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Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2006 > December 23, 2006 > Agrarian Relations in Two Bihar Districts: A Field Study

VOL XLV No 01

Agrarian Relations in Two Bihar Districts: A Field Study

Tuesday 24 April 2007, by D. Bandyopadhyay

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The following paper—published in Mainstream (June 2, 1973)—was prepared for the Land Reforms Division, Planning Commission, and the Working Group on Land Reforms, National Commission on Agriculture, New Delhi on the basis of a field trip to Madhubani and Muzaffarpur in Bihar in April 1973 by a Visiting Group consisting of Dr Z.A. Ahmed MP (CPI), Krishan Kant MP (Congress), Era Sezhiyan MP (DMK), A.K.K. Nambiar (Revenue Secretary, Kerala Government), S.K. Mitra (Joint Director, National Commission on Agriculture) and D. Bandyopadhyay (Labour Secretary, West Bengal Government). The paper was drafted by D. Bandyopadhyay, who as an administrator later played a seminal role in implementing ‘Operation Barga’, the Left Front Government’s biggest achievement in its more than 29 years of uninterrupted rule in West Bengal. He was also Secretary, Rural Development as well as Secretary, Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. We are reproducing this paper along with a piece by D. Bandyopadhyay who has since retired and is currently the Executive Chairperson of the Council for Social Development, New Delhi; he recently revisited Madhubani after 33 years. —Editor
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I

The Working Group on Land Reforms of the National Commission on Agriculture made a field visit to Pandaul Block of Madbubani district and Musahari Block of Musaffarpur district on April 8 and 9, 1973.
In Pandaul Block the Group met a number of representatives of bataidars and landowners and the local officials dealing with revenue, land reforms and development in an open meeting and tried to ascertain from them the present situation in the agrarian sector. The representatives of the CPI-led Kisan Sabha pointed out that not a single bataidar was recorded during the survey and settlement field operation which was concluded in that area only recently. According to them, all the staff of the Settlement Department were “brought over” by the land- owners as a result of which they stubornly refused to record any sharecropper. Finding no other way the members of the Kisan Sabha assaulted some field staff, who under duress took down in a “kutchha khata” the names of the bataidars. Later on, they came to know that their names were not incorporated and the field records stood as they were. They alleged that with the connivance of the local revenue and Block staff, a vast water area belonging to the Darbhanga Raj was not taken possession of by the State and was allowed to be retained by the landowner. At this point, the local Block Development Officer intervened and stated that the mater went up to the High Court and judgement went against the Government. The Kisan Sabha leader further complained that the sharecroppers were being evicted at the sweet-will of the landowners, that he landowners were highly organised and that they always got the support of the police and the magistracy in their action against the sharecroppers. He cited the example of the murder at Selibeli where the “Mahant” of a religious trust killed seven sharecroppers who came to harvest the crop in the last season. At this point, one of the representatives of the landowners who claimed himself as a small farmer stood up and protested and asked whether the laws of the land had ceased to operate in this part of the country. He asserted that the killing was fully justified as the so-called sharecroppers were politically motivated outsiders who were deliberately looting the crop of the religious trust.

The fact that a landowner in a public place could openly and unashamedly support the ghastly murder of seven persons over a dispute regarding sharing of the crop showed the attitude and strength of the landowning class of the area.

The representatives of the Kisan Sabha pointed out that the implementation of Bihar Privileged Persons Homestead Tenancy Act had been very tardy. He stated that the beneficiaries got much less than what they actually occupied, that some of them were evicted and the lands were reoccupied by the landowners and that economic sanctions were applied against those poor farm labourers who on receipt of the “parcha” of homestead land tried to behave like free economic agents. This statement of the Kisan Sabha representative also evoked a sharp protest from another landowner who said that the Government was at the root of all social tensions in Madhubani district. The landowners and the farm labourers had come to terms through their mutual relations from time immemorial. In order to ensure steady supply of labour during the cultivation season the landowners of their own gave their attached farm hands permissive posession of small parcels of land to build their dwellings. If at any time they refused to work for their masters, the threat of eviction brought back their sanity and assured proper behaviour thereafter. The Government had no business to give them full title over such dwelling lands. As soon as these farm hands found that the Government was on their side, they mistakenly thought that they were under no further obligation to their masters and they started misbehaving with them (masters), thereby disrupting the age-old bond between the Maliks and the khet mazdoors and upsetting the productive potential of the area.

