India After Independence: 1947-2000 (63 page)

The cumulative effect of abolition of zamindari, tenancy legislation and ceiling legislation (see the next chapter for a detailed discussion of land ceiling) in the direction of meeting one of the major objective of land reform, i.e., creation of progressive cultivators making investments and improvement in productivity, was considerable. A very perceptive observer of India’s land reforms, the economist, Daniel Thorner had noted, as early as 1968, that despite all the evasions, leakages, loopholes, and so on, ‘many millions of cultivators who had previously been weak tenants or tenants-at-will were enabled to become superior tenants or virtual owners.’

If one lists certain changes together, the cumulative impact can be easily ascertained. Abolition of zamindari led to about 20 million tenants, the superior occupancy tenants, becoming landowners and many absentee zamindars actually turning to direct cultivation in the lands ‘resumed’ for ‘personal’ cultivation. In the ryotwari areas nearly half the tenants, e.g., in Bombay and Gujarat become landowners. Further, about half (in Bombay about 70 per cent) of the lands from which tenants were evicted were used by the landowners for direct cultivation, i.e., they were not leased out again in a concealed manner. Also, a very substantial number of inferior tenants in former ryotwari areas got occupancy rights (about half in Gujarat and Maharashtra). Even in former zamindari areas such as West Bengal, nearly half the sharecroppers got occupancy rights. To this may be added between three to five million landless cultivators who got land which was declared surplus under ceiling laws.

Now the tenants and sharecroppers who got occupancy rights and paid reduced fixed rents, the tenants who acquired ownership rights, the landless who got land which was declared surplus over ceiling limits, the absentee landowners who became direct cultivators, all had the motivation, and many the potential, of becoming progressive farmers based on their own resources or on credit from institutional sources which became increasingly available even to the poorer peasants.

A major plank of the land reform effort in India was the imposition of ceilings on the size of landholdings, with the objective of making land distribution more equitable. On this question, however, societal consensus was weak, if not non-existent, and that was reflected in the extreme difficulty in implementing this programme with even a reasonable degree of success.

The All India Kisan Sabha had supported the demand for a maximum limit of landownership of 25 acres per landholder in 1946. The Congress, perhaps for the first time, officially introduced the notion of land ceiling soon after independence. In November 1947, the AICC appointed a committee, which drew up the economic programme of the Congress. The committee headed by Jawaharlal Nehru had recommended, ‘The maximum size of holdings should be fixed. The surplus land over such a maximum should be acquired and placed at the disposal of the village cooperatives.’
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Similarly, the Congress Agrarian Reform Committee, chaired by J.C. Kumarappa, which submitted its report in July 1949, also recommended a ceiling on landholding which was to be three times the size of an economic holding. (An economic holding being defined as that which would give a reasonable standard of living to the cultivator and provide full employment to a family of normal size and at least to a pair of bullocks.)

The First Plan (1951-1956) too expressed itself ‘in favour of the principle that there should be an upper limit to the amount of land that an individual may hold.’ Though the Plan broadly accepted the upper limit suggested by the Kumarappa Committee as ‘fair’, it was nevertheless stated that the exact upper limit was to be ‘fixed by each State, having regard to its own agrarian history and its present problems.’ Moreover, it was stated, ‘The census of land holding and cultivation, which it is proposed to hold during 1953, will give the data relevant to this decision.’ Clearly, there was no immediate programme of implementing ceilings and the First Plan anticipated that ‘two to three years would be necessary’ to
even undertake the necessary survey and set up a machinery which would enforce ceiling legislation effectively.
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It was a matter of no surprise, therefore, that despite the early statements of intentions and recommendations, not much progress on the question of ceilings occurred in the initial years after independence. This was recognized by the Congress, and the AICC in its session in Agra in 1953 urged, ‘The State Governments should take immediate steps in regard to collection of requisite land data and the fixation of ceilings on land holdings, with a view to redistribute the land, as far as possible, among landless workers.’
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This position was reiterated repeatedly by the Congress Working Committee and the AICC over the next few years. In 1957 the Standing Committee of National Development Council (The NDC was created in 1952. It was a forum where all the chief ministers of the states would assemble, under the chairmanship of Nehru, to discuss critical issues relating to development.) adopted a decision to complete the imposition of ceilings in the few states where such legislation had been passed by the end of 1960 and decided that other states should pass such legislation by 1958-59.

