Nicaragua

Agrarian Property and Stability

There is no one property problem. The problems are many an complex when it comes to
agrarian properties. They are all related to one another and affect very diverse groups. The
solution that prevails should not be one that favors only the most powerful ones.

Patrick Dumazert

Agrarian property in Nicaragua has been subjected to numerous upheavals since 1979. By
diverse methods, the Sandinista government came into possession of and/or redistributed over
1.5 million acres of farmland, equivalent to 32% of the country's total. During the Chamorro
administration, just under 600,000 acres, or 12%, changed hands, three fourths of it through the
privatization of previously state owned land. To all this must be added another 20% that was
deeded to tenant farmers during the 1980s, and nearly 180,000 acres that were occupied de facto
over the whole period. Today, only 29% of the exploited agricultural area has escaped all of
these processes.

For better or worse, the changes that took place before the 1990 elections had major
consequences for the economy and society. Although the figures were known, their significance
was not deeply analyzed and virtually never publicly debated. There is near consensus about the
terrible results of the national economy in the 1980s, but no clear, complete and publicly
disseminated assessment of what those land tenure changes meant.

To critically assess the changes as a whole, at least three aspects must be considered:
1) how and by what criteria the lands were affected;
2) what level of legal consolidation the process had;
3) what criteria were used to redistribute the affected
lands.

These three questions have different answers depending on the stage of the Sandinista
government being considered. Its handling of the land issue can roughly be divided into four
stages. The first began with the confiscation of Somoza properties and lasted until the 1981
agrarian reform law, leading to the consolidation of the state as an agrarian business owner. The
second concluded with the second agrarian reform law in 1986, and was characterized by
collectivization as a condition of providing land and credits. In the third stage, the government
recognized the need to respond to the demand for individual plots, in at least some regions, and
to be more flexible in its policy toward production cooperatives by allowing certain plots within
them for family consumption crops. Meanwhile, with the economy falling apart, agrarian reform
was put on hold. The fourth stage was the government's two month lame duck period after losing
the 1990 elections, when it passed blanket legislation to legalize all these changes ex post facto.

Criteria for Affecting Lands

Except for the expropriation of Somoza's lands (Decree 3), arbitrary political criteria often
dominated in the choice of lands actually affected, particularly in the application of Decree 38,
which permitted confiscation of the properties of "Somoza allegados" (family, friends and allies).

The social philosophy underlying the first agrarian reform law was based on production criteria,
not size. But this, too, lent itself to capricious and arbitrary interpretations. For example, an
extensive cattle ranch may appear much less "exploited" than a cotton plantation, but a cotton
grower's influence in the economic inequalities of a given zone is not necessarily less than that of
a cattle rancher.

De facto occupations of thousands of acres, without later intervention by the state, also took
place during the Sandinista administration. And as late as 1988 a decree was issued that, in the
best style of absolutist governments, allowed the confiscation of lands belonging to the political
opposition.
In such a climate, which further exacerbated the existing polarization, it was nearly impossible to
forge a national consensus that would provide lasting legitimacy for the agrarian reform,
particularly after the change in the correlation of forces that had made the revolution possible.

Level of Legal Consolidation

It is estimated that some 70% of the agricultural properties affected by the Sandinista
government were never legally registered as state property. Most were incorporated into state
companies and later into corporations by decree, or were transferred to agrarian reform
beneficiaries without the state going through the chain of legal actions established by the existing
law for acquiring a property. When the FSLN lost the elections, it had to push a law through the
National Assembly, which it still dominated, to protect those properties. Law 88 states that "the
provisional or definitive agrarian reform titles that have been provided to the assignees of
agrarian reform as of this date [March 30, 1990] constitute a legal instrument that provides
ownership of the land to them free of charge.... In consequence, they may sell, cede, transfer, will
or effect any other form of disposal."
It is relevant that Law 88 permits "any form of disposal" of the agrarian reform properties, when
that had been frontally rejected by Sandinistas in previous years. The key aspect of the law,
however, is its tacit recognition that the agrarian reform lacked legal status. This reflects a way
of thinking that the Sandinistas shared with other left movements in Latin America that political
decisions have the privilege of ignoring any other consideration in any other sphere of power.
This thinking places more value on taking power than on transforming the state and sets the
executive branch above all others.

Criteria for Assigning Lands

The selection of agrarian reform beneficiaries could have created a broad base of social
consensus in the countryside, which would have helped attenuate the war and political tensions,
as well as the legal complications that such unsatisfactory handling created. But instead, it had an
anti rural and anti economic skew.

In the first stage, the FSLN did not support the spontaneous peasant land takeovers, even in areas
where the peasants had fought with Somoza's National Guard to gain access to land and thus live
a bit better. Arguing that dividing up the farms would lead to a drop in agricultural supply,
particularly of crops for export, the government elected to create centrally managed state farms.
But these huge enterprises were particularly inefficient and very costly, since they followed a
technological model that was irrational under the conditions of Nicaragua's economy.

Later, the government felt obliged to respond to the pressure from the peasantry, even though
many political cadres and even leaders refused to recognize the advantages of small family
properties. Access to land was thus conditioned to creating collective forms of work: the
production cooperatives. Since these cooperatives were decreed from above, the majority of
them never became truly cohesive. Members came and went, with no incentive to invest since
they had no security over their property. Life for many cooperative members remained as poor as
before they received the land. Some cooperatives showed signs of growth because they received
huge state subsidies to acquire imported machinery and hire temporary workers. That allowed
them to copy in the best of cases the productive process of the intensive plantations.

The top down bias of the process and the desire to copy the technological "modernization"
recommended by the agronomy manuals also imported had a very negative effect on the
efficiency of the reassigned lands: costs rose and supply dwindled.

Lands were also assigned to individual peasant families after 1986, mainly due to the pressure of
the war, but even then in insignificant amounts: 2% of the farmland. That shift paralleled a
loosening up of the cooperative model, which allowed some land on the collectives to be
individually cultivated. But both changes were too little, too late: the FSLN had already lost the
1984 elections in the rural areas by percentages similar to those of 1990. Furthermore, by not
resolving the essential problem of land security for peasant families, this new flexibility only
created more tensions within the cooperatives.
The agrarian reform's influence on production systems was far less than the 32% of farm lands
affected. According to estimates made by a European Community mission in 1993, farmland in
the hands of peasants with under 30 acres only grew from 17% to 22% during the revolution, and
that in the hands of farmers with between 30 and 120 acres grew even less: from 30% to 32%.
This meant that participation in land tenure by these two sectors, which are the real
standardbearers of economic development and contribute to more equitable rural income
generation, only increased by 7%.

The social base that was thus created was too small and weak to fend off the enormous
destabilizing potential of the agrarian changes. That potential came directly from those adversely
affected, and indirectly by comparing those benefitted and those not, as well as from the overall
macroeconomic costs they caused.

Transition: New Problems

The consequences of all the agrarian changes that the Sandinista government had pushed through
did not cease when it left office. Their defects and lack of legal consolidation sparked new rural
tensions after February 1990.

The agrarian upheavals increased the instability of the economy and of society, despite the new
government's efforts and its massive spending for "peace," which was essentially covered by
foreign aid. The contradictions between the logic of macroeconomic stabilization (which requires
restricted spending) and that of pacification (which requires increasing it) became manifest. A
democratization that confused privatization with the market, and the market with democracy, did
not help in striking a balance between these two logics.

A consultant of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
(ECLAC) concluded that "with its ambiguities, the government of Violeta Chamorro did not
resolve the property problem generated by the Sandinistas, but complicated [it] even more. At
the end of this whole process, the government left no important sector of society satisfied."
The first tension to emerge in the Chamorro period resulted from the FSLN's attempt to legally
consolidate all it had done in the 1980s prior to handing over power. Tolerance of this sweeping
legalization process and the continuation of Sandinistas at the head of the police and army were
part of the transition protocol signed by representatives of the incoming and outgoing
governments. Independent of any economic, legal and social assessments that could be made of
these agreements, it is obvious that this "solution" to the property problem was a key piece in the
political chess game of the moment. Given Nicaraguan society's long non democratic tradition,
the first democratic transfer of power could not be expected to occur without high political costs
and some tribute to the departing administration.

Under Protection of Law 88

Rural properties were already being transferred to private hands before the 1990 elections, but
the process accelerated in the two months of transition. The problem before 1990 was that these
individual assignments were not made with any expressly enunciated political program in favor
of peasant families, and official policy never altered its priority on state farms and collectives.
This obviously lent itself to major arbitrariness and to the buying and selling of political favors.
After February 1990, the moment also seemed appropriate to return some properties to certain
"patriotic producers" who had given them to the revolution.
The process of quickly divvying up state lands to individuals and massively handing out agrarian
reform titles was sanctified by Law 88, which protected all agrarian reform titles and all land
assignments, whether collective or individual, that had been provided up to the transition period.
Since everything done under the protection of Law 88 has been indiscriminately labeled "piñata,"
the interests of poor peasants benefited during the 1980s were tarred with the same brush as
those of a political clientele benefited at the last minute. "An unprecedented affair in the history
of the Nicaraguan state's booty created a new landowner class," railed a La Prensa editorial of
September 21, 1990, about a process in which many goods "ceased to belong to the state and
passed to private hands." At that early date, it was admitted that those goods, nearly 300,000
acres, belonged to the state, and the manner by which the state had obtained them was not
discussed. Nor was much importance given to whether the state had registered them or not. Later
on, the discourse would change.

