agrarian property

8/14/2019 Agrarian Property

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Nicaragua

Agrarian Property and Stability

There is no one property problem. The problems are many an complex when it comes toagrarian properties. They are all related to one another and affect very diverse groups. Thesolution 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. Bydiverse methods, the Sandinista government came into possession of and/or redistributed over1.5 million acres of farmland, equivalent to 32% of the country's total. During the Chamorroadministration, just under 600,000 acres, or 12%, changed hands, three fourths of it through theprivatization 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 factoover the whole period. Today, only 29% of the exploited agricultural area has escaped all ofthese processes.

For better or worse, the changes that took place before the 1990 elections had majorconsequences for the economy and society. Although the figures were known, their significancewas not deeply analyzed and virtually never publicly debated. There is near consensus about theterrible results of the national economy in the 1980s, but no clear, complete and publiclydisseminated 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 affectedlands.

These three questions have different answers depending on the stage of the Sandinistagovernment being considered. Its handling of the land issue can roughly be divided into fourstages. The first began with the confiscation of Somoza properties and lasted until the 1981agrarian reform law, leading to the consolidation of the state as an agrarian business owner. Thesecond concluded with the second agrarian reform law in 1986, and was characterized bycollectivization as a condition of providing land and credits. In the third stage, the governmentrecognized the need to respond to the demand for individual plots, in at least some regions, andto be more flexible in its policy toward production cooperatives by allowing certain plots withinthem for family consumption crops. Meanwhile, with the economy falling apart, agrarian reformwas put on hold. The fourth stage was the government's two month lame duck period after losingthe 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 oftendominated 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, anextensive cattle ranch may appear much less "exploited" than a cotton plantation, but a cottongrower's influence in the economic inequalities of a given zone is not necessarily less than that ofa cattle rancher.

De facto occupations of thousands of acres, without later intervention by the state, also tookplace during the Sandinista administration. And as late as 1988 a decree was issued that, in thebest style of absolutist governments, allowed the confiscation of lands belonging to the politicalopposition.


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In such a climate, which further exacerbated the existing polarization, it was nearly impossible toforge 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 Sandinistagovernment were never legally registered as state property. Most were incorporated into statecompanies and later into corporations by decree, or were transferred to agrarian reformbeneficiaries without the state going through the chain of legal actions established by the existinglaw for acquiring a property. When the FSLN lost the elections, it had to push a law through theNational Assembly, which it still dominated, to protect those properties. Law 88 states that "theprovisional or definitive agrarian reform titles that have been provided to the assignees ofagrarian reform as of this date [March 30, 1990] constitute a legal instrument that providesownership 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, whenthat 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 wayof thinking that the Sandinistas shared with other left movements in Latin America that politicaldecisions 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 theexecutive branch above all others.

Criteria for Assigning Lands

The selection of agrarian reform beneficiaries could have created a broad base of socialconsensus 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 ananti rural and anti economic skew.

In the first stage, the FSLN did not support the spontaneous peasant land takeovers, even in areaswhere the peasants had fought with Somoza's National Guard to gain access to land and thus livea 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 atechnological 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 thoughmany political cadres and even leaders refused to recognize the advantages of small familyproperties. Access to land was thus conditioned to creating collective forms of work: theproduction cooperatives. Since these cooperatives were decreed from above, the majority ofthem never became truly cohesive. Members came and went, with no incentive to invest sincethey had no security over their property. Life for many cooperative members remained as poor asbefore they received the land. Some cooperatives showed signs of growth because they receivedhuge state subsidies to acquire imported machinery and hire temporary workers. That allowedthem 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 theefficiency of the reassigned lands: costs rose and supply dwindled.

Lands were also assigned to individual peasant families after 1986, mainly due to the pressure ofthe war, but even then in insignificant amounts: 2% of the farmland. That shift paralleled aloosening up of the cooperative model, which allowed some land on the collectives to beindividually cultivated. But both changes were too little, too late: the FSLN had already lost the1984 elections in the rural areas by percentages similar to those of 1990. Furthermore, by notresolving the essential problem of land security for peasant families, this new flexibility only


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created more tensions within the cooperatives.The agrarian reform's influence on production systems was far less than the 32% of farm landsaffected. According to estimates made by a European Community mission in 1993, farmland inthe hands of peasants with under 30 acres only grew from 17% to 22% during the revolution, andthat 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 realstandardbearers of economic development and contribute to more equitable rural incomegeneration, only increased by 7%.

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

Transition: New Problems

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

The agrarian upheavals increased the instability of the economy and of society, despite the newgovernment's efforts and its massive spending for "peace," which was essentially covered byforeign aid. The contradictions between the logic of macroeconomic stabilization (which requiresrestricted spending) and that of pacification (which requires increasing it) became manifest. Ademocratization that confused privatization with the market, and the market with democracy, didnot 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. Atthe 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 legallyconsolidate all it had done in the 1980s prior to handing over power. Tolerance of this sweepinglegalization process and the continuation of Sandinistas at the head of the police and army werepart of the transition protocol signed by representatives of the incoming and outgoinggovernments. Independent of any economic, legal and social assessments that could be made ofthese agreements, it is obvious that this "solution" to the property problem was a key piece in thepolitical 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 costsand some tribute to the departing administration.

