SO ARE THEY SEEKING ANOTHER "BHOODAN" WITHIN THIS SYSTEM
On February 21st this year an organization named Ekta Parishad was seen rallying sections of poor rural masses, including the landless, many coming from regions of Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh up to Delhi in a padayatra that started from neighbouring Haryana. The landless poor were to protest the Land Acquisition Ordinance and demand land for their homes and cultivation at a rally in the capital. During the march towards Delhi Ekta Parishad leader P V Rajagopal and even Govindacharya, an erstwhile BJP leader, were seen vehemently questioning and criticizing the globalisation-liberalisation path of development adopted by the successive governments. As a culmination to that rally in Delhi on that 23rd and especially the 24th February, demonstrations not only brought to the forefront several familiar faces of the NGO-led so-called social movements of this country like Anna Hazare, Aruna Roy, Medha Patkar, Arif Mohamad Khan, organizations like All India Union of Forest Working People, National Alliance Of People's Movement etc...who all came together. But along with them there were also several of the left leaders such as Hannan Mollah (CPIM), Atul Anjan (CPI) and their peasant organizations the All India Kisan Sabha and also the once prominent General Secretary of BJP and RSS ideologue Govindacharya. In fact a report stated---"there is more than one rally taking place / converging in Delhi today: There is the one that was originally called for today by a platform of movements ...., with its demand for withdrawal of the Land Ordinance, not its amendment, which is of farmers, the landless, forest workers, fishworkers, and also the urban poor; there is the one formally led by Anna Hazare, in which Ekta Parishad has also taken part .."[ [WSF-Discuss] Fwd: Join: Massive rally of Farmers, workers, fishworkers and urban poor against Land Ordinance !!! - 24 Feb 2015 - Jantar Mantar Jai Sen jai.sen at cacim.net Tue Feb 24 01:23:57 CST 2015]. In the present scenario of sluggish pace of movements even some communist revolutionary organisations got interested in the assembly of 20000 (as reported) that was brought together by a motley list of a number of organizations on this land acquisition ordinance issue.
The more prominent and important organizers among these forces were, the Ekta Parishad leaders and Medha Patkar and the NAPM she leads. According to the Ekta Parisad leader P V Rajagopal they were demanding from the govt. homestead and cultivable land which they seek to realize for the poor through non-violent methods of struggle like negotiations and steps pursued by government constituted National Land Reforms Council. He said that the government has agreed to reconstitute the National Land Reform Council, to formulate a homestead land bill, national land reform policy, and amend the new land acquisition ordinance "I am happy that land has become higher on the political agenda. That is a first step in the right direction."...In 2007 and 2012 also Ekta Parishad led rallies of poor, landless to Delhi to demand land for them. Medha Patkar, on the other hand is a well-known proponent of what is known as participatory democracy. She talks of the positive impacts that there people's organizations experienced when the previous UPA government consulted different NGOs and their representatives in the National Advisory Council. She talked of struggle for the abrogation of the Land Acquisition Act and bringing in a development policy and law for a decentralised planning with the people's right over the resources like land, water, forest, minerals and fish of the village communities and full participation in the development planning of these resources.[National Alliance of People's Movements----People's resolve that...].
THE PROBLEM OF LANDLESSNESS IS NO DOUBT GRAVE-------The Draft National Land Reform Policy 2013 says 60 per cent of the
country's population has right over only five per cent of land in this country
whereas ten per cent of the population has control over 55 per cent of the
land. Even the recent socio-economic census released by the Modi government this year identified landlessness as the root of many problems in the rural economy. But quite on the contrary the ongoing development model of globalization-liberalisation pursued by the State has put the capitalists' repeated demands of land for mining,
industry, and other infrastructural development on the forefront of their present agenda. There exists the continuing problem of landlessness of the poor and middle peasants since the days of independence, prevailing due to skewed land ownership, On top of it, in the present period of globalization-liberalisation policies evictions from land for land acquisition has repeatedly been seen to become one of the very important issues of contention. It has led on several occasions to confrontation between the state and the peasants. There have been a series of strong resistances against land acquisition in Nandigram, Singur, Kalingnagar, POSCO, Niyamgiri etc. In spite of temporary back-tracking of the state in the face of tremendous opposition from these struggles, the government has not changed its basic plan to acquire land for the corporates.
In such a scenario when Ekta Parishad like organizations are looking for negotiations with government for land to the poor or the likes of Medha Patkar seek partnership of the poor masses in country's development a number of questions arise on their approach to the problem of landlessness of the poor.