The State Lands

The increased pressure for land triggered by the end of the war brought a second tension to the
Chamorro government. There were more veterans of peasant extraction among the Nicaraguan
Resistance "contras" than among the discharged soldiers of the drastically reduced Sandinista
Popular Army, but the best path to reconciliation was thought to be providing land to all of them.
Part of the land fund still under state administration in the Area of Peoples Property was used to
deal with this sudden increase in demand for land. It is hard to know what proportion of the
444,000 acres not included in the piñata were distributed to former combatants in the 1991
privatization process by the state holding company CORNAP. Negotiated agreements with the
various sectors demanding the 87 agricultural businesses grouped into 10 corporations spoke of
privatizing 25% to each sector the workers, old owners, and veterans on each side but there are
indications that this was not uniformly met.

The majority of state lands were grouped into the following corporations: CAFENIC (coffee),
HATONIC (cattle), CONAZUCAR (sugar), NICARROZ (rice), TABANIC (tobacco) and
AGROEXCO (cotton). Overall, 9% of the privatization favored new businesses, 41% went to the
old owners, 28% to veterans as a whole and the remaining 22% to the workers in the enterprises.
According to a preliminary CORNAP report, however, 30% of the nearly 250,000 acres of the
three most important corporations (AGROEXCO, CAFENIC and HATONIC) was returned to its
owners, 38% went to the veterans and 32% remained in the hands of the workers.

This privatization has been criticized for its lack of transparency regarding the payment
mechanisms established for acquiring the properties. This murkiness is reflected partly in the
declared and proven fact that the process generated net losses for CORNAP. For their part, the
veterans and workers who were benefited have repeatedly charged that they have not been
granted their property titles, making access to credit nearly impossible and in turn leading their
companies into ruin. The accumulation of unpayable debts on their assets is obliging them to sell
the lands they received at low prices, thus guaranteeing a stealthy and silent reversal of the
agrarian reform by way of "market forces."
Just over 14,000 acres 3% of the total privatized were transferred to the veterans of the
Resistance in the first months of the new government, but this sector's needs were much greater.
More than 22,000 Resistance members, including combatants and civilian rearguard,
demobilized in June 1990. By 1993, they had received almost 180,000 acres, of which over
160,000 were acquired through state purchase of private lands, and the Nicaraguan Agrarian
Reform Institute provided agrarian reform titles to the beneficiaries. An important footnote to
that chapter is that many foot soldiers in the Resistance complain that the leadership distributed
the land very unequally, leaving many of those veterans still landless.

Claims of the Confiscated

A third tension came later, as claims mounted by all those who had been adversely affected by
the various phases and forms of the agrarian changes. With the transition over and power firmly
in new hands, different groups began, in the name of their injured rights, to demand that the
changes be reversed or that they be compensated. Some impugned the legitimacy of the entire
confiscation process and even of the agrarian reform itself. Of those, a number were actively
backed by US congressional members on the grounds that they had become US citizens albeit
after their properties were confiscated. Others took refuge simply in the lack of legal paperwork
for most of the transfers. Some have tried to recover their properties by force, but the majority,
even after exhausting administrative formalities, still favor judicial recovery. An estimated 6,000
cases in dispute are still in the courts. Given the shape that the judiciary is in and the traditional
foot dragging of justice, these cases could remain unresolved for up to 10 years. The political
cost of the agrarian reform's lack of transparency and legal solidity has been extremely high: in
some cases, at least four claimants are fighting over the same piece of land with some legal basis.

An April 1995 report by the Carter Center, prepared for the United Nations Development
Program, lists the many factors that make it extremely hard to find a single solution to the
property problem that would satisfy the whole country. They include the fragile legal framework
(including the lack of legitimacy plaguing the "piñata" laws), the multiple owners of the same
land due to the generalized practice of provisional titling, the inability of the political class to
reach any agreement, the gaps in an antiquated property registry system and the government's
administrative incapacity.

The indemnification bonds, instead of being a solution, have ended up complicating the situation
even more. To compensate those who were confiscated, the government issued 1.7 million
córdobas worth of bonds with annual interest rates of between 3% and 5%, to be paid starting in
the second year and cancellable in five annual installments starting in the eleventh year. But
many recipients sold their bonds to speculators, in some cases for as little as 17% of their
nominal value, given their low redemption value and mistrust of the government and the
economy (inflation is already higher than those interest rates). Another 35 million worth of
bonds were used to pay off tax debts, and an additional 455 million worth were used to snatch up
state enterprises from CORNAP for a song, since CORNAP accepted the bonds at their face
value, even though their recovery value was obviously devalued.

If we subtract all the bonds redeemed by the state one way or another, those still outstanding
have a redemption value of about US$102 million. The government has no more assets with
which to redeem them, except the monopolistic public services, particularly TELCOR, the
telecommunications and postal service.

Referring to the complex linkage between the privatization process and the property problems,
the ECLAC report notes that "privatization has succeeded in diminishing the participation of the
state in business affairs to make way for private initiative, but has not managed to show the
contribution of the privatization process to the development of the country."
The issue of privatizing TELCOR in fact constitutes another tension around property, the
Chamorro administration's fourth. The interests of those whose confiscations were compensated
with bonds are mixed with powerful interests that go beyond the national framework: the
government's interest in complying with the International Monetary Fund "at least in something,"
given its marked failure to comply with the conditions of the Enhanced Structural Adjustment
Facility in its first year; the interests of the powerful transnational corporations vying to purchase
TELCOR; and the interests of the international financial institutions, stalwart defenders of
privatization. The greatest danger to the nation in the short term is that the government
authorities will make a very negative decision, using the excuse that it must revalue the
indemnification bonds, even though most of those still out are now in the hands of a few
powerful speculators who can exert heavy pressure on the government and the National
Assembly.

All these problems overlap one another; they all make up the "property problem" in Nicaragua. It
is not one problem, but many related ones affecting different segments of society.

A Serious and Silent Problem

The fifth and largest tension is the most serious, even though those affected are not yet making
much noise. The economic fragility of all the family units born of the agrarian reform, even those
that were legally consolidated, is a powerful wave that could capsize the boat of the national
economy.
While the debates go on, deals among politicians are still being made under the table, the
economy is still awaiting the promised and always postponed take off and the cooperatives and
other production collectives are being silently dismantled. In October 1993 it was estimated that
70% of the cooperatives had already been split up; in some departments of the country it reached
100%. But the problem is not parcelization. It is that the lack of a deed and of credit for the
former cooperative members now holders of individual plots prevents them from having a real
farm with the minimum of capital needed to get safely and productively through the agricultural
cycle.

For these smallholders, becoming farmers and living on their farm means being interested in
making improvements on their plots: putting up fences, getting a few chickens, building a well,
doing soil conservation work, planting trees to prevent wind erosion, and the like. It means
diversifying their productive activities: tending various crops at the same time and making better
use of the agricultural byproducts in raising animals. And it means perennial crops: trees, coffee
plants, cultivated forage, etc. It means making maximum use of their land and family labor and
becoming profitable, not only for themselves but also for the country and for the bank that lends
them money.

Land worked in the conditions from which these smallholders are blocked would generate more
jobs and more value added per acre than the "better" worked plantations. Agrarian reforms are
made precisely to achieve this kind of soil use. That is why they were made in Japan, Korea or
Taiwan, countries whose economic successes are undisputed.

In 1989, the Agrarian Reform Research and Studies Center of the Ministry of Agriculture
estimated that 35,000 families had received land in the form of production collectives. Assuming
that those figures held true in 1990 and that those lands were still in the name of cooperatives,
some 27,000 smallholders would be in hopes of consolidating themselves as small farmers.
According to calculations by Nitlapán, they would need about $1,000 per family to get started as
small farmers: to pay for the deed, fences, tools, working capital, chickens, etc. Adding some
$500 more for a team of oxen, we estimated that $40 million in capital would be needed to
capitalize this 5% of the country's economically active population and keep it from expanding
the ranks of the unemployed, and to guarantee the agrarian reform that has cost the country so
much in political and social terms. That $40 million is only 40% of what is being sought so
avidly to redeem the bonds of a handful of power wielding speculators.

The Weight of the USA and the Urban Piñata

Reality today is marked by intense debates over a bill that would put the "final period" to the
property problem, that would finally provide the country "stability" in such a crucial issue. All
those involved, whether Nicaraguans or others, agree that resolving this problem is key to social
stability and to removing one of the greatest hobbles to Nicaragua's economic reactivation. But
that's as far as consensus goes. Since there is not just one property problem but several a legacy
of the multiple ways that agrarian property has been handled the various actors and political
sectors disagree on the problem's essence. Without minimum consensus, the most influential
sectors are pressuring for a law acceptable to all that is, to all political parties represented in the
National Assembly and with enough consensus so that its legitimacy will not be impugned when
the government changes in a year.

It will not be easy to hit this target because the debate has not been established on firm and
philosophically sustained foundations. Nor has a democratic debate been undertaken on the
issue. A political agreement and a legal framework to sanction it cannot be legitimate if they lack
a philosophical foundation as the cornerstone of the social contract that must be built. There
cannot be a secret pact among hidden forces; there must be an open contract with public and
consensual terms. Several obstacles impede this.

First are the external influences: those of the international financial institutions and, above all, of
the US government, which is not honoring the international law establishing that a country
cannot come to the defense of its citizens over a problem they had before becoming citizens. If
the US were to abide by that, the political weight of this problem would shift significantly, since
only 170 of the roughly 2,000 "US" claimants were citizens of the United States at the time they
were confiscated.

The symbolic aspects of the urban piñata are also an obstacle. The concept of urban property as a
social good obviously cannot be applied to the urban mansions that were confiscated and used by
Sandinista leaders and high level cadres in the 1980s. Those properties, transferred to their
occupants under the umbrella of Law 85, are today "legally" bound up with the thousands of
small urban properties justly transferred to those living in them, which seriously complicates any
solution to the problem.

The unproductive nature of the big properties and their transfer's lack of redistributive impact
since one owner was simply replaced by another invalidates them politically and economically.
They may end up having a legal pretext, but never social legitimacy. And their eminently
symbolic character destines them to being a permanent target of political struggle, the flame of
discord that makes any deal about the rest of the major property problems even harder.

A Political Deal Isn't Enough

What are the principles of political philosophy that could help legislators, jurists, governors,
those affected and those benefited, the entire population, find a balanced road that could truly put
the final period to this set of property problems in Nicaragua? In the first place, it must be
recognized that these problems are legal, political and economic, at one and the same time.
Jurists advocating a strict legal solution in accord with pure law lose sight of the fact that a
solution that fails to respect the other social balances will not enjoy legitimacy. Basing
themselves on "natural law" as some extremist lawyers do is just empty rhetoric. Is not the law of
the jungle the simplest and most primitive form of politics? Though some may think that
Nicaraguan politics seem a lot like the jungle, it is the responsibility of people of laws to draw up
a framework that regulates politics, not shirks them.

It is also erroneous to try to establish the basis for a solution on a political deal. In Nicaragua, the
circle of those with political representation is so small and the power of those few pressure
groups and their family connections is so great that arbitrariness always prevails in a simple
political deal.

The Right to Property

The simultaneous boom of capitalism and of democratic aspirations led political philosophers of
modern times to seek a solution to the always present contradiction between the desire for the
individual freedom to undertake an endeavor and enjoy its fruits, and the desire for justice that is
inherent in human beings and sanctioned by morality. Liberal thinkers tried to imagine ways to
conciliate freedom and justice, recognizing that justice even if some do not consider it a good in
itself is needed to maintain a certain equilibrium in the social edifice, without which it is
ungovernable.

One of the underpinnings of the freedom to engage in business and assure the enjoyment of its
fruits is the right to property. English philosopher John Locke considered the father of the liberal
revolution in his country and one of the founders of modern political thought believed that
appropriating scarce goods was legitimate as long as others' right of possession was not harmed.
When he put forward the need to have "left enough and equally good to others in common," he
was seeking to make the right to property compatible for all and to establish the limits of my
right when it hurts the right of others. Criteria have also been formulated about these limits with
the following line of reasoning: my knife is mine and I thus have the right to do with it as I will,
other than sink it into the chest of my neighbor.

Alongside these postulates, both classic and Marxist economists discovered that almost
everything that can be appropriated by human beings is the product of human labor. Maintaining
the principle that one always has the right to enjoy the fruits of his/her labor, they deduced that
there were no limits to private property. But the situation is not quite like that, because some
goods are not the product of labor, although labor can be incorporated into them. Land is the best
example.

Neoliberal thinkers such as Robert Nozick set forth as an exception the example of a water
fountain in the desert. It is a good that one cannot privately appropriate without harming the right
of others. They are right, but they err in thinking that goods of this type virtually no longer exist
because, according to them, industrial capacity has generated such an abundance of goods that
appropriating as many of them as one likes will not necessarily deprive others of enjoying them.
Land is again the main exception to this rule.

One of the most famous economists of the neoclassic school, Vilfredo Pareto, recognizes that "it
is generally useful for land to be in the hands of those who know how to work it better." But in
his typical cautious style, he also states that, unlike other forms of capital, "it is generally
impossible to produce real estate capital by means of savings." What he meant was that the latter
is not the product of labor, yet its appropriation always generates rent, a form of income that
depends not on the merit of labor but on appropriation. The same author noted that "this capital
is more important than the others on the political level."

Centuries of Estates
Considering the arguments about the legitimacy of agrarian property in light of the contributions
of economic theory, it is clear that, since the creation of huge land estates makes it impossible for
others to exercise their right to property, such estates are illegitimate. In colonial Nicaragua, an
empty country or to be more exact, an emptied country in which the unrestricted power of a
minority social strata dominated power, great haciendas were created that excluded the poorest
individuals: those of mixed Spanish and Indian blood who were left to populate the spaces left
free by the hoarding estate owners if they escaped the repression that forced them to work the
estate owners' lands. Small holdings, insufficient to allow their owners to generate savings to
invest and develop the country, came into being before the mestizo peasants could get the capital
to improve it, while the estate owners, protected by political power and the laws that ordered
obligatory labor, had, with no particular competence on their part, the luxury of being profitable
without being efficient.

This structure, which began in the second half of the 16th century, was already well consolidated
by the end of the colonial period. Nicaraguan historian Germán Romero, after examining
property titles issued by the Colonial High Court of Guatemala between 1700 and 1769, notes
that 9% of these titles in Nicaragua corresponded to 54% of the titled land. Four owners alone,
all from Granada, controlled 40% of the land! Estates were solidly rooted by the second half of
the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, and were reconsolidated in the 1950s.

Even before the 1970s, the situation was such that an agrarian reform law was passed in 1966,
during the presidency of Luis Somoza. Its first article defended "the fundamental modification of
land tenure and of its legal structuring and systems of exploitation, aimed at obtaining, with
equitable distribution of the cultivable area and its rent and an increase of production, an increase
in the standard of living of the peasant masses and their incorporation into the process of the
development of the country and the integral development of the nation."

Four Indispensible Decisions

Since there is many a slip twixt cup and lip, history demonstrated that the Somocista
Agrarian Reform Institute was better able to colonize new lands because it was politically
easier to implement than to redistribute the estates. It demonstrated also that, contrary to
what extremist jurists still claim, a law is not enough to be able to act. What is done badly
can be put right through law, and estate or latifundista property was done badly from its
historic roots. But a law that does not turn the aspirations of the majorities into reality
cannot enjoy legitimacy.
 The profile of land tenure distribution in Nicaragua today is one of the most equitable in
Latin America. But four things are indispensible if this potential is to be taken advantage
of and the social equilibrium preserved, without spoiling the economic equilibrium by
incurring economically untenable costs or, to compensate for them, committing even
greater errors such as privatizing TELCOR.

It is indispensable today to:

Legally consolidate small and medium productive property and remove the hobbles it has
always worn as a dominated social force, so it can take economic root.

Compensate those affected for their expropriated properties, but only for the value of the
improvements they can demonstrate having made or an estimate of them and for an
overall amount compatible with the country's economic possibilities.

Return expropriated properties only when the change of owner really implies more
efficient use of the land, in conditions of equal access to social resources and credit.

Stress the principle of compensation over devolution.

All this requires political will. Those who hope to govern tomorrow must decide today if
they want to administer a governable country or prefer to use the radical rhetoric of the
extremist jurists to win the votes and financial support of those affected by the changes.
They must decide if they want to occupy a government or build a state.

II
INTRODUCTION

"PROPERTY!" At the mention of the word, according to an old Indian

saying, even a corpse will sit up on its bier. And to most Indians,
property means farm land. In India roughly 70 percent of the people
still live on the land (about 80 percent if all villagers are included),
as against less than 10 percent in the United States. Farming provides
the livelihood of most of those who dwell in India's villages. For the
man who grows things from the soil, ownership of land or the assured
possession of a few acres not only means economic subsistence but
also is a symbol of status and dignity. For the city dweller who has
made good in business or a profession, land is a favored form of in-
vestment and tax haven.

Not surprisingly, then, a conflict between established property

owners on the one hand and nation-minded government planners and
officials, the architects of social change, on the other has marked the
first twenty years of independence. Property will continue to be a cen-
tral source of contention, one may confidently predict, for a long time
to come. Where to strike the balance between private interest and the
general welfare has been a hotly debated issue in India, as in any
democratic polity, and land has been a major focus for the debate.