Under Protection of Law 88

Rural properties were already being transferred to private hands before the 1990 elections, butthe process accelerated in the two months of transition. The problem before 1990 was that theseindividual assignments were not made with any expressly enunciated political program in favorof 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.
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The process of quickly divvying up state lands to individuals and massively handing out agrarianreform titles was sanctified by Law 88, which protected all agrarian reform titles and all landassignments, 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 "piata,"

the interests of poor peasants benefited during the 1980s were tarred with the same brush asthose of a political clientele benefited at the last minute. "An unprecedented affair in the historyof the Nicaraguan state's booty created a new landowner class," railed a La Prensa editorial ofSeptember 21, 1990, about a process in which many goods "ceased to belong to the state andpassed to private hands." At that early date, it was admitted that those goods, nearly 300,000acres, belonged to the state, and the manner by which the state had obtained them was notdiscussed. Nor was much importance given to whether the state had registered them or not. Lateron, the discourse would change.

The State Lands

The increased pressure for land triggered by the end of the war brought a second tension to theChamorro government. There were more veterans of peasant extraction among the NicaraguanResistance "contras" than among the discharged soldiers of the drastically reduced SandinistaPopular 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 todeal with this sudden increase in demand for land. It is hard to know what proportion of the444,000 acres not included in the piata were distributed to former combatants in the 1991privatization process by the state holding company CORNAP. Negotiated agreements with thevarious sectors demanding the 87 agricultural businesses grouped into 10 corporations spoke ofprivatizing 25% to each sector the workers, old owners, and veterans on each side but there areindications 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) andAGROEXCO (cotton). Overall, 9% of the privatization favored new businesses, 41% went to theold 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 thethree most important corporations (AGROEXCO, CAFENIC and HATONIC) was returned to itsowners, 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 paymentmechanisms 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, theveterans and workers who were benefited have repeatedly charged that they have not beengranted their property titles, making access to credit nearly impossible and in turn leading theircompanies into ruin. The accumulation of unpayable debts on their assets is obliging them to sellthe lands they received at low prices, thus guaranteeing a stealthy and silent reversal of theagrarian reform by way of "market forces."Just over 14,000 acres 3% of the total privatized were transferred to the veterans of theResistance 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 over160,000 were acquired through state purchase of private lands, and the Nicaraguan Agrarian

Reform Institute provided agrarian reform titles to the beneficiaries. An important footnote tothat chapter is that many foot soldiers in the Resistance complain that the leadership distributedthe 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 bythe various phases and forms of the agrarian changes. With the transition over and power firmlyin new hands, different groups began, in the name of their injured rights, to demand that thechanges be reversed or that they be compensated. Some impugned the legitimacy of the entire


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confiscation process and even of the agrarian reform itself. Of those, a number were activelybacked by US congressional members on the grounds that they had become US citizens albeitafter their properties were confiscated. Others took refuge simply in the lack of legal paperworkfor 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 traditionalfoot dragging of justice, these cases could remain unresolved for up to 10 years. The politicalcost of the agrarian reform's lack of transparency and legal solidity has been extremely high: insome 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 DevelopmentProgram, lists the many factors that make it extremely hard to find a single solution to theproperty problem that would satisfy the whole country. They include the fragile legal framework(including the lack of legitimacy plaguing the "piata" laws), the multiple owners of the sameland due to the generalized practice of provisional titling, the inability of the political class toreach 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 situationeven more. To compensate those who were confiscated, the government issued 1.7 millioncrdobas worth of bonds with annual interest rates of between 3% and 5%, to be paid starting inthe second year and cancellable in five annual installments starting in the eleventh year. Butmany recipients sold their bonds to speculators, in some cases for as little as 17% of theirnominal value, given their low redemption value and mistrust of the government and theeconomy (inflation is already higher than those interest rates). Another 35 million worth ofbonds were used to pay off tax debts, and an additional 455 million worth were used to snatch upstate enterprises from CORNAP for a song, since CORNAP accepted the bonds at their facevalue, even though their recovery value was obviously devalued.

If we subtract all the bonds redeemed by the state one way or another, those still outstandinghave a redemption value of about US$102 million. The government has no more assets withwhich to redeem them, except the monopolistic public services, particularly TELCOR, thetelecommunications 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 thestate in business affairs to make way for private initiative, but has not managed to show thecontribution of the privatization process to the development of the country."The issue of privatizing TELCOR in fact constitutes another tension around property, theChamorro administration's fourth. The interests of those whose confiscations were compensatedwith bonds are mixed with powerful interests that go beyond the national framework: thegovernment'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 AdjustmentFacility in its first year; the interests of the powerful transnational corporations vying to purchaseTELCOR; and the interests of the international financial institutions, stalwart defenders ofprivatization. The greatest danger to the nation in the short term is that the governmentauthorities will make a very negative decision, using the excuse that it must revalue theindemnification bonds, even though most of those still out are now in the hands of a fewpowerful speculators who can exert heavy pressure on the government and the NationalAssembly.

All these problems overlap one another; they all make up the "property problem" in Nicaragua. Itis 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 makingmuch noise. The economic fragility of all the family units born of the agrarian reform, even thosethat were legally consolidated, is a powerful wave that could capsize the boat of the nationaleconomy.


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While the debates go on, deals among politicians are still being made under the table, theeconomy is still awaiting the promised and always postponed take off and the cooperatives andother production collectives are being silently dismantled. In October 1993 it was estimated that70% 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 theformer cooperative members now holders of individual plots prevents them from having a realfarm with the minimum of capital needed to get safely and productively through the agriculturalcycle.

For these smallholders, becoming farmers and living on their farm means being interested inmaking 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 meansdiversifying their productive activities: tending various crops at the same time and making betteruse of the agricultural byproducts in raising animals. And it means perennial crops: trees, coffeeplants, 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 lendsthem money.

