INDIA: Landless Threaten Siege of Delhi

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Bharat Dogra

NEW DELHI , Feb 2 2006 (IPS) - India’s vast army of rural poor has served notice that it would lay siege to the Indian capital on Oct. 2, 2007, the birth anniversary of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, unless the government fulfils a pledge by the country’s founding fathers to distribute land to the landless.

Comprehensive land reforms were identified along with literacy, wide-based health care and an end to rampant social inequalities as ”tasks ahead” by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in a famous speech, on the eve of India’s independence from British colonial rule, on Aug. 14, 1947.

Almost six decades later, only two states, West Bengal and Kerala, which have had communist party governments, have kept the pledge somewhat.

Over 60 percent of India’s population of a billion plus people is dependent on agriculture. While land ownership is central to the well-being of people, there has been little progress in either implementation of land ceiling laws or security of tenure to tenants. Instead, as the country pursues economic reforms, the political leadership’s commitment to land rights has visibly weakened.

The Planning Commission, which oversees India’s development, is candid in its tenth plan document. “Land reforms seem to have been relegated to the background in the mid-1990s. More recently, initiatives of state governments have related to liberalising of land laws in order to promote large-scale corporate farming,” it has stated.

Displacement of marginalised people, from land they already own, is also taking place. On Jan. 2, police shot dead 12 tribals to quell a protest they were mounting against the setting up of a steel plant on their farming land in Kalinga Nagar, eastern Orissa state, without paying adequate compensation.

But India’s landless and marginalised communities have been fighting back. Close to a thousand people from three of the most backward but mineral-rich Indian states, Bihar, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, participated in a ‘Vanchito Sansad’ (Parliament of the Deprived) in December 2005.

Organised by ‘Ekta Parishad’, a Gandhian-group, several grassroots organisations sent representatives to the medieval city of Gwalior, 320kms south of Delhi, in Madhya Pradesh. Ekta Parishad convenor PV Rajagopal warned the government that it could face massive civil action if it failed to address people’s concerns in the next 21 months.

”Development should be village and poor centred à There can be no real peace and justice in the villages till land reforms are implemented properly,” he said. ”We’ve seen alarming examples of outsiders seizing land on vast scales while the local rural poor are denied land,” he added.

According to Rajagopal, ”there’s no place for the poor. They are being driven out of villages and slums in cities.”

Sane Mani from Kalahandi in Orissa testified that the land of his parents was grabbed by powerful landowners. “We have land but are forced to live as coolies (porters),” he lamented. Bharat Thakur from the same region claimed that figures showed that the share of land belonging to indigenous peoples has declined dramatically in Kalahandi.

Saroj Behan from Bundelkhand in Madhya Pradesh state said that women who were given pattas or title deeds found that the same land had been given to others. As a result the government has pitted two groups of poor people against one another, she added.

According to Chaitram Kamar from Chattisgarh, who swore that he would ”join the march to Delhi (next year)”, his people first lived in the hills but ”we were lured to the plains with promises. Once we came down the promises were broken.”

Kamar has taken a pledge to remain bare-chested until the government concedes to land rights. ”The oppressors can kill me if they want but I’ll not give up my fight,” he said to thunderous applause at the meeting.

Last month, Nobel laureate and Indian economist Amartya Sen spoke out on behalf of India’s poor at the 93rd Indian Science Congress in Hyderabad. He warned that India cannot become a major player in the global economy unless it completed the land reform process.

Sen, who addressed the meeting after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said that land reform was extremely important if India wanted to unleash the kind of energy that China has done to emerge as a global player. He observed that the land reform process, which has kept the economies of West Bengal and Kerala floating, was substantially incomplete in the rest of the country.

”Our vision of India cannot be one that is half California and half sub-Saharan Africa,”Sen warned. The country could draw lessons from the second phase of land reforms initiated in China, which helped the country achieve extraordinarily rapid expansion over the past two decades, he suggested.

The government’s own estimates show the pace of land reforms has slowed. In the mid-1990s, at the end of the Eighth Plan, a mere 2 percent of India’s farm land had been redistributed, despite agricultural land ceiling laws. Over five years only some 55,000 landless people were given under one acre of land each across the country.

At the end of that decade little had changed. The planning commission admitted in the tenth plan document that “by the end of the Ninth Plan, the position was virtually the same. à There has been no progress in the detection of concealed land and its distribution to the landless rural poor.”

Still, the ball seems to be in the planning commission’s court. On Dec. 24, 2005, a delegation of Gandhian activists and scholars who met the prime minister to demand action on land rights were told to ”work out a feasible road map” together with the commission.