The contention has taken many forms, at many levels. In the vil-
lages the striving for a well-protected holding of land involves old
questions of caste, status, and human survival. For the constituent
States of India and their districts, the administration of land taxes
and of laws concerning conditions of ownership and tenancy has long
been a major preoccupation. Under the Constitution of India, the
States have exclusive jurisdiction over matters relating to land and ag-

-1-

CHAPTER 8

"ESTATES" AND "AGRARIAN REFORM"

BEGINNING WITH the First Amendment, but especially after the

Fourth Amendment, judicial questioning of land reform measures
took two main forms. Did the measures deal with the kinds of inter-
ests in land of which acquisitions were protected from testing under
the Fundamental Rights? If not, did they satisfy the requirements of
equal protection of the laws," of "compensation," and of reasonable-
ness of restrictions to the right "to acquire, hold and dispose of prop-
erty"?

The major basis of attack by those adversely affected by reform

measures was bound to be, after the addition of Article 31A, that
the constitution-amenders had not exempted laws to acquire interests
of the kind they held from the usual constitutional requirements for
such measures. In response to these contentions the Supreme Court's
doctrine developed along two intertwined lines -- (a) a more precise
definition of the exempted legislative measures and (b) a clarification
of the purpose of the protective umbrella, which the members found
to be an intention to protect measures of "agrarian reform," and, pos-
sibly, only such measures, so far as dealings with landed property
were concerned.

WHAT ARE "ESTATES" IN LAND?

The original Constitution said nothing about land reforms as

such. The zamindari abolition laws were to be exempted from the nor-
mal rules of compensation mainly through two of the exceptions to

-172-

CHAPTER 10

URBAN DEVELOPMENT:
THE DEBATE MOVES TO THE CITIES

SURGE IN POPULATION AND LAND PRICES

In the first 60 years of the twentieth century, the population of

India's urban areas trebled. The increase was concentrated in the
larger cities. By 1961, 44 percent of the total urban population lived
in cities of more than 100,000, which, numbering only 28 four dec-
ades earlier, now totaled 104. In those same four decades, the urban
population as a whole had increased by 174 percent; in the cities of
more than 100,000 the rate was 400 percent. 1

The prospect is for an even faster growth in the 1970s and the
1980s, when it is estimated that at least 80 million will be added to
the urban population. By 1981, probably at least 200 million people
will live in cities. 2 The Government's Committee on Urban Land Pol-
icy, urging that a much higher priority be given to the improvement
of life in cities, has commented that even at present population levels
"most of the urban areas in our country, particularly the ten largest
metropolitan cities, present a very pathetic picture of congestion,
overcrowding, slums and blight." 3 The prospective explosion in the
urban population has posed urgent needs not only for more effective
use of land and humane living conditions in the miserably crowded
inner cities but also for the orderly development of the fringe areas,
where city meets country and where agricultural land or wasteland
will, in the near future, be added to cities.

____________________
1
G.O.I., Ministry of Health, Report of the Committee on Urban Land
Policy ( 1965) 6.
2
Ibid., 8.
3
Ibid., 6.

III
Power, Agrarian Structure, and
Peasant Mobilization in Modern India
Majid H. Siddiqi
Jawaharlal Nehru University
E-mail:
Keynote Address: Symposium in Honor of Walter Hauser's Contributions to
Peasant Studies
Draft copy, 23 May 1997

Mr. Ehnbom, Mr. Barnett, distinguished colleagues, and friends.

Let me say at the very outset that I consider it an enormous privilege to have been allotted the
very pleasant though for me formidable task of reading the keynote address to an audience
consisting, as it does, of colleagues with large reputations. As I endeavour to rise equal to the
task,let me also say how happy I am to be among friends and with Walter and Rosemary Hauser.

When Walter Hauser wrote his Chicago thesis, peasant studies hardly existed, peasant
movements were almost unknown to the academy, and agrarian structures were expressed solely
in the reigning idiom of British policy or economic history. The very face of social science
history has itself changed since the early sixties, in some cases (and it must be added not
necessarily to our advantage) entirely beyond recognition. But the history then inaugurated
abides.

While Walter Hauser's thesis on the Bihar Kisan Sabha was the first in peasant movement
histories in South Asia, the subject had indeed been broached in writings by nationalist leaders
during the colonial period itself. Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahadev Desai and tens of
other nationalist leaders had written accounts directed at the iniquities of the Indian agrarian
social order but mainly directed at the fact of British rule.Simultaneously, in those very years of
the Indian nationalist movement,peasant movements had arisen that weakened the symbiosis of
the power of the landed elite with the contingencies of the requirements of British rule. In a
word, peasant movements and nationalist politics pressured policy making towards, first,
modifying and then ending the era of landlordism in colonial India. Agrarian power at Indian
Independence stood redefined. But the

++Page 2

process of the making of the Indian nation had many complexities of character, not the least of
which was that of the agrarian class struggle that underpinned it. But, as students of history
would know, class struggles are never simple if at all they are, when they are, what, purportedly,
they are:(i.e.) class struggles.

Let us first consider how the history of rural political mobilization had been written, mainly in
the sixties. In one significant area of scholarship peasant movements were seen to have been
peasant wars. Within each of the six major upheavals of this century the middle peasantry was
supposed to have played an initially revolutionary role. The idea of evaluating the role of the
peasantry in social revolutions came from the political texts of the Russian and Chinese
revolutions and it made its impact in the form of the 'middle peasant theory' in the writings of
Hamza Alavi and Eric Wolf. Modifications of this idea, whether in empirical refutation or as a
qualified redefinition, were applied to India. Usually the answers sought were to affirm (or deny)
this middle peasant thesis.

The history of peasant protest was also, following Eric Hobsbawm, divided into 'political' and
'prepolitical'. Thus the major question, implicit in such a treatment of the subject proved to be:
were the peasants political?If so, how did the mobilization actually occur? This question had a
longer and more lasting impact as over the years it was modified, to assert the case,albeit in
structuralist terms, of, as it were, peasant insurgency against the social order as a whole, of which
social order it was itself a part. To this theme we shall return.

The questions that became dated pertained to the role that peasants played in the transformation
of the social order. They were: Which section of the

++Page 3

peasantry played a revolutionary/reactionary role? As a political peasantry must be led from the
outside, it was also asked: what was the nature (class origins/ideology) of this outside agency?
Was it a revolutionary movement which heralded the consolidation of the bourgeois state
(Zapata in Mexico)under an urban leadership? Or did the peasantry serve through rebellions to
break up the existing state polity (The Russian Revolution)? Or did the peasants provide the
social basis (and an area for tactical retreat) for a working class revolution (Cuba, China)? Were
peasant movements millenarian? Did they exhibit in their struggles an alternative 'moral
economy' (Burma, Vietnam)? The theoretical armoury of social science scholarship on rural
political mobilization began to be reconstituted. By the nineties the questions had indeed
changed. But the anguish remained:peasants were either tricked or bullied or led under false
pretenses into a modern world, which, given its need for development, was (and is) heavily tilted
against their interests. Their cultures are dominated, never dominant,their futures always at the
mercy of an unrelenting progress in which town dominates country, burghers rural folk, the
bourgeoisie the peasantry.

We can neither undo the past nor alter the course of the future in this regard. Yet, within social
science concerns, we can try and reformulate some of our questions on lines which do not
presume pace all social-historical scholarship a preordained social reality To do this we restrict
our reflections to an outline of peasant movements in modern India, 1860-1950,and examine this
outline anew in light of existing scholarship. We also try and reformulate some of the questions
hitherto asked afresh by specifying those features of agrarian society which make more for
discontinuity rather than change and which demonstrate cultural and ideological disjunctions as
++Page 4

opposed to presumed continuities, especially when these latter have connoted success and
failure.

Beginning at the middle of the nineteenth century, which also corresponded with the end of the
stage of direct plunder, British policy in India increasingly became one of support for landlords
through whom the officialdom of empire sought to protect their dominions. Every now and then
there was a deviation from this policy to accommodate the pressure generated by an unequal
agrarian society which, under the impact of the market, produced peasant movements. Between
1860 and 1950, with the exception of half a decade between 1930 and 1935 when prices of
agricultural produce did indeed fall, there was a rise in prices over this entire period. The single
greatest impact which such a rise in prices produced was manifest in a developing struggle
between landlord and peasant for control over the increased value of agricultural surplus. The
landlord raised rents.Tenants protested. The landlords asserted their proprietary rights, by
emphasizing their power to evict tenants while the latter claimed, and were occasionally and with
increasing frequency granted, occupancy rights. Over the century, the peasants' ability to resist
landlord control of rent and produce increased and the structure of landlordism stood
considerably weakened by the end of British rule.