The landowners’ representatives stated that they had no objection in principle to get the names of the sharecroppers recorded but they insisted that only real sharecroppers should be recorded. On a point of information they admitted that no bataidar had been put on record. They also stated that no sharecropper should be recorded in the retained land of the landowners after the operation of the Ceiling Law. At this point, a question was asked as to whether there was any possibility of getting any surplus land through operation of the recently amended Bihar Ceiling Act. On this, the unanimous opinion of all the landowners present was that nothing would be available.When it was further asked whether such lands had already been dispensed among friends, relatives, etc. through benami and fictitious transfer to avoid the ceiling, they openly admitted it and asked a counter-question whether there was anything wrong about it.

What was striking about the attitude of the landowners of Madhubani whom we had the opportunity to meet was that they were not only not ashamed of the deliberate and overt actions they had taken for preservation of their control over land, but went to the extent of openly questioning the right and the propriety of the State to enact such laws by which their position was often being threatened by agitation launched by Communists and other lawless elements. The attitude of the local officers was also rather queer. In the presence of the Working Group they did not, of course, show any partisanship in favour of the landowners; but they betrayed an attitude of hostile neutrality towards the bataidars. The fact that no bataider was recorded in spite of the law and the positive Government instruction on the subject, did not cause even slight embarrassment to the officers present. This was, perhaps, the most natural thing to happen and, therefore, this should cause neither surprise nor embarrassment since nature must take its own course.

Thereafter, towards the evening we went to Mousa Sorhai—about a couple of kilometres away from Block headquarters. Here we were shown a vast tract of land—according to local statement approximately 800 acres wherefrom about 250 bataidars were evicted by sheer physical force by the employees of Darbhanga Raj in 1970. Since then they had been trying to get back possession of the land, but to no effect. Fourteen criminal cases were instituted against these sharecroppers. Altogether 32 persons suffered imprisonment as undertrial prisoners and they were being harassed very frequently by the police and the magistracy. When it was asked why they did not move the Magistrate for obtaining order under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code in their favour against the Darbhanga Raj, the bataidars and the accompanying officials looked gapingly at us. That Section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code could also be applied against the landowners and in favour of the bataidars was something quite surprising to both the parties.

Social tension in Madhubani area is apparent even to casual visitors. The fact that the bataidars are meekly and timidly submitting to their masters’ will does not prove that things are all right everywhere. Landowners also understand it. Hence, they react so violently against any overt sign of social disorder. They are organised and aggressive. They will not let their treasured heirlooms slip through their clutches. With an obliging administration on their side, they are definitely not going to give up an iota of their rights, privileges and economic dominance without a stiff fight, notwithstanding the thunderous oration for the rural underdogs at distant Patna the reverberation of which hardly ever reach the backwoods of Madhubani. In such a situation enactment of sophisticated laws, finely balancing the opposing and conflicting interests of different sections of the agrarian community, appears to be an exercise in utter futility. No law, however good it may be, in conferring on paper right, title and interest on the bataidards will have the slightest chance of success unless the bataidars have a strong and militant mass organisation of their own capable of not only defending their own rights given by the law but also capable of mounting counter-action to prevent and forestall any direct attack on them. The will to do something positive for the rural poor should permeate down to the lower echelons of administration failing which the minimal conditions would not be created for formation and effective functioning of mass organisation of the bataidars. Without this the gap between promise and performance would become gradually wider and ultimately unbridgeable, leaving no other alternative for the required social change excepting perhaps, through a major social convulsion.