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

In 1989, the Agrarian Reform Research and Studies Center of the Ministry of Agricultureestimated that 35,000 families had received land in the form of production collectives. Assumingthat 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 Nitlapn, they would need about $1,000 per family to get started assmall 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 tocapitalize this 5% of the country's economically active population and keep it from expandingthe ranks of the unemployed, and to guarantee the agrarian reform that has cost the country somuch in political and social terms. That $40 million is only 40% of what is being sought soavidly to redeem the bonds of a handful of power wielding speculators.

The Weight of the USA and the Urban Piata

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

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

First are the external influences: those of the international financial institutions and, above all, ofthe US government, which is not honoring the international law establishing that a countrycannot come to the defense of its citizens over a problem they had before becoming citizens. Ifthe US were to abide by that, the political weight of this problem would shift significantly, since


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only 170 of the roughly 2,000 "US" claimants were citizens of the United States at the time theywere confiscated.

The symbolic aspects of the urban piata are also an obstacle. The concept of urban property as asocial 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 theiroccupants under the umbrella of Law 85, are today "legally" bound up with the thousands ofsmall urban properties justly transferred to those living in them, which seriously complicates anysolution to the problem.

The unproductive nature of the big properties and their transfer's lack of redistributive impactsince 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 eminentlysymbolic character destines them to being a permanent target of political struggle, the flame ofdiscord 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 putthe final period to this set of property problems in Nicaragua? In the first place, it must berecognized 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 asolution that fails to respect the other social balances will not enjoy legitimacy. Basingthemselves on "natural law" as some extremist lawyers do is just empty rhetoric. Is not the law ofthe jungle the simplest and most primitive form of politics? Though some may think thatNicaraguan 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, thecircle of those with political representation is so small and the power of those few pressuregroups and their family connections is so great that arbitrariness always prevails in a simplepolitical deal.

The Right to Property

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

One of the underpinnings of the freedom to engage in business and assure the enjoyment of itsfruits is the right to property. English philosopher John Locke considered the father of the liberalrevolution in his country and one of the founders of modern political thought believed thatappropriating 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," hewas seeking to make the right to property compatible for all and to establish the limits of myright when it hurts the right of others. Criteria have also been formulated about these limits withthe 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 almosteverything that can be appropriated by human beings is the product of human labor. Maintainingthe principle that one always has the right to enjoy the fruits of his/her labor, they deduced thatthere were no limits to private property. But the situation is not quite like that, because somegoods are not the product of labor, although labor can be incorporated into them. Land is the best


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example.

Neoliberal thinkers such as Robert Nozick set forth as an exception the example of a waterfountain in the desert. It is a good that one cannot privately appropriate without harming the rightof 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 thatappropriating 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 "itis generally useful for land to be in the hands of those who know how to work it better." But inhis typical cautious style, he also states that, unlike other forms of capital, "it is generallyimpossible to produce real estate capital by means of savings." What he meant was that the latteris not the product of labor, yet its appropriation always generates rent, a form of income thatdepends not on the merit of labor but on appropriation. The same author noted that "this capitalis 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 contributionsof economic theory, it is clear that, since the creation of huge land estates makes it impossible forothers to exercise their right to property, such estates are illegitimate. In colonial Nicaragua, anempty country or to be more exact, an emptied country in which the unrestricted power of aminority social strata dominated power, great haciendas were created that excluded the poorestindividuals: those of mixed Spanish and Indian blood who were left to populate the spaces leftfree by the hoarding estate owners if they escaped the repression that forced them to work theestate 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 capitalto improve it, while the estate owners, protected by political power and the laws that orderedobligatory labor, had, with no particular competence on their part, the luxury of being profitablewithout being efficient.

This structure, which began in the second half of the 16th century, was already well consolidatedby the end of the colonial period. Nicaraguan historian Germn Romero, after examiningproperty titles issued by the Colonial High Court of Guatemala between 1700 and 1769, notesthat 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 ofthe 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 ofland tenure and of its legal structuring and systems of exploitation, aimed at obtaining, withequitable distribution of the cultivable area and its rent and an increase of production, an increasein the standard of living of the peasant masses and their incorporation into the process of thedevelopment 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.


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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.

IIINTRODUCTION

"PROPERTY!" At the mention of the word, according to an old Indiansaying, even a corpse will sit up on its bier. And to most Indians,property means farm land. In India roughly 70 percent of the peoplestill live on the land (about 80 percent if all villagers are included),as against less than 10 percent in the United States. Farming providesthe livelihood of most of those who dwell in India's villages. For theman who grows things from the soil, ownership of land or the assured

possession of a few acres not only means economic subsistence butalso is a symbol of status and dignity. For the city dweller who hasmade good in business or a profession, land is a favored form of in-vestment and tax haven.

Not surprisingly, then, a conflict between established propertyowners on the one hand and nation-minded government planners andofficials, the architects of social change, on the other has marked thefirst twenty years of independence. Property will continue to be a cen-tral source of contention, one may confidently predict, for a long timeto come. Where to strike the balance between private interest and the


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general welfare has been a hotly debated issue in India, as in anydemocratic 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 constituentStates of India and their districts, the administration of land taxesand of laws concerning conditions of ownership and tenancy has longbeen a major preoccupation. Under the Constitution of India, theStates have exclusive jurisdiction over matters relating to land and ag-

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CHAPTER 8

"ESTATES" AND "AGRARIAN REFORM"

BEGINNING WITH the First Amendment, but especially after theFourth Amendment, judicial questioning of land reform measurestook two main forms. Did the measures deal with the kinds of inter-ests in land of which acquisitions were protected from testing underthe Fundamental Rights? If not, did they satisfy the requirements ofequal 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, thatthe constitution-amenders had not exempted laws to acquire interestsof the kind they held from the usual constitutional requirements forsuch measures. In response to these contentions the Supreme Court'sdoctrine developed along two intertwined lines -- (a) a more precisedefinition of the exempted legislative measures and (b) a clarificationof the purpose of the protective umbrella, which the members foundto be an intention to protect measures of "agrarian reform," and, pos-sibly, only such measures, so far as dealings with landed propertywere concerned.