It is hardly necessary to state that our preceding remarks present an oversimplified picture of the
background to the emergence of peasant movements. Many of those peasants who won tenancy
and property rights against the landlords themselves became rent-receivers. They rented out the
land rented in (or acquired after a struggle) from superior proprietors. Many others became rich
cultivators. Still others, and these were most numerous,

++Page 5

continued to lead their lives within the framework of a landlordism which

became top-heavy. While the agrarian structure remained unequal and indeed
skewed, the greater stratification of rights in Indian rural society both within the
category of 'landlord' as well as within the category of 'tenant' altered the
relationship between different agrarian social classes. In the various peasant
movements which emerged, we find that the actual mobilization was carried out
in a hundred myriad forms. Some of these maybe reproduced as an elementary
typology thus:

1. The Blue Mutiny, 1859-1862

Poor peasants and small landlords opposed indigo planters in Bengal. In this they were
helped by moneylenders whose own credit resources stood threatened by the structure of
the monopsonistic rights of the planters.

2. The Pabna and Boora Uprisings, 1872-1875

Rich cultivators, benefiting from the commercialization of agriculture and producing cash
crops, protested to secure further their occupancy rights granted nominally in 1859. In
this they succeeded by 1885 when the Bengal Tenancy Act was passed.Later, by the
middle twentieth century, such tenants were transformed into rent-receivers.

3. The Mappilla Rebellions, 1836-1921

Poor peasants in Malabar (Kerala) protested for security of tenure.This was granted in
1887 and 1929. But only a rich tenantry benefited from these movements. This tenantry
itself acquired afresh and consolidated further its rights as rent-receivers vis-a-vis

++Page 6

the larger landlords. Peasant protest fed into the assertion of rentier claims of one section
of rural society against another.

4. The Deccan Riots, 1875

Up against a heavy land revenue demand of the state, 1840-1870,cultivators lost their
 lands to moneylenders from the towns. The symbiosis of peasants with rural
moneylenders was upset as the dependence of these latter on the moneylenders of the
towns developed. The protest against the structure of legal authority which allowed such
land transfer took the form of antimoney lender riots. The state intervened to legislate in
favour of the 'agriculturists' in 1879. The state's pro-landlord stance therefore could also
become pro-peasant as long as the framework within which it realized its land revenue
did not alter to its disadvantage.

5. Punjab Agrarian Riots, 1907

The state intervened to prevent alienation of land from peasants to moneylenders in 1900
but urban middle classes protested, in nationalist idiom, against government intervention.
Riots broke out against moneylenders. The government appeared pro-peasant, as the
peasants rioted against 'agriculturalist' moneylenders, who were landlords. Landlords we
might recall were over the long term supported by British rule.

6. Peasant Movements in Oudh. 1918 - 1922

The peasants of eastern Uttar Pradesh defied large landlords through a tenants movement
for security of tenure. Oppressive traditions of forced labour were attacked through fierce
agrarian

++Page 7

riots. Small landlords and the rural poor supported and led the movement. Statutory rights
of occupancy were secured in 1921.The movement marked a phase of retreat for
landlordism.

7. Peasant Protest against Indigo Cultivation in North Bihar, 18601920 and

Champaran. 1907-1909 and 1917-1918
Moneylenders and rich peasants voiced grievances of indebted small peasantry and
agricultural labourers. Planters of indigo were put to rout by the rural hierarchy was left
undisturbed. The movement signified the emergence of the peasant as a symbol in a
nationalist ideology.

8. Agrarian Unrest in Uttar Pradesh, 1930-1932

When prices slumped, peasants could not pay rents to landlords nor landlords revenue to
the state. The Indian National Congress launched a no-rent no-revenue campaign of
middle and rich peasants, supported by the rural poor, and small property holders.The
movement marked a simultaneous retreat for landlordism and an attrition of the political
domination of the colonial state.

9. Peasant Agitations in Kheda, 1917-1934 and Bardoli, 1928

In Bardoli a proletariat in traditional agrestic servitude protested against an increased land
revenue valuation alongside a dominant and in relation to the 'serfs' exploitative peasant
community. The 'serfs' were partly convinced of the validity of nationalist ideology as
represented to them and were in part coerced into joining the movement. In Kheda rich
and pauperized strata of a peasantry with shared cultural traditions and kinship
alignments agitated against higher revenue rates, resorting to relinquishment of holdings
and

++Page 8

migration en masse to other neighboring regions as a form of protest.

10. Peasant Struggles in Bihar, 1933-1942

When prices fell in 1930, the rents to which tenants had agreed in a period of rising prices
(1900-1920) became too heavy to bear.Peasants were evicted by landlords as the latter
attempted to increase their power and control. The tenants movement that developed
sought to regain control over the lands from which the peasants had been evicted. The
popular basis of these struggles was provided by rich and middle peasants and
 occasionally poor peasants. Agricultural labourers were not even formally included in the
programme of the Peasants Association till 1944.

11. Share-croppers Agitation in Bengal, 1938-1950

The share-croppers were mostly poor peasants with very small holdings who fought
landlords for security from eviction and aright to at least two-thirds of the produce. The
demand originated from the government's land revenue commission of 1938 and was
propagated by the Communist Party in 1946-1947. Share-croppers were joined in their
movement by small peasants with occupancy rights, small impoverished landlords and a
few rich peasants. In legislation in 1950 and in 1978-1979 these rights were recognized
and pushed through despite landlord opposition by various governments in Independent
India.

12. The Telengana Rebellion, Hyderabad, 1946-1951

A movement involving sustained armed struggle of rich peasants and the rural poor. The
peasantry sought to destroy the political

++Page 9

power of large landlords while the agricultural labourers fought against forced labour.
The political consequences of the movement may be appraised at two levels. The popular
unrest provided the basis for the absorption of Hyderabad State into the Indian Union.The
communist leadership of this movement made for electoral victories in the early 'fifties
for party members from this region.

A glance at the preceding synopsis suggests two ideas that are of relevance to our discussion:

1. While each of the movements, and all together, may well be said to be in some way
representing anti-landlord tendencies in the colonial agrarian society as a whole, any
single one of these movements does not exhibit any such features. Among the more
remarkable conundra of our schema, poor peasant protest has strengthened rentier
structures, anti-moneylender riots have stood opposed to the nationalist political idiom
and movements under a communist leadership have served (however inadvertently this
may have come about; here we are not concerned with intentions) to strengthen the
domination of the rich peasantry,and, at a remove, even the post-colonial state.

2. Leaving aside the question whether or not we can or ought to infer any one tendency
merely because all such instances of protest 'add up' to, finally, a single development, we
find remarkable the extreme disjunction between the politics of each episode against
rentier landlordism. No leaders were ever in common between these instances of protest;
no organization except the All-India Kisan Sabha (1936) spoke for the entire

++Page 10

Indian peasantry. Even when the Kisan Sabha in Bihar or the Communist Party in Bengal
and Telengana did formulate demands for the peasantry, demands that would have an all-
India character, the very specificity of each local variant of the agrarian structure as well
as the sheer diversity of peasant communities in India prevented any generalized
acceptance of their programme. While, therefore, the agrarian structure did indeed consist
of unequal peasant and landlord holdings and the economy reflected a dominant
landlordism and, temporally, an emerging process in which the stratum of richer
peasantry proved ascendant, the ideological distance between the ultimate act of
zamindari abolition (and other land reforms of the 'fifties) and the series of peasant
agitations over a hundred years of Britishr ule was never bridged. Consequently, while it
may be possible for us to say that in the colonial Indian economy a backward capitalism
emerged plagued with all evils characteristic of under-development, and in the nationalist
struggle against British rule representatives of the Indian middle classes as the urban
counterparts of the peasantry came ultimately to dominate and even determine the politics
of peasant protest, the gap between this statement and another with which one might
highlight the cultural dimension of the mobilization process would still remain. (A
 cultural dimension that would take into account the lived and experienced little traditions
of the peasantry in simultaneity with the articulation of the agrarian class structure and
not merely presuppose the domination of such traditions by

++Page 11

'nationalist' political mobilization, notwithstanding the number of instances one might be

able to record of this nationalist mobilization never having been, as it were, 'complete').

In order to move towards a more credible version of the political mobilization process we need to
disaggregate our story of peasant struggles.We might use the same sources but our focus would
have to shift towards one main aspect of the problem: an evaluation of the cultural moorings of
the leadership of the peasantry which, we would argue, came from the ranks of the mofussil
middle classes and from elements declasses. This leadership had little link, and a highly tenuous
one when it did, with the over arching spread,control and domination of the modern state as that
came to evolve, in its institutional form during the period of British rule and in its political
expression in the decades since. Nor can its origins be defined in any simplistic 'social class'
terms, given its culturally heterogeneous, socially stratified and temporally disjunctive character.
Yet, it stood on the rural-urban continuum in its many manifestations and while it aided the
process of mobilization through its strategic relevance to the peasantry, it simultaneously
reinforced these self-images of culture and community which served to widen the distance
between town and country and further the ideological disarticulation of Indian political society.

The process of political mobilization among the Indian peasantry did not,as may be expected,
respond to secular formulae of class struggle while the latter was indeed carried on and
developed in some of the forms of the social class alignments we have just described. Instead,
much of this mobilization was the consequence of those features of Indian society which, in their
customary rooting did not share the modernity of the urban "social contract."