In the meantime, opposition to ceilings was building up in large parts of the country, in the Press, in parliament, in the state legislatures and even within the Congress party. A threat to the right to private property was perceived by the rural landowners as well as urban interests. Matters came to a head at the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress in January 1959. Despite opposition from prominent Congressmen at the AICC and the Subjects Committee meeting preceding the open session, the Nagpur Congress (January 1959) passed a resolution stating that ‘in order to remove uncertainty regarding land reforms and give stability to the farmer, ceilings should be fixed on existing and future holdings and legislation to this effect . . . should be completed in all States by the end of 1959.’ Further, the land declared surplus, i.e., above ceiling limits, was to ‘vest in the panchayats . . . and (be) managed through cooperatives consisting of landless labourers.’
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A wave of criticism was to follow in the months following the Nagpur session. N.G. Ranga, Secretary of the Congress parliamentary party who had already, in December 1958, sent to Nehru a letter signed by a hundred Congress members of parliament, critiquing the idea of ceilings, resigned from the Congress in February 1959. The Nagpur Resolution contributed considerably towards the consolidation of the right-wing forces both in the rural and urban sectors of the country. N.G. Ranga and C. Rajagopalachari, alarmed at the moves towards land ceilings and threats of compulsory cooperativization now joined hands with Minoo Masani an important leader of the Forum for Free Enterprise which campaigned against the threat of nationalization and the public sector swamping the private sector, to form the Swatantra party in June 1959, with Ranga as a president. The campaigners and beneficiaries of zamindari abolition, the tenants who had now become landowners, also ranged themselves against the next step in land reform, an attempt at redistribution of land ownership through imposition of land ceilings.

The opponents of the ceilings legislation were, however, to have their real victory at the state level, as it was the states which had to formulate and implement the legislation. The state legislatures, which met shortly after the Nagpur session, showed no haste in implementing the Nagpur Resolution. The ceilings issue thus dragged on and most states passed the enabling legislation only by the end of 1961, i.e., nearly fourteen years after the idea was officially mooted.

The long delay, as well as the nature of the legislation, ensured that the ceilings would have a very muted impact, releasing little surplus land for redistribution. By and large the ceiling laws in most states had certain major shortcomings. First, in a situation where more than 70 per cent of land holdings in India were under five acres, the ceiling fixed on existing holdings by the states were very high. For example, in Andhra Pradesh, it varied from 27 to 312 acres (depending upon the class of land), Assam 50 acres, Kerala 15 to 37.5 acres, Punjab 30 to 60 acres, West Bengal 25 acres, Maharashtra 18 to 126 acres and so on. Moreover, in most states, initially, the ceilings were imposed on individuals and not family holdings, enabling landowners to divide up their holdings ‘notionally’ in the names of relatives merely to avoid the ceiling. Further, in many states the ceiling could be raised, e.g., by 67 per cent in Kerala, 90 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, 100 per cent in Bihar, Madras and Maharashtra, 140 per cent in Tripura and so on, if the size of the family of the landholder exceeded five. Andhra Pradesh had no limit, allowing 6 to 72 acres (depending on the nature of land) per ‘extra’ member of the family. Very few landed families would have holdings that exceeded these liberal limits. Only in some states, where very few holdings exceeded the ceiling limit such as Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, no allowance was made for the size of the family.

Second, a large number of exemptions to the ceiling limits were permitted by most states following the Second Plan recommendations that certain categories of land could be exempted from ceilings. These were tea, coffee and rubber plantations, orchards, specialized farms engaged in cattle breeding, dairying, wool raising, etc., sugarcane farms operated by sugar factories and efficiently managed farms on which heavy investments had been made.
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The intention was clearly to promote and certainly not hinder progressive or capitalist farming done on a large scale, while at the same time ending absentee landlordism indulged in by large landowners through tenants and sharecroppers.

However, the exemptions were often carried to absurd limits with Tamil Nadu reportedly permitting 26 kinds of exemptions. In any case, criteria such as ‘efficiently managed farm’ were sufficiently vague for large number of landholders to evade the ceilings by simply getting themselves declared ‘efficient’. Similarly, exemption to land held by
cooperatives, as proposed by the Madras government, was open to great misuse with landlords transferring their lands to bogus cooperatives. On the other hand, however, the ceiling laws led to at least some landowners shifting to direct ‘efficient’ farming in order to avoid alienation of their lands.