II

On April 9, the Working Group visited the Musahari Block of Musaffarpur district. This area earned some notoriety in early 1970 because of Naxalite activities. About half-a-dozen big landholders and usurious moneylenders were killed by Naxalities. It created consternation in the highest level of the Government as well as among the philanthropists and social reformers. Sri J.P. Narayan, the venerable leader of the Sarvodaya movement, thought “that the Naxalite threat was an urgent call to demonstrate through positive action how the challenge of violence could be used to speed-up the process of non-violent social change and reconstruction that Vinobaji had initiated through his Gramdan-Gram-Swaraj Movement”. He went to the area and camped there for about a year from June 1970. JP’s stay in Musahari Block to “fight” the Naxalite meance through non-violent means, brought some of the basic issues which underlay the social unrest to limelight.

Rural violence is nothing new in the Bihar agrarian scene. Application of naked force and coercion for deprivation of the share of the crop of the bataidars and their ultimate eviction is a common feature of agrarian relations there. Only the other day 15 Santhal sharecroppers were murdered—three among them being burnt alive—at Rupaspur in Roupola Block in Kosi Division. At Selibeli in Madhubani district the head of a religious trust did not have any compunction in shooting down seven sharecroppers who came to harvest the crop that they had cultivated. Such incidents, however undesirable they might be, were common occurrences in any harvesting season. They, therefore, did not create any commotion except, perhaps, temporarily in the places of occurrence and in the homes of the victims. They did not in any way pose any threat to the stability of the social order. What was unusual at Musahari was that the offensive was launched on behalf of the rural poor against the tyranny of the rural rich—a situation to which no one in Bihar was accustomed.

This was a new phenomenon with grave and dangerous potentialities. Cognisance had to be taken of this threat by all-both inside and outside the Government. Instant action was called for to snuff out this quivering flicker of revolt of the rural poor. The Sarvodaya Movement took up the ameliorative portion of the job, leaving the administration to take stern measures to put down the unrest and to restore order and tranquillity.

Sri J.P. Narayan stayed in Musahari for about a year. He recorded his experience in a booklet entitled Face to Face (Navachetna Prakashan, Varanasi, Re One). His work in the area attracted the attention of various organisations of the country and the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development (AVARD) came in a big way to help economic planning of the area. Its Chief Executive Officer, an energetic officer from Uttar Pradesh, explained to the Working Group various schemes that were formulated. We were shown sheafs of blueprints, thick cyclostyled volumes of plans and various other tools of modern regional planning. He also assured the Group that money was not a problem. On a single item on minor irrigation for this small Block he got a fund of rupees sixty lakhs which was made available through the good offices of an international organisation called Freedom from Hunger Campaign (FFHC). He was highly optimistic about the possibility of a real breakthrough of agricultural productivity of the area by optional use of surface and ground water resources of the Block. A lot of data were collected for the detailed planning of the area. But there was no statistics regarding the pattern of concentration of landholding in the area. It was pointed out that only six per cent of the landowners had more than 15 acre holding. But there was no figure regarding how much land in absolute terms this top six per cent of the landholders owned and what was their percentage to the total arable area of the Block. The Group was told by a number of officials present in the Block Office that there were a dozen-and-a-half of big landowning families who held the bulk of the land of Musahari Block. In spite of the Ceiling Law a retired civil servant was cultivating more than 1500 acres with his own tractors. He, of course, gave 20 bighas to the Gram Swaraj movement, perhaps as a lump insurance premium against any future social unrest. Everyone in the administration knew about his landholding but it did not strike anyone that the Ceiling Law could be applied against him and against, say, another dosen or so families so that a substantial quantum of land could be secured through the process of law for distribution among the landless Musahars (Scheduled Caste inhabitants of the area who earn their living as agricultural workers). The problem of bataidari was not known to the enthusiastic officials engaged in rural uplift at Musahari. Not that the system did not exist. It was very much there. But as the bataidars were not at all important politically and socially, they could not attract the attention of the administration. The revisional settlement operation was completed only recently, yet not a single bataidar was recorded at Musahari where the administrative machinery and the national and international philanthropic organisations were working hard hand in glove, day in and day out, for the economic development of the Block.