++Page 12

In this, religious belief played no small role. In Champaran (Bihar, 1917)and northern Oudh
(U.P., 1922) the sanction of village deities was considered necessary for determining the
membership of the peasant associations and for the success of the movement. The reluctance of
those who did not wish to join in with the peasants' protest was compared to the sin of having
violated food taboos as laid down in Hinduism and Islam (Bihar, 1917; U.P., 1921). Stories of
Gandhi's non-violent success in his South Africa campaigns, commonly told in the Champaran
movement,tapered into the regard of the laity for the ascetic and the renouncer; indeed,Gandhi's
presence in Champaran also often led his following towards a deification of his person. The
Congress leader Sardar Vallabhai Patel invoked the message of God, as did Gandhi, in the
Bardoli (1928) campaign.The use of religious beliefs and symbols in the mobilization process
overlapped with the social identity of the community, strengthening thereby caste and communal
identities. In U.P. (1918-1922), Bardoli (Gujarat,1928), Bihar (1920-1935), and Bengal (1938-
1947), caste and community associations provided many of the symbols for protest. In Malabar
(1836-1921), the Islamic religious identity of the Mappillas was a source of cohesion among the
poor peasantry and for the linking up of this community with the urban-based sabhas of the
richer Muslims. There is no evidence in this latter experience of any rift or tension between poor
peasant protest,born of and in identification with the Islamic community to which they belonged,
and their subservience to and acceptance of their richer, socially dominant, counterpart. The
necessity of preserving Patidar (Gujarat, 1917-1934) and Kurmi (U.P., 1918-1920) traditions of
endogamy was emphasized as an element in mobilization. Even Sanskritization, the cultural
emulation

++Page 13

of Sanskritic practices for upward social and ritual mobility, which confirmed the distinctions
between castes, was reinforced during popular unrest. The Bhuinhar-Brahman Sabha in Bihar
(1910-1935), Hari sabhas and Kshatriya sabhas in Bengal (1938-1947), and the Kurmi-Kshatriya
sabha in U.P. (1920-1940) are all instances of the simultaneity of the reinforcement of caste
values and peasant mobilization. Peasants marginal to Hindu society converted to Christianity
(Sardari Larai, Chota Nagpur, 1880-1885), or Vaisnavite Hinduism, which strengthened the
purity-pollution opposition(Tana Bhagats, Chota Nagpur, 1915-1919), or to Islam (Malabar,
1870-1890).

The propensity of many a peasant movement leader to be peripatetic, a fact hardly explicable in
the simple-minded terms of wanderlust, was a remarkable feature of political mobilization. Baba
Ramchandra of Oudh, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Rahul Sanskrityayana and Yadunandan
Sharma of Bihar, Motilal Tejawat and Vijay Singh Pathik of Rajasthan, Janardan Sharma of
Gujarat and scores of others roamed the Indian subcontinent, in and out of sects, religions, towns
and villages, schools and monasteries, but hardly ever from one peasant movement to another.
Each of such individuals experienced multiple identity crises - the stories are too many and the
space too little for us to narrate any - as they protested against the social process from which they
had all emerged: usually one of the pauperization of a traditional village level elite. They looked
for answers to the mysteries of life in holistic terms, moving as they did between the world and
its renunciation, often several times in a single lifetime. Several of such leaders who knew as
many languages as they did their many worlds could be observed in swarms, dotting the political
landscape in 1921. With its eternal

++Page 14

fear of Bolshevism, government thought these leaders to be 'political emissaries disguised as

Sadhus or Fakirs...fomenting discontent and antagonism to government especially in Bengal,
Bihar, Assam and the United Provinces'. Moreover, they changed their names several times,
leaving behind them a trail of aliases, designed as often to evade arrest as to escape from and
obliterate traces of their own earlier selves. It was altogether this ubiquitous presence on the
rural-urban continuum of such individuals which allowed others, who were not itinerant
wanderers, to pose as these persons, to switch roles, as it were, with roles discarded by others. It
was this process of moving in and out of one's self and in and out of others' selves which made
for the multiplex potential of Gandhi's message(s) which could be transformed to suit the
occasion.

Between the mercurial character of the lower level leadership and the working out of high
politics was a stratum of a 'rurban' intelligentsia, firmly rooted in the various regions. The
members of this intelligentsia derived their livelihood from a combination of an increasingly
diminishing rental income from small holdings and professional earnings as small town
lawyers,school teachers, lower-rung government officials, and employees and editors of the
Indian languages press. Such an intelligentsia, though itself 'traditional' in that it did not
represent the interests of any 'fundamental' group or class, produced a spate of mobilization
literature for the peasantry whose demands it helped to shape and whose interests it represented
in the nationalist press. The politics of this intelligentsia, crucial as it was for the peasant masses
as a whole, was not related in the same way to peasant classes as it was to Indian nationalism.
The proliferation of regional vernacular papers in the 1920s and 1930s - Tarun Rajasthan,
Gana Bani, Langal, Pratap,

++Page 15

Abhyudaya - served more to integrate the little traditions of the peasantry with Indian
nationalism (variously understood, variously defined) than promote the interests of any single
stratum, rich or poor, among the peasantry. The attitude of the peasantry towards this
intelligentsia was itself ambivalent, suspicious and trusting at the same time. This attitude lent
itself very well to the subsequent exploitation of peasant beliefs by electoral politics in
Independent India but to see in this latter process only the cynical manipulation of rural masses
by urban dominated constituencies is to miss the roots of populism in Indian history which lay in
the historically specific character of the mobilization process as that came to be structured over a
century.

The historicity of peasant insurgency in modern India has come full circle. The deeper sinews of
community economies, traditional moralities and customary bindings has transmuted, through
land reform and in a strange marriage with the social contract of political democracy, into
becoming a mix of casteist movements, communal politics and class struggles. On this we have
little perspective.

Iv

PANEL 32: Post Green Revolution Agrarian

Transformation in South Asia: Ecology and Peasant Life
under Globalization
Panel Organizers:

Sucha Singh Gill - Department of Economics, Punjabi University, Patiala

Staffan Lindberg - Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden
Shinder Thandi - Department of Economics, University of Coventry, UK
K.S. Babu - Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad

Abstract

The Green Revolution ushered a dynamic development of South Asian agriculture in terms of
increased yields and income accruing to the rural population. The food problem was solved to an
extent that there was enough food to distribute among those who could afford to buy it. It meant
an increasingly mechanized agriculture with the use of tractors, thrashers, etc. It also meant
gradual industrialization and development of services in rural areas and an increased straddling
of particularly the male workforce between agricultural and non-agricultural work. Short and
long term migration of labour followed in its wake and there was increasing interaction between
rural and urban areas also in terms of media, culture and consumption styles.

But the Green Revolution was also the beginning of widespread stress on nature in rural areas.
The increased use of harmful pesticides led to the poisoning of soil. Lavish irrigation of land has
put excessive burden on water resources leading to the deforestation and draughts. The Green
Revolution was a ‘state-driven, market-mediated and farmer-managed process'. The state
orchestrated a vast array of measures to stimulate the process, from institutional changes in land
tenure to the regulation of prices of inputs and outputs. The provision of necessary infrastructure
in terms of irrigation, roads, power, etc. was also integral to this process.

With the beginning of the 1990s, agriculture policies have turned neo-liberal and the state has
started withdrawing from an actual involvement in agriculture production and distribution and
other necessary pre-conditions. Most flagrant is the decreasing public investment in
infrastructure and development of new technology and an insensitive withdrawal of protection of
internal markets from the dumping of western grains in accordance with the WTO rules which
few other countries seem to obey. The neo-liberal policies linked to agro market conditions led to
increase in risks and vulnerability of the poor farmers many of them fell victims to suicide deaths
in many Indian states, especially Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab, etc. The
heavy investment on agro-chemicals, machinery and deep bores could not be recovered due to
lack of expected level of yields and prices. The vulnerability of yield, prices and spurious quality
of chemical inputs have added to viability crisis of poor cultivators.

We invite papers on all these aspects of processes of agricultural and rural transformation in
South Asia especially on ecology and farmers' life in the era of neo-liberal globalization.
Sucha Singh Gill, Punjabi University, Dept. of Economics, Patiala, India
Agrarian Transformation in the Post Green Revolution India: Recent Changes

The arrival of green revolution in the mid,sixties set in motion the process of capitalist
transformation of agriculture in India. It began to transform traditional agriculture into a
modernised one and from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture. The linkages to
market developed through acquisition of new inputs and output disposal. The farmers began to
purchase the major share of inputs such as seeds, chemical inputs, mechanical implements and
labour services from the market. This began to be accompanied by production for sale in the
market. Along with the commodity market there emerged labour market for agricultural labour
and lease and sale market for land. This made agriculture susceptible to market signals with
different consequences for different categories of the farmers. This brought opportunities for
some categories of farmers and difficulties for others. The process of market integration of
production system in agriculture accelerated a pace of capital!
accumulation resulting in increased scale of production on the one hand and led to agrarian
change in production relations on the other. This has serious implications for the extent and
nature of tenancy with differences across different regions in India. This is accompanied by
emerging viability crisis of tiny and small farmers. With beginning of the process of withdrawal
of state intervention in the post green revolution phase, the viability crisis is becoming more
pronounced with the phenomenon of liquidation of crisis ridden holdings, appearances of reverse
tenancy and indebtedness of the farmers. With the publication of the 59th round of National
Sample Survey results it is possible to capture some of these changes which was difficult to
capture earlier. This paper attempts to capture these changes using recent data. The paper
attempts to capture these changes in agriculture of India across states and over two decades
period characterized as post green revolution phas!