WHAT ARE "ESTATES" IN LAND?

The original Constitution said nothing about land reforms assuch. The zamindari abolition laws were to be exempted from the nor-mal rules of compensation mainly through two of the exceptions to

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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 ofIndia's urban areas trebled. The increase was concentrated in thelarger cities. By 1961, 44 percent of the total urban population livedin cities of more than 100,000, which, numbering only 28 four dec-ades earlier, now totaled 104. In those same four decades, the urban


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population as a whole had increased by 174 percent; in the cities ofmore than 100,000 the rate was 400 percent. 1

The prospect is for an even faster growth in the 1970s and the1980s, when it is estimated that at least 80 million will be added to

the urban population. By 1981, probably at least 200 million peoplewill live in cities. 2 The Government's Committee on Urban Land Pol-icy, urging that a much higher priority be given to the improvementof life in cities, has commented that even at present population levels"most of the urban areas in our country, particularly the ten largestmetropolitan cities, present a very pathetic picture of congestion,overcrowding, slums and blight." 3 The prospective explosion in theurban population has posed urgent needs not only for more effectiveuse of land and humane living conditions in the miserably crowdedinner 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 LandPolicy ( 1965) 6.

2Ibid., 8.3Ibid., 6.

III

Power, Agrarian Structure, and

Peasant Mobilization in Modern India

Majid H. SiddiqiJawaharlal Nehru University

E-mail:

Keynote Address:Symposium in Honor of Walter Hauser's Contributions toPeasant 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 thevery pleasant though for me formidable task of reading the keynote address to an audienceconsisting, as it does, of colleagues with large reputations. As I endeavour to rise equal to thetask,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, peasantmovements were almost unknown to the academy, and agrarian structures were expressed solelyin the reigning idiom of British policy or economic history. The very face of social sciencehistory has itself changed since the early sixties, in some cases (and it must be added notnecessarily to our advantage) entirely beyond recognition. But the history then inauguratedabides.

While Walter Hauser's thesis on the Bihar Kisan Sabha was the first in peasant movementhistories in South Asia, the subject had indeed been broached in writings by nationalist leadersduring the colonial period itself. Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahadev Desai and tens of
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other nationalist leaders had written accounts directed at the iniquities of the Indian agrariansocial order but mainly directed at the fact of British rule.Simultaneously, in those very years ofthe Indian nationalist movement,peasant movements had arisen that weakened the symbiosis ofthe power of the landed elite with the contingencies of the requirements of British rule. In aword, peasant movements and nationalist politics pressured policy making towards, first,

modifying and then ending the era of landlordism in colonial India. Agrarian power at IndianIndependence stood redefined. But the

++Page 2

process of the making of the Indian nation had many complexities of character, not the least ofwhich was that of the agrarian class struggle that underpinned it. But, as students of historywould 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 beenpeasant wars. Within each of the six major upheavals of this century the middle peasantry wassupposed to have played an initially revolutionary role. The idea of evaluating the role of thepeasantry in social revolutions came from the political texts of the Russian and Chineserevolutions and it made its impact in the form of the 'middle peasant theory' in the writings ofHamza Alavi and Eric Wolf. Modifications of this idea, whether in empirical refutation or as aqualified 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 alonger and more lasting impact as over the years it was modified, to assert the case,albeit instructuralist terms, of, as it were, peasant insurgency against the social order as a whole, of whichsocial 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 transformationof 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 tobreak up the existing state polity (The Russian Revolution)? Or did the peasants provide thesocial basis (and an area for tactical retreat) for a working class revolution (Cuba, China)? Werepeasant movements millenarian? Did they exhibit in their struggles an alternative 'moraleconomy' (Burma, Vietnam)? The theoretical armoury of social science scholarship on ruralpolitical mobilization began to be reconstituted. By the nineties the questions had indeedchanged. But the anguish remained:peasants were either tricked or bullied or led under falsepretenses into a modern world, which, given its need for development, was (and is) heavily tiltedagainst their interests. Their cultures are dominated, never dominant,their futures always at themercy of an unrelenting progress in which town dominates country, burghers rural folk, thebourgeoisie the peasantry.

We can neither undo the past nor alter the course of the future in this regard. Yet, within socialscience concerns, we can try and reformulate some of our questions on lines which do notpresume pace all social-historical scholarship a preordained social reality To do this we restrictour reflections to an outline of peasant movements in modern India, 1860-1950,and examine thisoutline anew in light of existing scholarship. We also try and reformulate some of the questionshitherto asked afresh by specifying those features of agrarian society which make more fordiscontinuity rather than change and which demonstrate cultural and ideological disjunctions as


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++Page 4

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

Beginning at the middle of the nineteenth century, which also corresponded with the end of thestage of direct plunder, British policy in India increasingly became one of support for landlordsthrough whom the officialdom of empire sought to protect their dominions. Every now and thenthere was a deviation from this policy to accommodate the pressure generated by an unequalagrarian society which, under the impact of the market, produced peasant movements. Between1860 and 1950, with the exception of half a decade between 1930 and 1935 when prices ofagricultural produce did indeed fall, there was a rise in prices over this entire period. The singlegreatest impact which such a rise in prices produced was manifest in a developing strugglebetween landlord and peasant for control over the increased value of agricultural surplus. Thelandlord raised rents.Tenants protested. The landlords asserted their proprietary rights, byemphasizing 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 resistlandlord control of rent and produce increased and the structure of landlordism stoodconsiderably weakened by the end of British rule.