Among the gentlemen present at the Block headquarters was one Sri Tewari. His village Madavpur was a Gramdan village. He was the Secretary of the Gram Sabha. He appeared very active and energetic and he insisted that the Group should visit his village to get an idea of the effect of the combined efforts of the Gram Swaraj movement and AVARD on the rural development. The village was approximately 2.5 km away from the Block office. From the black-topped district road, a newly constructed motorable kutchha road connected the village. This road was constructed by AVARD.The road led one directly to the twin residential houses of Tewaris. The stark contrast between the modern residential buildings of the Tewaris with white piano-key switch boards, concealed electrical wiring, silver painted grills, and the surrounding dilapidated thatched hovels where lived the wretched of the earth, was, to say the least, shocking. The Group was well looked after by the Tewaris. The Secretary of the Gram Sabha showed his concern about the mounting indebtedness of the small and poor farmers. According to his assessment, the total indebtedness of his village was about Rs 90,000. Many poor and small peasants who took loan from the moneylenders were working as bataidars or farm-hands on lands which were once their own because of their inability to repay the loan and cumulative interest thereon. Shri Tewari had a plan for redemption of these loans if he could secure some money from the bank. He requested the Chairman of the Group to intercede on his behalf with the authorities of any nationalised bank.

Thereafter, the Group was taken to the site of one of the two deep tubewells sunk by AVARD to ensure perennial irrigation for multiple cropping. A small group of villagers gathered under a nearby tree to watch casually the goings-on of the Tewaris and the Babus from Patna. They had seen such visitors before and did not seem to be particularly interested in the present batch of tourists. After a little prodding they whispered that the Tewaris were the largest landowners of the village, that tubewells were sunk in their lands and that they would naturally be the main beneficiaries of all the development activities of AVARD. It was also revealed that the landowners of the village systematically evicted the bataidars and converted them into farm-hands. Agricultural workers got three-and-a-half “kutchha” seers of inferior grains like bajra, kanoi, sama, etc., for each day of work.
Employment, however, was casual and intermittent. With the tubewells sunk gratis by AVARD, houses illuminated and free pumpsets energised by the Rural Electrification scheme, with motorable road constructed by AVARD making it easy to bring modern inputs of agriculture and to export marketable surplus to good mandis afar, and with the Block extension services to give new HYV seeds and to teach new and better cultural practices to substantially improve the yield, the Tewaris of Madavpur have a prosperous future to look forward to. But with three-and-a-half “kutcha” seers of inferior grains as daily wages, with long spells of unemployment, with a large number of mouths per family to feed, field rats would continue to be the stample source of protein for the Musahars (rat-eaters) of Musahari, for quite some time to come. With the concentration of land in a few hands, it was only inevitable and natural that all the benefit of the developmental activities of AVARD and like agencies would accrue only to the big landowners. What crumbs the rural poor would collect in future might be a matter of conjecture but we had definite evidence to indicate that at Musahari the bread had already gone to the rural rich.

III

By their abysmal failure to implement the laws, the authorities in Bihar have reduced the whole package of land reforms measures to a sour joke. This has emboldened the landowning class to treat the entire issue of agrarian reform with utter contempt. Elsewhere in the country, the law evaders have a sneaking respect for the law enforcing authority. Their approach is furtive—their method clandestine. In Bihar, the landowners do not care a tuppence for the administration. They take it for granted. Their approach is defiant—their modus operandi open and insolent. Violence has been ruthlessly suppressed at Musahari and elsewhere. But the problems remain unresolved. Though uncommunicative and mute, the village poor at Musahari made his choice between Baiju Shahu, the landowning Mukhia-cum-Mahajan, who held almost the whole village in mortgage and Raj Kishore, that young lad who had the guts to protest against the accumulated injustice and tyranny and to pay the extreme penalty for it.

(Mainstream, June 2, 1973)

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