Babu Suri Kandregula, Hyderabad, India

Globalisation, Ecology and Peasant Life in Andhra Pradesh

Though the globalisation is accelerating the tempo of social economic changes in India, these
changes lead to unexpected conflicting economic and ecological imperatives. The forests are
depleting at faster rate though the government records do not reflect the reality at ground level.
Almost one quarter of the land area is officially classified as forest, yet only 12 per cent of land
actually dense forest cover. Climate studies also confirms that due to the nature exploitative type
of development, India will likely to face significant adverse impacts to agriculture, health and
forestry. The quality of forests has dramatically changed now. Many plant and animal species are
disappearing. These forests are in no way sustaining food requirements of tribes through their
traditional means of hunting and gathering. Mostly they are dependent on agriculture either as
cultivators or agriculture labourers. They are malnourished, poor and largely illiterate. In plain
areas, liberalisation linked agro market conditions lead to number of suicide deaths by farmers.
For example, cotton cultivation has been taken up in areas, which were not traditionally
cotton,growing areas. However, the cotton failed due to severe pest attack. The frequent sprays
and spurious quality of pesticides used made them even more ineffective. The heavy investment
made in purchase of agri,chemicals could not be recovered because the yield was much below
the expected level. During recent years Andhra Pradesh is worst affected by farmers suicide
deaths. According to NSS report on village facilities, cable TV is percoloated to more than 50
percent of the villages in all South Indian states. This will have greater impact on socio,cultural
aspects and food consumption pattern. In the paper, an attempt will be made examine these
issues based on 58th and 59th rounds of NSS reports on village facilities and household
consumer expenditure and other recently conducted micro studies.

Jeevan Raj Sharma, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Imagining Rural Nepal as Agrarian and Traditional: an ethnography of development
discourse in Nepal

In this paper I take issue with powerful academic and policy discourses that have developed a set
of representations to imagine Nepal as a stable, immobile, agrarian and traditional society. A set
of academic and policy discourses have remained silent on the issue of mobile nature of rural
population in the hills, and where discussed it has been represented as a problem to hill society,
culture and economy. The hill population is represented as passive victims of ecological and
economic crisis who are often treated as no more than a faceless mass of people who react to the
forces over which they have no control. Mobility is viewed as a dependent variable in the larger
equation involving economic imbalances between different regions and class. Such
representations have influenced policy responses that have tended to pay relatively little attention
to mobility as an important aspect of Nepali economy and society but seeing it as an unfortunate
and essentially byproduct of a stagnant rural economy to be eliminated by development
programs, particularly within the agriculture sector. This hegemony of agriculture in
development policies are reflected in policy documents including 20 year Agricultural
Perspective Plan (APP), World Bank's Poverty Assessment (1996) and the policy documents of
other donors like USAID, CIDA and ADB. This discursive imagination suggests that agriculture
is not only central in people's livelihoods but must be a central element in any development
strategy in rural Nepal. I argue that these compelling narratives have helped to produce new
forms of imagination and socio,political engagements in Nepal and facilitated international
development aid for agricultural development, environmental protection, population control and
various humanitarian efforts without taking people's perspective into account.

Shinder Thandi, Coventry University, Coventry Business School, Coventry, UK

Post Green Revolution Agrarian Performance, Transformation and Rural Wellbeing in the
two Punjabs: understanding the trends and future prospects

The Indian and Pakistan Punjabs, divided by an arbitrary international border amidst the painful
and bloody partition which lead to over one million deaths and the displacement of over 8
million people in 1947, continues to provide an interesting case study of comparative agrarian
performance and development. Both Punjabs have achieved remarkable economic success in the
last 50 years and continue to play important roles in the economies of India and Pakistan. Both
have attempted to diversify away from over,reliance on the agricultural sector with varying
degrees of success. Despite these attempts, the agrarian sector still remains the most important
determinants of the population's well,being and as is well known East or Indian Punjab has
tended to outperform Pakistan Punjab both in terms of agrarian performance and in terms of
human development. This exploratory paper has three major objectives: firstly it revisits the
agrarian performance of the two Punjabs since the 1970s and analyses the major factors behind
their differential performance and experience. Secondly it discuses the distributional aspects of
their respective performance by linking and measuring the impacts of this performance on
human development and general well,being and finally it identifies emerging constraints, both
agrarian and environmental, to critically examine the issue of sustainable livelihoods in the two
Punjabs and whether greater co,operation between them (e.g. under SAFTA) may generate
mutual benefits.

Ranjit Singh Ghuman, Punjabi University, Patiala, India

Post,Green Revolution Transformation of Rural South Asia: Agriculture, Employment and
Environment

The paper deals with five South Asian Countries as the data and information about the other
three countries is very scanty.

India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal are in the category of low income economies and Sri
Lanka falls in the category of lower,middle,income economies. These five countries account for
97.87 per cent population, 99 per cent GNI and 86.38 per cent surface area of South Asia. They
account for 22.31 per cent population of the World. Nearly, 39 per cent of the World's extreme
poor are living in South Asia.
These countries continue to be predominantly rural and agrarian in terms of the share of
population and workforce. The proportion of rural population and workforce ranges between 60
to 80 per cent, respectively. The very success of 'green revolution' has, however, put a great
pressure on environment, ecology, water resources, and the very sustainability of agriculture.

Agricultural development in these countries did not go along the Kaldor,Kuznets long term
dynamics of agrarian transformation and thereby rural transformation. As such the
diversification of rural economy, not only in terms of output, but also in terms of employment, is
imperative for the sustainability and development of the rural economies.

The low productivity agricultural activities, the ever,rising rural unemployment, shrinking labour
absorption capacity of agriculture are other very serious limitations of the rural and agrarian
economies of these countries. All this has resulted in increased rural,urban gap and a growing
sense of deprivation on the part of rural population.
Massive shifting of subsidies from the reductionable 'boxes' to non,reductionable 'boxes' ('green'
and 'blue' boxes), under WTO,regime, by the developed countries is another serious challenge to
the rural and agricultural economies of South Asia.
The full length version of the paper would be a modest attempt to analyze and discuss all the
issues.
Lindberg Staffan, Lund University, Department of Sociology, Lund, Sweden
South India: 25 Years of Change in the Kaveri Delta Agriculture

This paper reports from an ongoing panel study of 240 agricultural households in 6 villages in
Trichy and Karur districts in Tamilnadu which were interviewed 25 years ago. Three of the
villages belong to canal irrigated area along the river Kaveri, which we call wet villages and
three of the villages belong to a dry rain,fed area, which we call dry area. In 1979,80 this area
was already deep into the green revolution with increasing employment and incomes. In the wet
area there had been land reform and in the dry there had been an increase in well irrigation, both
being important for the success of the application of the new high yielding crop technology.
When we returned in 2005 we find considerable changes. Agricultural operations have been
mechanised to a large extent with tractors and power tillers used for ploughing the fields and for
transports. Threshing is now done by threshing machines. The most striking change is however,
the water crisis in both areas. This used to be an area where the wet villages had assured water
supply all year round and the opportunity to raise three crops. Today less water is flowing
through the Kaveri since Karnataka State has decided to keep most of the water for its own
farmers. Add to this that it had not rained for 3 years. The response to this situation has been to
dig wells in the wet area and to try other, less water demanding crops. In the dry area, most of
the farming had come to a standstill with the lack of rains and a rather desperate situation. Rich
capitalist farmers have now deep bore wells while their poor neighbours have no water in their
wells. Another significant change is the increase in non,agricultural economic activities.

Naresh Singh, IBS Campus, ICFAI Business School, Haryana, India

Understanding the Process of Agriculture and Land Reforms in India: Perspectives on
Theories of Institutional Change and Political Behaviour

The present paper is based on the premises that poverty has its own culture. Social system and
sub,systems of this culture are built upon exploitation. The rich and the power holders exploit the
poor. Process of agriculture and land reforms in India is not its opposite. It has occurred in this
culture of poverty and is still continuing. In this article an attempt has been made to understand
the process of agriculture land reforms in India with its historical background by applying
theories of institutional change and political behaviour. The main explanations in the article are
based on i) strategic conflict and distribution, ii) powers and sources actors, iii) role of extracting
bandits and iv) difference between formal and effective property rights. These explanations have
been derived from the theories of R. H. Coase (problem of social cost), Oliver E. Williamson
(new institutional economics) and Konard Hegedorn (political institutions and processes). The
paper concludes with some of the alarming findings like under the process of agriculture and
reforms in India we see a clear strategic conflict where political leaders were reluctant to
implement land reforms because of their vested interest of being big landholders themselves. The
power and sources of actors never wanted to share power with the poor people and they
legitimised this power into authority by entering into political system. Bureaucrats provided all
their support to protect the interest of political leaders cum big agriculture landholders; whether
it is the case of enforcing land ceiling Acts in different States or land consolidation. Their role
was like bandits in political economy. In the entire process of agriculture and land reforms in
India, we also see a clear difference between formal and effective proper rights.