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

++Page 5

continued to lead their lives within the framework of a landlordism whichbecame top-heavy. While the agrarian structure remained unequal and indeedskewed, the greater stratification of rights in Indian rural society both within thecategory of 'landlord' as well as within the category of 'tenant' altered therelationship between different agrarian social classes. In the various peasantmovements which emerged, we find that the actual mobilization was carried outin a hundred myriad forms. Some of these maybe reproduced as an elementarytypology thus:

1. The Blue Mutiny, 1859-1862

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

2. The Pabna and Boora Uprisings, 1872-1875Rich cultivators, benefiting from the commercialization of agriculture and producing cashcrops, protested to secure further their occupancy rights granted nominally in 1859. Inthis they succeeded by 1885 when the Bengal Tenancy Act was passed.Later, by themiddle twentieth century, such tenants were transformed into rent-receivers.

3. The Mappilla Rebellions, 1836-1921Poor peasants in Malabar (Kerala) protested for security of tenure.This was granted in1887 and 1929. But only a rich tenantry benefited from these movements. This tenantryitself 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 sectionof rural society against another.

4. The Deccan Riots, 1875Up against a heavy land revenue demand of the state, 1840-1870,cultivators lost their


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lands to moneylenders from the towns. The symbiosis of peasants with ruralmoneylenders was upset as the dependence of these latter on the moneylenders of thetowns developed. The protest against the structure of legal authority which allowed suchland transfer took the form of antimoney lender riots. The state intervened to legislate infavour 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 revenuedid not alter to its disadvantage.

5. Punjab Agrarian Riots, 1907The state intervened to prevent alienation of land from peasants to moneylenders in 1900but urban middle classes protested, in nationalist idiom, against government intervention.Riots broke out against moneylenders. The government appeared pro-peasant, as thepeasants rioted against 'agriculturalist' moneylenders, who were landlords. Landlords wemight 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 movementfor security of tenure. Oppressive traditions of forced labour were attacked through fierceagrarian

++Page 7

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

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

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

8. Agrarian Unrest in Uttar Pradesh, 1930-1932When prices slumped, peasants could not pay rents to landlords nor landlords revenue tothe state. The Indian National Congress launched a no-rent no-revenue campaign ofmiddle and rich peasants, supported by the rural poor, and small property holders.Themovement 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, 1928In Bardoli a proletariat in traditional agrestic servitude protested against an increased landrevenue valuation alongside a dominant and in relation to the 'serfs' exploitative peasantcommunity. The 'serfs' were partly convinced of the validity of nationalist ideology asrepresented to them and were in part coerced into joining the movement. In Kheda richand pauperized strata of a peasantry with shared cultural traditions and kinshipalignments agitated against higher revenue rates, resorting to relinquishment of holdingsand

++Page 8

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

10. Peasant Struggles in Bihar, 1933-1942When 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 latterattempted to increase their power and control. The tenants movement that developedsought to regain control over the lands from which the peasants had been evicted. Thepopular basis of these struggles was provided by rich and middle peasants and


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occasionally poor peasants. Agricultural labourers were not even formally included in theprogramme of the Peasants Association till 1944.

11. Share-croppers Agitation in Bengal, 1938-1950The 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. Thedemand originated from the government's land revenue commission of 1938 and waspropagated by the Communist Party in 1946-1947. Share-croppers were joined in theirmovement by small peasants with occupancy rights, small impoverished landlords and afew rich peasants. In legislation in 1950 and in 1978-1979 these rights were recognizedand pushed through despite landlord opposition by various governments in IndependentIndia.

12. The Telengana Rebellion, Hyderabad, 1946-1951A movement involving sustained armed struggle of rich peasants and the rural poor. Thepeasantry 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 popularunrest provided the basis for the absorption of Hyderabad State into the Indian Union.Thecommunist leadership of this movement made for electoral victories in the early 'fiftiesfor 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 wayrepresenting anti-landlord tendencies in the colonial agrarian society as a whole, anysingle one of these movements does not exhibit any such features. Among the moreremarkable conundra of our schema, poor peasant protest has strengthened rentierstructures, anti-moneylender riots have stood opposed to the nationalist political idiomand movements under a communist leadership have served (however inadvertently thismay have come about; here we are not concerned with intentions) to strengthen thedomination 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 tendencymerely 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 againstrentier 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 Bengaland 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 wellas the sheer diversity of peasant communities in India prevented any generalizedacceptance of their programme. While, therefore, the agrarian structure did indeed consistof unequal peasant and landlord holdings and the economy reflected a dominantlandlordism and, temporally, an emerging process in which the stratum of richerpeasantry proved ascendant, the ideological distancebetween the ultimate act ofzamindari abolition (and other land reforms of the 'fifties) and the series of peasantagitations over a hundred years of Britishr ule was never bridged. Consequently, while itmay be possible for us to say that in the colonial Indian economy a backward capitalismemerged plagued with all evils characteristic of under-development, and in the nationaliststruggle against British rule representatives of the Indian middle classes as the urbancounterparts of the peasantry came ultimately to dominate and even determine the politicsof peasant protest, the gap between this statement and another with which one mighthighlight the cultural dimension of the mobilization process would still remain. (A


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cultural dimension that would take into account the lived and experienced little traditionsof the peasantry in simultaneity with the articulation of the agrarian class structure andnot merely presuppose the domination of such traditions by

++Page 11

'nationalist' political mobilization, notwithstanding the number of instances one might beable 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 todisaggregate our story of peasant struggles.We might use the same sources but our focus wouldhave to shift towards one main aspect of the problem: an evaluation of the cultural moorings ofthe leadership of the peasantry which, we would argue, came from the ranks of the mofussilmiddle classes and from elements declasses. This leadership had little link, and a highly tenuousone when it did, with the over arching spread,control and domination of the modern state as thatcame 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 theprocess of mobilization through its strategic relevance to the peasantry, it simultaneouslyreinforced these self-images of culture and community which served to widen the distancebetween 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 anddeveloped 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 themembership of the peasant associations and for the success of the movement. The reluctance ofthose who did not wish to join in with the peasants' protest was compared to the sin of havingviolated food taboos as laid down in Hinduism and Islam (Bihar, 1917; U.P., 1921). Stories ofGandhi's non-violent success in his South Africa campaigns, commonly told in the Champaranmovement,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. TheCongress leader Sardar Vallabhai Patel invoked the message of God, as did Gandhi, in theBardoli (1928) campaign.The use of religious beliefs and symbols in the mobilization processoverlapped with the social identity of the community, strengthening thereby caste and communalidentities. 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 thepoor peasantry and for the linking up of this community with the urban-based sabhas of thericher Muslims. There is no evidence in this latter experience of any rift or tension between poorpeasant 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. Thenecessity of preserving Patidar (Gujarat, 1917-1934) and Kurmi (U.P., 1918-1920) traditions ofendogamy was emphasized as an element in mobilization. Even Sanskritization, the culturalemulation

++Page 13

of Sanskritic practices for upward social and ritual mobility, which confirmed the distinctionsbetween 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-Kshatriyasabha in U.P. (1920-1940) are all instances of the simultaneity of the reinforcement of castevalues and peasant mobilization. Peasants marginal to Hindu society converted to Christianity


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(Sardari Larai, Chota Nagpur, 1880-1885), or Vaisnavite Hinduism, which strengthened thepurity-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. BabaRamchandra of Oudh, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Rahul Sanskrityayana and YadunandanSharma of Bihar, Motilal Tejawat and Vijay Singh Pathik of Rajasthan, Janardan Sharma ofGujarat and scores of others roamed the Indian subcontinent, in and out of sects, religions, townsand 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 thespace too little for us to narrate any - as they protested against the social process from which theyhad all emerged: usually one of the pauperization of a traditional village level elite. They lookedfor answers to the mysteries of life in holistic terms, moving as they did between the world andits renunciation, often several times in a single lifetime. Several of such leaders who knew asmany 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 asSadhus 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 andobliterate traces of their own earlier selves. It was altogether this ubiquitous presence on therural-urban continuum of such individuals which allowed others, who were not itinerantwanderers, 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 madefor the multiplex potential of Gandhi's message(s) which could be transformed to suit theoccasion.

Between the mercurial character of the lower level leadership and the working out of highpolitics was a stratum of a 'rurban' intelligentsia, firmly rooted in the various regions. Themembers of this intelligentsia derived their livelihood from a combination of an increasinglydiminishing rental income from small holdings and professional earnings as small townlawyers,school teachers, lower-rung government officials, and employees and editors of theIndian languages press. Such an intelligentsia, though itself 'traditional' in that it did notrepresent the interests of any 'fundamental' group or class, produced a spate of mobilizationliterature for the peasantry whose demands it helped to shape and whose interests it representedin the nationalist press. The politics of this intelligentsia, crucial as it was for the peasant massesas 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 Indiannationalism (variously understood, variously defined) than promote the interests of any singlestratum, rich or poor, among the peasantry. The attitude of the peasantry towards thisintelligentsia was itself ambivalent, suspicious and trusting at the same time. This attitude lentitself very well to the subsequent exploitation of peasant beliefs by electoral politics inIndependent India but to see in this latter process only the cynical manipulation of rural massesby urban dominated constituencies is to miss the roots of populism in Indian history which lay inthe historically specific character of the mobilization process as that came to be structured over acentury.

The historicity of peasant insurgency in modern India has come full circle. The deeper sinews ofcommunity economies, traditional moralities and customary bindings has transmuted, throughland reform and in a strange marriage with the social contract of political democracy, into


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becoming a mix of casteist movements, communal politics and class struggles. On this we havelittle 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, SwedenShinder Thandi - Department of Economics, University of Coventry, UKK.S. Babu - Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad

Abstract

The Green Revolution ushered a dynamic development of South Asian agriculture in terms ofincreased yields and income accruing to the rural population. The food problem was solved to anextent that there was enough food to distribute among those who could afford to buy it. It meantan increasingly mechanized agriculture with the use of tractors, thrashers, etc. It also meantgradual industrialization and development of services in rural areas and an increased straddling

of particularly the male workforce between agricultural and non-agricultural work. Short andlong term migration of labour followed in its wake and there was increasing interaction betweenrural 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 hasput excessive burden on water resources leading to the deforestation and draughts. The GreenRevolution was a state-driven, market-mediated and farmer-managed process'. The stateorchestrated a vast array of measures to stimulate the process, from institutional changes in landtenure to the regulation of prices of inputs and outputs. The provision of necessary infrastructurein 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 hasstarted withdrawing from an actual involvement in agriculture production and distribution andother necessary pre-conditions. Most flagrant is the decreasing public investment ininfrastructure and development of new technology and an insensitive withdrawal of protection ofinternal markets from the dumping of western grains in accordance with the WTO rules whichfew other countries seem to obey. The neo-liberal policies linked to agro market conditions led toincrease in risks and vulnerability of the poor farmers many of them fell victims to suicide deathsin many Indian states, especially Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab, etc. Theheavy investment on agro-chemicals, machinery and deep bores could not be recovered due tolack 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 inSouth Asia especially on ecology and farmers' life in the era of neo-liberal globalization.Sucha Singh Gill, Punjabi University, Dept. of Economics, Patiala, IndiaAgrarian Transformation in the Post Green Revolution India: Recent Changes

The arrival of green revolution in the mid,sixties set in motion the process of capitalisttransformation of agriculture in India. It began to transform traditional agriculture into amodernised one and from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture. The linkages tomarket developed through acquisition of new inputs and output disposal. The farmers began to


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purchase the major share of inputs such as seeds, chemical inputs, mechanical implements andlabour services from the market. This began to be accompanied by production for sale in themarket. Along with the commodity market there emerged labour market for agricultural labourand lease and sale market for land. This made agriculture susceptible to market signals withdifferent consequences for different categories of the farmers. This brought opportunities for

some categories of farmers and difficulties for others. The process of market integration ofproduction 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 andnature of tenancy with differences across different regions in India. This is accompanied byemerging viability crisis of tiny and small farmers. With beginning of the process of withdrawalof state intervention in the post green revolution phase, the viability crisis is becoming morepronounced with the phenomenon of liquidation of crisis ridden holdings, appearances of reversetenancy and indebtedness of the farmers. With the publication of the 59th round of NationalSample Survey results it is possible to capture some of these changes which was difficult tocapture 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 decadesperiod characterized as post green revolution phas!Babu Suri Kandregula, Hyderabad, IndiaGlobalisation, Ecology and Peasant Life in Andhra Pradesh

Though the globalisation is accelerating the tempo of social economic changes in India, thesechanges lead to unexpected conflicting economic and ecological imperatives. The forests aredepleting 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 landactually dense forest cover. Climate studies also confirms that due to the nature exploitative typeof development, India will likely to face significant adverse impacts to agriculture, health andforestry. The quality of forests has dramatically changed now. Many plant and animal species aredisappearing. These forests are in no way sustaining food requirements of tribes through theirtraditional means of hunting and gathering. Mostly they are dependent on agriculture either ascultivators or agriculture labourers. They are malnourished, poor and largely illiterate. In plainareas, 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 traditionallycotton,growing areas. However, the cotton failed due to severe pest attack. The frequent spraysand spurious quality of pesticides used made them even more ineffective. The heavy investmentmade in purchase of agri,chemicals could not be recovered because the yield was much belowthe expected level. During recent years Andhra Pradesh is worst affected by farmers suicidedeaths. According to NSS report on village facilities, cable TV is percoloated to more than 50percent of the villages in all South Indian states. This will have greater impact on socio,culturalaspects and food consumption pattern. In the paper, an attempt will be made examine theseissues based on 58th and 59th rounds of NSS reports on village facilities and householdconsumer expenditure and other recently conducted micro studies.Jeevan Raj Sharma, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UKImagining 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 setof representations to imagine Nepal as a stable, immobile, agrarian and traditional society. A setof academic and policy discourses have remained silent on the issue of mobile nature of ruralpopulation 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 andeconomic crisis who are often treated as no more than a faceless mass of people who react to theforces over which they have no control. Mobility is viewed as a dependent variable in the largerequation involving economic imbalances between different regions and class. Suchrepresentations have influenced policy responses that have tended to pay relatively little attentionto mobility as an important aspect of Nepali economy and society but seeing it as an unfortunateand essentially byproduct of a stagnant rural economy to be eliminated by developmentprograms, particularly within the agriculture sector. This hegemony of agriculture indevelopment policies are reflected in policy documents including 20 year Agricultural


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Perspective Plan (APP), World Bank's Poverty Assessment (1996) and the policy documents ofother donors like USAID, CIDA and ADB. This discursive imagination suggests that agricultureis not only central in people's livelihoods but must be a central element in any developmentstrategy in rural Nepal. I argue that these compelling narratives have helped to produce newforms of imagination and socio,political engagements in Nepal and facilitated international

development aid for agricultural development, environmental protection, population control andvarious humanitarian efforts without taking people's perspective into account.Shinder Thandi, Coventry University, Coventry Business School, Coventry, UKPost 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 painfuland bloody partition which lead to over one million deaths and the displacement of over 8million people in 1947, continues to provide an interesting case study of comparative agrarianperformance 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. Bothhave attempted to diversify away from over,reliance on the agricultural sector with varyingdegrees of success. Despite these attempts, the agrarian sector still remains the most importantdeterminants of the population's well,being and as is well known East or Indian Punjab hastended to outperform Pakistan Punjab both in terms of agrarian performance and in terms ofhuman development. This exploratory paper has three major objectives: firstly it revisits theagrarian performance of the two Punjabs since the 1970s and analyses the major factors behindtheir differential performance and experience. Secondly it discuses the distributional aspects oftheir respective performance by linking and measuring the impacts of this performance onhuman development and general well,being and finally it identifies emerging constraints, bothagrarian and environmental, to critically examine the issue of sustainable livelihoods in the twoPunjabs and whether greater co,operation between them (e.g. under SAFTA) may generatemutual benefits.

Ranjit Singh Ghuman, Punjabi University, Patiala, IndiaPost,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 otherthree countries is very scanty.

India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal are in the category of low income economies and SriLanka falls in the category of lower,middle,income economies. These five countries account for97.87 per cent population, 99 per cent GNI and 86.38 per cent surface area of South Asia. Theyaccount for 22.31 per cent population of the World. Nearly, 39 per cent of the World's extremepoor are living in South Asia.These countries continue to be predominantly rural and agrarian in terms of the share ofpopulation and workforce. The proportion of rural population and workforce ranges between 60to 80 per cent, respectively. The very success of 'green revolution' has, however, put a greatpressure on environment, ecology, water resources, and the very sustainability of agriculture.

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

The low productivity agricultural activities, the ever,rising rural unemployment, shrinking labourabsorption capacity of agriculture are other very serious limitations of the rural and agrarianeconomies of these countries. All this has resulted in increased rural,urban gap and a growingsense 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 tothe rural and agricultural economies of South Asia.The full length version of the paper would be a modest attempt to analyze and discuss all theissues.


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Lindberg Staffan, Lund University, Department of Sociology, Lund, SwedenSouth 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 thevillages belong to canal irrigated area along the river Kaveri, which we call wet villages andthree of the villages belong to a dry rain,fed area, which we call dry area. In 1979,80 this areawas already deep into the green revolution with increasing employment and incomes. In the wetarea there had been land reform and in the dry there had been an increase in well irrigation, bothbeing 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 beenmechanised to a large extent with tractors and power tillers used for ploughing the fields and fortransports. 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 watersupply 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 ownfarmers. Add to this that it had not rained for 3 years. The response to this situation has been todig wells in the wet area and to try other, less water demanding crops. In the dry area, most ofthe farming had come to a standstill with the lack of rains and a rather desperate situation. Richcapitalist farmers have now deep bore wells while their poor neighbours have no water in theirwells. Another significant change is the increase in non,agricultural economic activities.Naresh Singh, IBS Campus, ICFAI Business School, Haryana, IndiaUnderstanding 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 andsub,systems of this culture are built upon exploitation. The rich and the power holders exploit thepoor. Process of agriculture and land reforms in India is not its opposite. It has occurred in thisculture of poverty and is still continuing. In this article an attempt has been made to understandthe process of agriculture land reforms in India with its historical background by applyingtheories of institutional change and political behaviour. The main explanations in the article arebased on i) strategic conflict and distribution, ii) powers and sources actors, iii) role of extractingbandits and iv) difference between formal and effective property rights. These explanations havebeen 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). Thepaper concludes with some of the alarming findings like under the process of agriculture andreforms in India we see a clear strategic conflict where political leaders were reluctant toimplement land reforms because of their vested interest of being big landholders themselves. Thepower and sources of actors never wanted to share power with the poor people and theylegitimised this power into authority by entering into political system. Bureaucrats provided alltheir support to protect the interest of political leaders cum big agriculture landholders; whetherit is the case of enforcing land ceiling Acts in different States or land consolidation. Their rolewas like bandits in political economy. In the entire process of agriculture and land reforms inIndia, we also see a clear difference between formal and effective proper rights.Kanwaljit Kaur Gill, Punjabi University, Patiala, IndiaTransformation of Agriculture and Female Employment: An Analysis of Indian States

Under the policy of planned economic development Indian agriculture has experienced aqualitative transformation and change in employment structure. Though overall female workparticipation (FWP) has increased from 19.7 per cent during 1981 to 22.3 per cent in 1991 andfurther to 25.7 per cent in 2001. Their participation has witnessed decline during the last decadein agriculture. FWP, if any, has increased in household activities only. The new agriculturaltechnology 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 toinvestigate how far the introduction of modern technology in agriculture has led to thedisplacement of females from productive and remunerative activities on one hand and increasedexploitation 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


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for the states, the paper analyses the existing scenario of FWP in rural India. Further, itexamines 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 requiredwere compared in the cultivation of traditional crops and vegetables. The traditional crops have

been generating employment for male oriented operations, and the vegetables growing favoursfemale employment. The aggregative analysis shows that share of female employment in allvegetables is about 59 per cent as compared to that of male employment, 38 per cent. Rest 3 percent is the child labour. Crop diversification is, therefore, suggested as a measure to increaseFWP.State should, therefore, intervene for proper marketing of the agricultural produce to encouragediversification. At the same time vocational training to rural women should also be given tomake her able to perform other operations in agriculture more efficiently.Staffan hrling, Mid,Sweden University, stersund, SwedenFrom Clay Pot to Colour TV. Contrasts and Similarities in Socio,geographic Development

for Sri Lanka and Two Local Communities 1972,2006This paper is a comprehensive review over 34 years of development in Sri Lanka and two localcommunities there, Bundala and Panapola Pelawatte. The two villages are situated in twocontrasting climatic regions, the Dry Zone of the lowland region in the southeast, and the WetZone of the southern hill country. The climatic differences have been considered to influencepreconditions for development in general and in particular for agriculture. From 1972, changesand development have been investigated continuously by the author for these two villages aswell as for the whole country. The aim of this article is to review changes in the two villages andto compare this with development in Sri Lanka in a long time perspective. Development in thetwo villages, located in what was previously considered as neglected areas, was for this reasonassumed to be lagging behind the rest of the country. Somewhat surprisingly, conditions inrecent years have improved considerably in Bundala and Panapola Pelawatte also compared withthe rest of the country in spite of the relative isolation of these communities. Two majordrawbacks last year on the national level was the aftermath of the 24,12 tsunami 2004 and theNorwegian,brokered ceasefire between LTTE and SLA from 2002 turning very volatile late in2005. How these two factors have affected development for Sri Lanka as well as the twocontinuously investigated villages will be reviewed later in this paper. This article will thereforeprovide an epitome of drawbacks as well as positive changes at two aggregation levels, thenational and the local, and suggest some explanations for the recent directions of development inthe concluding part.

Sujoy Dutta, National University of Singapore, SingaporeRethinking Power Relationships in Rural Uttar Pradesh

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

Improvement in the relationship between Thakurs and Jats with weaker groups;

agrarian property

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