WHAT ARE THE EARLIER EXPERIENCES OF SUCH GOVT. BACKED AND NEGOTIATED EFFORTS FOR DISTRIBUTION OF LAND TO THE POOR? Looking back at the peaceful way of govt-sponsored Bhoodan land collection and distribution programme led by Vinoba Bhave and later Jai Prakash Narayan during the 1950s and the governments' steps by promulgating laws, the results of land reform or land to the poor are not at all any secret unless anyone wants to forget or muddle up the issue. Thus the Ekta Parishad leader P V Rajagopal himself admits? "....dealing with the land distribution issues; land ceiling act is completely violated in Bihar; its even worse off than Madhya Pradesh; Vinoba Bhave got the maximum land (dhaan) in Bihar during the Bhoodan movement - nearly 24 lakh acres of land.......But look at what happened. Only 50% was transferred; the rest is still with the landlords, due to inefficiency of the government. ....It has been manipulated to the core. [Look at] [t]he way we implemented it. A few days back the former DGP of Bihar was telling me that land was given to a dog called Kuttaram, and to the dog's child called Bhokuram! No one verified that these names were dog's names.....It's a mess. There are thousands of land litigations pending in the lower courts. The court systems continue to favors the rich." [http://indiatogether.org/interviews/pvr.htm#]
It was a period just after independence when there were peasants' struggles erupting with large masses of poor peasants and landless participating in it, which often took forms of big confrontations with the landlords and the state. In such a background of events Vinoba Bhave started his Bhoodan "movement", getting zamindars to voluntary donate land for the landless, in that very Telengana where the peasants in their struggle had just faced the brutal repressive force of the newly independent Indian state. He carried the Bhoodan movement to Bihar also, another region of rising peasants struggles. Vinobaji said, " The rich people are responsible for the creation of the Communists. The rich in fact are the fathers of the Communists........The police will not be very helpful in fighting the Communist menace. The only way to root it out is to remove the improper distribution of land in peaceful way". (Politics of Land Reforms in India,- D. Thakur, p.128). Jaya Prakash Narayan was also brought in to campaign for the cause of Bhoodan and Sarvodaya. With these two charismatic leaders in the forefront, it was believed that the movement would be able to generate enough enthusiasm to become a way of preventing the spread of communism and emerge as a method "of bringing about a peaceful revolution." ...To this end, Bhave resolved to remain in Bihar till the land problem was finally and completely solved. After two years of intensive Bhoodan activity in Bihar, Jaya Prakash Narayan announced in 1954 that the movement had not reached its target...By 31 March 1966 the Bhoodan Yagna Committee had to admit officially that its total acreage of land collections had not increased; instead, it had decreased from 21, 47, 842 acres in 1956 to 21, 37, 787 acres in 1966; of this at least 500, 000 acres, mainly contributed by the Raja of Ramgarh, was either forest land or legally contested lands. The recent Bandyopadhya Commission report on land reforms in Bihar also revealed in different cases that someone else is utilizing the Bhoodan land as his or her private zamindari.[BANDYOPADHYA COMMISSIONReport of The Bihar Land Reforms Commission (2006-2008); Arvind N Das on Bhoodan]. Thus the post-independence decades show that the government promulgated laws for land reforms and the government sponsored " peaceful revolutions" were not only a failure but it was also a ploy by the ruling classes to falsely hype up a futile exercise to divert and destroy the struggles of the peasant masses.
EVEN THE LEFT EXPERIMENT OF MUCH HYPED RIGHTS TO SHARECROPPERS THROUGH "OPERATION BARGA" FAILED WITHIN THIS SYSTEM ------ Barga rights merely mean the sharecroppers got their rights to cultivate on the owners land with their names recorded. With the CPIM-led Left Front government in power continually for more than three decades in West Bengal, the Operation Barga to give this right to the share-croppers has been often highlighted to be a great achievement as if it is a novel model for agrarian reforms. But delving behind this glorification, facts are found to speak otherwise. The barga rights could not be given to all; neither could it be ensured that the rights remain in the hands of those who could get it, within the existing capitalist-landlord system The National Sample Survey (NSS) data of 1999 has reported that only 30.6 per cent of all sharecroppers were registered, and that there was a "distinct class bias". Such a class bias, and the involvement of only the more influential among the agricultural class, has led to a creation of "rural rich", while the poorer sections and backward castes have been comparatively marginalized in terms of effectiveness of this program. Studies have also noted that the landlords continued to own the largest holdings in the villages and the value of their holdings increased substantially. In 2003, a comprehensive survey by the West Bengal State Institute of Panchayats & Rural Development (SIPRD) warned that as much as 14.37 per cent of registered bargadars had been dispossessed of their barga land, 26.28 per cent were suffering from a sense of insecurity that they might lose it in the near future, and 13.23 per cent of pattadars had also been alienated of the land they had received. [ Wikipedia-----Operation Barga]. The same reality was reflected when the then Land Reforms Minister Abdul Rezzak Molla admitted in the state assembly that a large proportion of bargadars (sharecroppers) had lost their recorded rights as sharecroppers. The figure he gave was as high as 27 per cent, though the [CPIM party--Ed] State secretariat mandarins somehow managed to reduce the percentage to 20 the next day. [Barga Blues Hardnews,com 23 oct 2008 Nilanjan Dutta Singur/Kolkata]. Even looking into the issue of land distribution, reports state that, after 25 years in power, the Left Front government in West Bengal managed to redistribute only about 15 per cent of the net arable land in the state. A substantial section lost land due to eviction and ''other reasons''. While releasing a study on agrarian reforms by the land reforms department, the erstwhile state health minister Surya Kanta Misra, was nevertheless defensive. ''Even 15 per cent is not a small figure. This has been proved by international experience,'' said the minister. [Land reforms a myth in Bengal Nirmalya Banerjee,TNN | Aug 23, 2002, 12.56 AM IST].