Finally, the long delay in bringing in ceiling legislation to a large extent defeated its purpose. The large landowners had enough time to either sell their excess lands, or make malafide transfers in the names of relatives and even make benami transfers. Further, the landowners also resorted to mass eviction of tenants, resuming their lands at least upto the ceiling limit, and claiming, often falsely, to have shifted to progressive farming under their direct supervision. Thus, by the time the ceiling legislations were in place, there were barely any holdings left above the ceiling and consequently little surplus land became available for redistribution. This was recognized by the Congress leadership and the Third Plan also admitted it.

In fact, despite the ceiling legislations which were passed by most states by 1961, till the end of 1970 not a single acre was declared surplus in large states like Bihar, Mysore, Kerala, Orissa and Rajasthan. In Andhra Pradesh, a mere 1400 acres were declared surplus but no land was distributed. Only in Jammu and Kashmir were ceiling laws fully implemented and by the middle of 1955 about 230,000 acres of surplus land were handed over to tenants and landless labourers, that too without having to pay any compensation. However, taking India as whole, only 2.4 million acres were declared surplus by the end of 1970, and the area distributed constituted only about half the surplus land, constituting a mere 0.3 per cent of the total cultivated land of India.

The dismal record in using ceiling legislation for a more equitable distribution of land combined with a sharply increasing polarization in the countryside since the mid-sixties called for a new initiative in land reform. The Indian countryside saw the growing consolidation of the owner cultivator/rich peasant interests (similar to what the Rudolphs call ‘Bullock capitalists’) and their finding a distinct political voice in formations such as the BKD (formed by Charan Singh after he brought down the C.B. Gupta-led Congress government in U.P. in 1967). The BKD later merged with Swatantra and other parties to become BLD in 1974 and the BLD was the principal component of the Janata Party which came to power in 1977, after the Emergency, bringing the strong influence, of the owner cultivator/rich peasant interests, which was hitherto felt mainly at the state level, to the central or national level.

In the wake of the political and economic crisis of the mid-sixties, inflation, devaluation, the Indo-Pak war, and so on (see
chapter 26
), there emerged a strong strand of agrarian radicalism in large parts of the country. The Naxalite Movement led by the CPI (ML) peaked in West Bengal and parts of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Bihar towards the end of the sixties. The year 1970, and in some cases like in West Bengal the preceding few years, saw a widespread ‘land grab’ movement by the
landless in many parts of the country under the leadership of the Communist and Socialist parties. Disturbances were reported from Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, U.P., and West Bengal in 1969-70. The total amount of land seized was not very significant and most of it was government wasteland, land taken over by the government but not distributed, and to some extent homestead land. The movement was effectively suppressed. About 20,000 political activists were arrested. However, despite the very limited success in land seizure and the quick suppression of the movement, on the whole the movement had a significant symbolic effect. The nation’s attention was drawn dramatically to the agrarian question.

This was the context in which the second spurt of land reform efforts was to occur in the sixties and early seventies. The Land Reform Implementation Committee of the National Development Council met in June 1964 and made sustained efforts to put pressure on the chief ministers to plug the loopholes in the land reform legislations and implement them effectively. With the political shift of Indira Gandhi to the left in the late sixties, particularly after 1969, these efforts received a further momentum. At a land reform conference of the chief ministers called by her in September 1970, she forcefully argued that social discontent and violence in the countryside had erupted because:
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The land reform measures implemented have failed to match the legitimate expectations which were first fostered among millions of cultivators during the national movement . . . In short, we have yet to create institutional conditions which would enable small farmers, tenants, and landless labourers to share in the agricultural New Deal.

Reduction of ceiling limits was one of the main issues discussed in the Conference with most of the chief ministers rejecting such a proposal outright. The matter was referred to the Central Land Reforms Committee, which was to look into this and other contentious issues that emerged in the Conference. In August 1971, the Committee made a series of recommendations including a substantial reduction in the ceiling limits, withdrawal of exemptions such as those in favour of ‘efficient’ or mechanized farms and making ceilings applicable to the family as a unit and not to individuals as was the case in most states.

The Congress, now further strengthened after the electoral victories of 1971 and 1972, was able to get the chief ministers’ conference held in July 1972 to approve new national guidelines following months of bitter opposition. The new guidelines were based essentially on the August 1971 recommendations of the Central Land Reforms Committee. Some of the important features of the July 1972 guidelines, which marked a break in the history of ceiling legislation in India, were: