Undoing Land Reforms

ALMOST all suicide victims belong to the category of small and marginal peasants. So, not only the Veeresh Committee of Karnataka but also the National Agricultural Policy suggests consolidation of all small land holdings and offering them on a platter to the private corporate houses and multinational companies. There were times when the peasants were proud of owning a piece of land. Redistribution of land was a sacred duty of the state to make agriculture flourish by unleashing the initiative of individual peasants. But, now, it is a sin. The government will not provide necessary infrastructure to make small lands profitable by enhancing public investment. He can either engage in contract farming under corporate houses or sell the land and join the army of agrarian labourers.

An analysis of Removal of Import Restrictions states: “If we want our agriculture to become competitive with the rest of the world, we must go for modernisation of this sector with improved technology. This would require huge private investments; but, a large proportion of our farmers in the bottom category is resource poor and cannot afford this. The very size of such farms discourages mechanisation and use of modern equipment, which are essential to increase efficiency. The time has come when something has to be done to put a floor on the bottom size of holding.”

Over the years, the Indian people, through their long-drawn struggles, have forced governments to fix a ceiling on land ownership through land reform legislations. But, the global powers are now demanding the fixing of a floor on the smallest size of land holding and their domestic agents are happy to obey their global masters. The National Agricultural Policy has clearly declared, without any ambiguity, that all land holdings should be consolidated through corporatisation and contractorisation.

The World Development Report observes, in the case of Brazil, that small farms are more productive than larger ones because of the focused involvement and sense of ownership of the farmers that unleashes the initiative of individuals. But, when it comes to the case of India, the very same world powers are insisting on land consolidation, snatching the rights of small and marginal peasants. In their standards, a small farm itself is at the range of 25 acres and above! They further make a distinction between viable and unviable small farms and, in the parlance of the Veeresh Committee of Karnataka, landholdings below 5 acres are considered to be unviable.

Perhaps, this is the point on which the interests of feudal landlords of states like Bihar and the corporate houses converge. TNCs consider the dominance of small peasant economy in the country to be an obstacle to gain control of the whole of the agricultural operations and to promote corporatisation. They are more comfortable in dealing with less number of domestic landlords and agricultural monopolies rather than millions of small peasants. The strategies of global TNCs and their Indian counterparts complement each other in fundamentally altering production relations in the country against the small peasants. The natural outcome is that large numbers of small peasants are bound to join the vast army of landless agrarian labourers, unless a valiant struggle is launched to halt the brutal reversal of land reforms and for a radical land reform.

In this backdrop, it would be more appropriate to recall what Lenin said, “.... Undoubtedly, the substitution of small scale for large-scale economy is reactionary and we must not favour it. But the demand we are discussing is conditioned by the aim of ‘abolishing the remnants of feudal dependence’; in relation to them (feudal holdings) a peasant holding, free of all medieval impediments is progressive, not reactionary. It is, of course, not easy to draw line of demarcation here, but we do not believe that any one demand in our programme can be “easily” realized”. (Collected Works, Vol.5, Page 250, Progress Publishers, Moscow).

Corporatisation and contractorisation are the two strategies adopted to snatch away lands from small peasants along with forcing amendments to the Land Reforms Act. Land Reform Acts are being amended in various states, removing ceiling on landholdings, legalizing tenancy, exempting land allotments for industrial purposes, etc. If semi-feudal coercions are a means for big landlords and kulaks in rural areas to alienate land from small peasants, corporatisation is another similar route less advocated by the forces of capital.

In states like Bihar and Eastern UP, where semi-feudal relations are more entrenched and where no law really operates, the lands are being snatched away through violent means and also using local power of dominance. People could restore the land only through militant movements and had to encounter private armies, in the process. Many small and marginal peasants are alienated from their lands through extra-economic coercion and finally they end up in various new forms of slavery.

Reversal of land reforms is the order of the day even in states where land reforms were relatively more thoroughgoing although each state has its own edition. West Bengal has unofficially introduced a rural version of the ‘golden handshake’ system to the bargadars (sharecroppers), a euphemism for eviction. By this system, bargadars are allotted a meagre land or equivalent money to vacate the land on which they have tenancy rights. This is accomplished in a smooth process of negotiation, either individually or collectively through the peasant association led by the CPI(M).

Karnataka has raised the ceiling limits from 10 to 40 acres for irrigated land and 54 to 216 acres for rain-fed lands. It has amended the provision that prohibited conversion of agricultural lands for non-agricultural purposes. It has also removed land ceiling to facilitate allotment of thousands of acres of lands to corporate houses for industrial or corporate farming purposes.

Tamil Nadu government has launched a ‘Comprehensive Wasteland Development Project’ to transfer large tracts of cultivable lands upto 1000 acres to private corporate houses, on a 30-years lease at a land rent of 1 per cent, 2 per cent and 3 per cent of the land value for the first, second and third year respectively and 4 per cent for the remaining period. In the dictionary of Jayalalitha, ‘wasteland’ also includes “higher-grade lands with assured rainfall”

If Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are thus forging ahead in the competitive exercise of reversal of land reforms, can Andhra Pradesh lag behind? Indeed, the TDP government has devised several innovative ways to undo the legacy of land reforms in the state. They have allotted hundreds of acres of land to a private company near Kuppam in the name of demonstrating contract and corporate farming practices even without the knowledge of the owners of the land. All that the peasants who lost the land could get was some ‘favours’ in the form of jobs or so-called annual payment for the contract. They could not even question the handing over of the land to the private company without their knowledge!

Many peasants have also been alienated from their own land by the moneylenders, even in states of relatively more capitalist development. In the agriculturally advanced state of Punjab itself more than 13% of farmers have been alienated from their land because of their inability to repay their loans and many such cases have also been kept hidden. A number of such cases have been exposed and successfully challenged by Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta).