants the rights to the land that they had cultivated for generations. In the so-called second phase a ceiling was fixed on the size of the holdings. The ostensible purpose of the second phase – most deftly defeated in practice − was to bring about a more equitable land distribution. Let’s however remember that land reform was a State subject. Had the Central Government been really serious about it, the subject would have been, while the Constitution was being finalized, at least brought on the Concurrent List to thwart the designs of land-owning classes dominating State legislatures.

The result of this unpardonable lapse, as they say, is history.

Continued to “Festering Agrarian Problem: How Long Can We Dither?”