Kanwaljit Kaur Gill, Punjabi University, Patiala, India

Transformation of Agriculture and Female Employment: An Analysis of Indian States

Under the policy of planned economic development Indian agriculture has experienced a
qualitative transformation and change in employment structure. Though overall female work
participation (FWP) has increased from 19.7 per cent during 1981 to 22.3 per cent in 1991 and
further to 25.7 per cent in 2001. Their participation has witnessed decline during the last decade
in agriculture. FWP, if any, has increased in household activities only. The new agricultural
technology has led to casualization and marginalization of female employment in agriculture.
This has pushed them into less skilled and less mechanized operations. This paper attempts to
investigate how far the introduction of modern technology in agriculture has led to the
displacement of females from productive and remunerative activities on one hand and increased
exploitation of female workers on the other. The intensity of this exploitation is, however,
different in different parts of the Indian states. With the help of census data and the NSSO data
for the states, the paper analyses the existing scenario of FWP in rural India. Further, it
examines the possibilities of increasing their participation in agriculture in the changed scenario.

The empirical data gives evidence of increased FWP in agriculture when labour hours required
were compared in the cultivation of traditional crops and vegetables. The traditional crops have
been generating employment for male oriented operations, and the vegetables growing favours
female employment. The aggregative analysis shows that share of female employment in all
vegetables is about 59 per cent as compared to that of male employment, 38 per cent. Rest 3 per
cent is the child labour. Crop diversification is, therefore, suggested as a measure to increase
FWP.
State should, therefore, intervene for proper marketing of the agricultural produce to encourage
diversification. At the same time vocational training to rural women should also be given to
make her able to perform other operations in agriculture more efficiently.

Staffan Öhrling, Mid,Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden

From Clay Pot to Colour TV. Contrasts and Similarities in Socio,geographic Development
for Sri Lanka and Two Local Communities 1972,2006

This paper is a comprehensive review over 34 years of development in Sri Lanka and two local
communities there, Bundala and Panapola Pelawatte. The two villages are situated in two
contrasting climatic regions, the Dry Zone of the lowland region in the southeast, and the Wet
Zone of the southern hill country. The climatic differences have been considered to influence
preconditions for development in general and in particular for agriculture. From 1972, changes
and development have been investigated continuously by the author for these two villages as
well as for the whole country. The aim of this article is to review changes in the two villages and
to compare this with development in Sri Lanka in a long time perspective. Development in the
two villages, located in what was previously considered as neglected areas, was for this reason
assumed to be lagging behind the rest of the country. Somewhat surprisingly, conditions in
recent years have improved considerably in Bundala and Panapola Pelawatte also compared with
the rest of the country in spite of the relative isolation of these communities. Two major
drawbacks last year on the national level was the aftermath of the 24,12 tsunami 2004 and the
Norwegian,brokered ceasefire between LTTE and SLA from 2002 turning very volatile late in
2005. How these two factors have affected development for Sri Lanka as well as the two
continuously investigated villages will be reviewed later in this paper. This article will therefore
provide an epitome of drawbacks as well as positive changes at two aggregation levels, the
national and the local, and suggest some explanations for the recent directions of development in
the concluding part.

Sujoy Dutta, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Rethinking Power Relationships in Rural Uttar Pradesh

In Uttar Pradesh (UP), until mid,1960s, power in villages tended to center around a few
dominant castes. However, since India's independence in 1947, there have been significant
changes in village power structure. Notable among such transformations include:

• Improvement in the relationship between Thakurs and Jats with weaker groups;
• Improvement in living standards of lower castes with the advent of modern technology in
UP agriculture;

In order to examine these issues, my paper will identify the dominant groups in UP village(s) and
investigate the bases and forms of control exercised by dominant groups. Accordingly the study
will consider the bases on which these groups have managed to establish their position; how the
sources of power have altered over time; and how the changing tactics employed by these groups
have served to sustain their dominance.
The study will also consider the methods employed by the weaker groups to survive the
supremacy of dominant groups. Where have their attempts failed, and where have they
succeeded? Finally, the paper will consider to what extent strategies employed by weaker groups
have been successful in enabling them to escape the supremacy of dominant groups.

Muzaffar Assadi, University of Mysore, Karnataka, India

Agrarian Crisis and Farmers' Suicide in India: Dimension, Nature and the response of the
state in Karnataka (32)

Farmers' suicide in different parts of India, particularly Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra and
Karnataka over the past one decade or so has completely changed the discourse on Indian
agriculture. These issues of suicide have come at a time when the debate on the agrarian
economy was shifting from the primacy of mode of production of 1960s(Alice Thorner: 1982,
Kathleen Gough: 1980) to the growing crisis of the economy in the 1980s to the farmers' suicide
in the recent years It also came at a time when Indian agriculture was also undergoing
tremendous transformation: Indian agriculture was progressively acquiring the "small farm
character"; focus was shifting from food grains to non,food grains; new inputs such as seeds
occupying the prominent place in the inputs; agriculture slowly but steadily linking to the global
market.

Nonetheless the suicide is the manifestation of larger crisis, crisis of agrarian capitalism as well,,
the beginning of such crisis needs to be located much earlier to the decade of globalization,
particularly during the decade of 1980s when terms of trade was going against the agriculture
(Pradeep Bose: 1981,Ashok Rudra: 1982), urban biased policies were dominating the state
policies and farming was becoming a loosing proposition. During this decade the crisis was
manifested in the forms of farmers' movement (Tom Brass: 1995, S.S.Gill: 1995, Staffan
Lindberg: 1995, Gail Omvedt; 1980,95,97, Assadi: 1995&1997). Nowhere agrarian crisis
translated into suicide form. This is because the agitation politics provided the farmers' a sense of
identity, a new discourse, a new vision about themselves and the world around them. A shift in
the discourse came at a time when India was embracing neo,liberal agenda which in the final
analysis went against the Indian farmers: it further sharpened the crisis of agrarian economy; it
increased the rural indebtedness (Deshpande&Nagesh: 2006; further marginalized the rural
categories. and trapped the rural categories in the larger network of global capital through the
mediation of seeds, new technology etc.

The number of farmers' committing suicide was much higher during 1995, 2002, it was
estimated that in Andhra Pradesh more than 3,000 farmers' committed suicide, in Karnataka
more than 700(Assadi: 1998 &2005) farmers' have committed suicide. However, our paper will
focus on the Karnataka state in India to under stand the larger crisis of the agriculture. This is
because of the fact that the Karnataka state is one of the first states to introduce New Agricultural
Policy (Assadi: 1995) in recent years that helped the agriculture to open up to the vagaries of
globalization; it is one of the states which saw the New Farmers' Movement opposing the
globalization as well as highlighting the suicide; it is also one of the states which witnessed the
sharp agrarian crisis during the of post,green revolution era and finally it is one of the first states
which also witnessed the sharp decline in farmers' suicide during the past two years.
In our paper an attempt will be made to understand the following:
· The reasons for the growing agrarian crisis beginning from post,Green Revolution period
· The changes that the new technology brought in in recent years
· The larger framework to understand the growing crisis and the suicide
· Why suicide is not reflected in such states as BIMARU in India than in Punjab, AP and
Karnataka
· The similarity and dissimilarity in the nature of agrarian crisis and suicide in Karnataka
and AP/Maharastra and Punjab.
· The social composition of farmers' committing suicide
· The response of the state to contain the crisis including the suicide

We would conclude that farmers' committing suicide must have declined in Karnataka but the
agrarian crisis is not over. It is increasing and enveloping the whole of agrarian society and
creating multiple crisis

Neil Webster, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark

Contesting Economic Control in a West Bengal Village

The paper takes its point of departure in the pro,poor agricultural economic growth that has
occurred in West Bengal in the past three decades. The discussion of this has tended to focus on
the role of reforms instigated by the Left Front Government (LFG) and the role of technologies
in facilitating the cultivation of rice and other crops. The agency of the poor in the agrarian
sector has tended not to figure prominently in these discussions. As a counterweight to these
approaches, the paper looks at the engagement of the poor in the ' flow of action' (Arensberg via
Wolf via Nuijten) in Kashnagram village in Bardhamman District, West Bengal. The state of
their life condition is seen to involve two parallel processes, one set rooted in a set of structures
that shape opportunities for their actions and the other set rooted in organising practices that are
engaged in on an everyday basis. The latter are closely linked to practices of exclusion a!
nd inclusion with consequences for access to key resources, assets, and services. The patterns
and regularities that enable one to identify organising practices are linked to force fields of
power relations in the neighbourhood, the village and to authorities and institutions beyond the
village space. In this way the analysis demonstrates the ways in which control, and economic
control in particular, is exercised from below and not just from above, by the poor and not just
the non,poor.