India After Independence: 1947-2000 (69 page)

Given this situation, any blind opposition to agricultural growth with the existing modern technology would be unsustainable and counter-productive. However, it has become necessary to make a major effort in educating the farmers so that excessive and improper use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, wasteful irrigation practices, etc., are checked and they are acquainted with the necessity of retaining bio-diversity and of learning from traditional methods of retaining the ecological balance while using modern technology. Partly, the answer lies in the direction of further scientific breakthroughs, particularly in the area of biotechnology. It is felt that top priority needs to be given to research in this frontier area, if India is to achieve sustainable growth with self-reliance in the emerging world context today, as she has been able to do in the past with the Green Revolution technology.

The years since independence have seen agrarian struggles of enormous variety, ranging from the legendary Telangana peasant movement and the PEPSU tenants’ movement which continued from the pre-independence years, to the Naxalite or Maoist movement in the late sixties and the ‘new’ farmers’ movements of the eighties. Interspersed in between are many lesser-known struggles, such as the Kharwar tribale’ movement in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar in 1957-58, the Bhils’ movement in Dhulia in Maharashtra from 1967-75, or the Warlis’ struggle led by the Kashtakad Sanghatna headed by the Marxist Jesuit Pradeep Prabhu since 1978. SSP and PSP launched a land grab movement in 1970, as did CPI. In Punjab and Andhra Pradesh, peasants protested against betterment levies imposed for covering costs of irrigation schemes, for better prices for crops, and other similar issues. CPI set up the first nation-wide agricultural labour organization, Bharatiya Khet Mazdoor Union, in Moga in 1968. In Tanjore and Kerala, movements of agricultural labour and tenants took place, as did numerous others all over the country.
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The trajectory of these movements in many ways maps the process of agrarian and social change since independence. A shift is discerned from immediate post-independence concerns bequeathed by colonialism and feudalism to issues arising out of the Green Revolution and other processes of agrarian change including the aspirations aroused by the struggles for and policy of land reform. Constraints of space do not permit an exhaustive account of these struggles; the choice has inevitably fallen on the more dramatic ones, while many quieter stories must await their turn.

In anticipation of independence and the accompanying changes in agrarian relations, the period between the end 1945-47 witnessed a sharp increase in agrarian struggles all over the country. Some of these, such as Tebhaga in Bengal and the Canal Colonies tenants’ movements in Punjab were disrupted by the rising tide of communalism that preceded and accompanied Partition. But in two areas, both located in princely states undergoing the process of integration into India, the movements continued into the post-independence years. One was the Telangana area of Hyderabad State and the other the Patiala area of the PEPSU or Patiala
and East Punjab States Union. Both were led by Communists and provide important insights into their politics at the time.

The Telangana or Telugu-speaking area of Hyderabad State ruled by the autocratic Nizam had been experiencing political opposition since the late thirties under the influence of nationalist and democratic organizations such as the State Congress and the Andhra Mahasabha. From the early forties, the Communists emerged as a major force and when the ban on CPI was lifted by the British in 1942 due to their pro-war line, they quickly expanded their influence and established their control on the Andhra Mahasabha. The peasants in Telangana suffered extreme feudal-type oppression at the hands of jagirdars and deshmukhs, some of whom owned thousands of acres of land. The Communists began to organize the peasants against the hated forced grain levy imposed by the government, and
veth begar
or forced labour extracted by landlords and officials. From 1945, helped along by a few incidents in which the Communists heroically defended the poor peasants, the peasant movement began to spread rapidly.

The Nizam of Hyderabad was among the very few rulers who refused to join the Indian union at independence in the vain hope, encouraged by Pakistan and some British officials, that he could hold out and stay apart The people of the state grew restless at his delaying tactics and started a movement for integration under the leadership of the State Congress. Camps were set up on the borders of Hyderabad with Maharashtra, coastal Andhra, etc., and arms were also sent in to help the resisters withstand the attacks of the Razakars, armed gangs of Muslim militia let loose on the predominantly Hindu population. The Communists participated actively in the anti-Nizam, pro-integration movement, and it is in this phase, August 1947 to September 1948, when they rode the anti-Nizam pro-India wave, that they registered their greatest successes, establishing a firm base in the Nalgonda, Warangal and Khammam districts. Landlords and officials mostly ran away to the towns, leaving the field free for the Communists in the villages. The Communists organized the peasants into sabhas and formed guerilla bands or dalams, for attacking Razakar camps and protecting villages. Armed mostly with slings, sticks and stones and later crude country guns they established control over a large number of villages, (the numbers mentioned by them are 3000), and used the opportunity to reorder land relations. Lands that had been taken over by landlords in lieu of debt claims in large numbers during the Great Depression of the thirties were returned to the original owners, government-owned uncultivated waste and forest land was distributed to the landless, wages of agricultural labour were sought to be increased, and women’s issues such as wife-beating were also taken up. As confidence grew, ‘ceilings’ on landlords’ land were declared, first at 500 acres and then at
100 acres, and the ‘surplus’ land distributed to landless and small peasants. It was found that the greatest enthusiasm was for recovering lands lost to landlords in living memory, followed by occupation of government waste and forest land. Occupation of the landlords’ surplus land, even when it was offered in place of land lost to the landlord but which could not be restored because it had in the meantime been sold to some other small peasant, was not really popular with peasants. Clearly, they believed strongly in their claim to their own ancestral land and even to uncultivated land but felt little claim to the landlords’ land even when it was surplus land. They also probably calculated quite wisely that they had a greater chance of retaining land to which they had some claim or to which nobody else had a claim (and there was also a customary traditional sanction for claim of ownership of the person who brought uncultivated waste land under cultivation). In fact, this is what happened after the movement declined. Peasants were able to by and large hold on to these categories of lands, but not to the ‘surplus’ lands.
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On 13 September 1948, after having waited for more than a year for the Nizam to see the writing on the wall, and once the anti-Nizam resistance movement had shown clearly what the people desired, the Indian Army moved in to Hyderabad. The people greeted it as an army of liberation and within days the Nizam and his troops surrendered. The army then moved into the rural areas to clear out the Razakars and was greeted enthusiastically by peasants. However, the Communists in the meantime had decided that they were not going to give up their arms and disband their guerilla bands but were going to fight a liberation war with the pro-imperialist, bourgeois-landlord Nehru government. As a result, the dalam or gurerilla squad members were told to hide in the forests and attack the Indian Army just as they had the Razakars. They seemed to have not noticed that this army was a modern, well-equipped force with high morale unlike the hated Razakars armed with medieval weapons. An unnecessary and tragic conflict ensued with the Army successfully flushing out activists from villages in a few months, but in the process causing great suffering to thousands of peasants. Communist activists who had hidden in the forests continued to make efforts to re-establish links and build new bases among the tribes in the forests, but with diminishing success. Officially, the movement was withdrawn only in 1951, once CPI changed its line after endless debates and a visit by its leaders to Moscow, but in effect only a few comrades remained in hiding in forests by then. Many, perhaps around 500, had died and about 10,000 were in jail.

The government was quick to respond to the issues raised by the movement. The Jagirdari Abolition Regulation was laid down in 1949 itself, and the Hyderabad Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act was passed in 1950. Over 6,00,000 tenants covering over one-quarter of the cultivated area were declared ‘protected’ tenants with a right to purchase the land on easy terms. Land ceilings were also introduced in the mid-fifties. It was also found that land reforms were much better implemented due to the high level of political consciousness of the peasants. Landlords who
returned after the movement collapsed were not able to go back to old ways. They often agreed to sell land at low rates, were subject to pressure for higher wages, did not try very hard to recover peasants’ own lands or waste lands, but only the ‘surplus’ lands. The movement had broken the back of landlordism in Telangana, but this had already been done as part of the anti-Nizam, pro-integration liberation struggle, when their position as leaders of the popular upsurge provided Communists the opportunity to articulate radical peasant demands as well. The costly adventure thereafter was not dictated by the imperatives of the peasant movement but was entirely a consequence of misguided revolutionary romanticism, of which some Indian Communists appeared to be enamoured.

The Muzara or tenants’ movement that was going on in Patiala (the largest princely state in Punjab, that had become notorious for its repressive and rapacious Maharaja) at independence had its origins in the late nineteenth century.
Biswedars
(the local term for landlords), who earlier had only some mafi claims or revenue collecting rights, due to their growing influence in the administration, succeeded in claiming proprietary status (imitating the pattern in British India where zamindars or revenue collectors with customary rights only to retain a share of the revenue had been made into landowners) and relegated the entire body of cultivating proprietors of roughly 800 villages, comprising one-sixth the area of the state, to the position of occupancy tenants and tenants-at-will. The new tenants regarded the new landlords as
parvenus,
who had no
legitimate
right to the land which had belonged to the tenants for generations, and not in the manner in which a traditional tenantry might regard their old, established, feudal landowners, whose right to the land had acquired a certain social legitimacy by virtue of its very antiquity.

The grievance festered, but the opportunity for expression came only with the new wave of political awareness brought by the national movement and its associated movements such as the Akali and the Praja Mandal movements in the twenties. But the repressive atmosphere in Patiala made any political activity extremely difficult, and it was only in the late thirties with the change in the political atmosphere brought about by the formation of Congress ministries in many provinces that it became possible for a movement to emerge. By then, Communists were quite active in the peasant movement in the neighbouring British Punjab, and they soon emerged as the leading force in the Muzara movement as well.

From 1939, a powerful movement emerged and from 1945 it escalated into an open confrontation between
muzaras
and biswedars, with the state intervening mainly to institute cases of non-payment of
botai
(rent-in-kind) and criminal assault. Numerous armed clashes took place at different places, some over forcible possession of land, others over forcible realization of batai. The Praja Mandal, which spearheaded the
anti-Maharaja democratic movement, under the influence of Brish Bhan, who was sympathetic to the Communists and the tenants’ cause, extended support. This gave strength to the tenants as the Praja Mandal had the weight of the Congress behind it.

With the coming of independence, Patiala joined the Indian union, but made no moves to grant responsible government. The Maharaja, in fact, isolated by the opposition of all political groups, launched severe repression on the muzaras, leading to appeals to the Ministry of States in Delhi by the Praja Mandal on behalf of the tenants. The repression decreased after the formation of the Patiala and East Punjab States Union(PEPSU) in July 1948, a new province comprising the erstwhile princely states of Punjab.

However, with the state unable to assert its authority, the situation was increasingly beginning to resemble that of a civil war in which the contending classes or political groups were left, by and large, to settle the issue between themselves as best as they could. Increasingly, as some landlords began to use armed gangs, the necessity arose for the movement to resist this armed onslaught by organizing its own armed wing. The decision to organize an armed volunteer corps was given a concrete form by the formation in 1948 of the Lal Communist Party, by Teja Singh Swatantar and a breakaway group of Punjab Communists, mostly belonging to the ‘Kirti’ group which originated in the Ghadr Movement and had always had an uneasy relationship with the CPI.

Thus, by the end of 1948, this small band of armed men was in place, whose duty was to rush to the aid of muzaras who were threatened with physical, especially armed, assault by the biswedars and their organized gangs. The fear of the ‘armed force’ helped to keep biswedars in check. However, quite contrary to popular notions, and Communist mythology, the size of this ‘armed force’ was never more than 30 or 40 people, the largest estimate being 100. This armed force was also not meant to take on the forces of the state, as was clearly shown by the Kishangarh incident in January 1949, in which four members of the armed force lost their lives. Anticipating an assault by the government forces, since a policeman had died in an earlier clash, the Communist leaders had wisely decided to send away the main body of the force, maintaining only a token presence so that the people did not feel abandoned. Dharam Singh Fakkar and others who were arrested in this incident were acquitted after a defence was organized by the left-wing Congressmen led by Brish Bhan.

The situation changed radically with the formation of a new, purely Congress ministry in 1951, in which Brish Bhan was deputy chief minister and his group had a strong presence. An Agrarian Reforms Enquiry Committee was set up to make recommendations and, till such time as the legislation could be enacted, the PEPSU Tenancy (Temporary Provision) Act was promulgated in January 1952 which protected tenants against eviction. In the meantime, the general elections intervened, and the Congress failed to secure a majority on its own in PEPSU. Now was the chance for the three Communist legislators to pay back some of the debts they owed to Brish Bhan and his group, but they chose instead to support
Rarewala, the Maharaja’s uncle, on the specious plea that they secured some minor reduction in compensation to be paid to biswedars. Other accounts suggest a deal by CPI (with whom the Lal Communist Party had merged) with the Akalis in Punjab for seat-sharing in the elections.