After independence the Indian state, represented by both the central and state governments, in the face of emerging peasants struggle from time to time legally formalized zamindari abolition acts, land ceiling acts with the supposed aim of much needed land reforms in the country. But in effect how these were rampantly by-passed and violated by the rural elites with full knowledge and connivance of the state administration up to the lowest rung in the village, is amply clearly borne by a few observations stated above. In effect within a society dominated by the classes of capitalists, landlords and the rich, the peasants are unable to hold on to their rights on land even if a political party supposedly in favour of the poor, working masses is in the government. Rather as the left parties' recent history has nakedly revealed that under the compulsions of the class rule of these dominant sections, to maintain their power within the system, these political parties, once who were in the forefront of many workers and peasants struggles, succumbed and surrendered removing even their last fa?ade, to nakedly implement the process of forcible land acquisition for which the big bourgeois is eager at the present moment. It shows that without political power in the hands of the working class and peasants in a state of their own there cannot ever be a radical land distribution to the mass of actual producers, the tillers. At the most under pressure of struggles from below there can only be some slow and half-hearted reforms. Because of compulsions of slow path of development of the capitalist-landlord economy for the ruling classes along the Junker path keeping the landlord economy in tact, reforming it gradually instead of dismantling it has been always their aim. Hence the peasant path of large-scale radical way of redistribution of land to the actual producers by expropriatin the landlords is impossible within the prevalent system of rule. Neither is it possible to ensure the rights of land to remain with the poor, toiling peasants, who still possess some of these or are gets it as a grant by any government scheme.
The problem with Ekta Parishad or Medha Patkar and her NAPM's thinking, in spite of their repeatedly citing instances of the oppression and deprivation of peasants and adivasis on the land question both by the state and the capitalists, is that they do not recognize this class rule, the state machinery as a system that enforces the rule of these exploiting classes. They talk of corporate plunder, criticize the globalization-liberalisation policies as anti-people, talk of alternate path of development which should be people-centred, but they do not see the classes, the class relations and interests operating and dominating through this relations, including its aggregate the state, to exploit and oppress the masses of working class, the poor peasants and other toilers. That is why Ekta Parishad's PV Rajagopal thinks of a peaceful negotiation with the state as a way to distribute land among the poor, Medha spreads the illusion of achieving the people's path of development by the people becoming partners with these ruling classes and their representatives in the government and the state. Medha therefore says, "People, whether they live in the urban or the rural areas, should be partners in all the developmental work that takes place in the region. Our framework is not an individualist one. It is the framework of the Indian constitution, values of equity and justice." [Am not anti-development, but land ordinance isn't pro-people, says Medha Patkar by Rajendra Khatry Feb 23, 2015 13:37 IST]. In fact P V Rajagopal has been a participant in government committee----the National Land Reforms Council and Medha is also very well interconnected with numerous NGOs where there is a continually growing clout of the NGOs in the government functions related to so-called social welfare schemes, as through consulting bodies like the National Advisory Council in the previous UPA govt. or otherwise. So they want this state to remain, a state that not only is making unhindered access for corporate plunder by the big-bourgeois of this country and the imperialists at the present moment of globalisation-liberalisation policies but which continued it since the days of independence denying and depriving the poor masses of their land and other resources, exploiting them all through. They have full faith in this capitalist landlord serving constitution which in Medha's own words represents the "values of equity and justice". Thus she says, "The state must not totally wither away, but it must be limited, and its occupation, dispossession, commodification, and its killing must be controlled." [Monthly Archives:April 2011 APRIL 23, 2011 ? 4:27 PM Land Grabs http://ashleydawson.info/]. Evading a straight forward answer to a comment by David Harvey, who during a discussion with Medha said, "One of my favorite quotes from Marx is that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie...... So you not only have to do battle with capital, but also with the state." Medha answered, "....we question the present form of the polity. Just like we question the present form of the economy, which is rule based on inequity. We cannot look at the state as our ideal. Hence we are neither statist nor marketist. We want popular movements to be part of decision making." [Ibid] What they seek is "Decentralisation of power and fully participatory democracy..." [National Alliance of People's Movements----People's resolve that...] within this exploitative system that is presently more and more baring its fangs to make the imperialists and capitalists capture lands, loot resources and exploit the masses in every nook and corner of this country and the world.
The utterly astounding fact is in the peculiar position of their denial of the obvious inference coming out from the very bare truth that they also acknowledge. In an answer to a question in an interview of P V Rajagopal, that land-redistribution is a politically difficult thing to do, P V replies, "Exactly. Its politically difficult. So that means, you can implement your law on people who are powerless, and you will never be able to implement your law on people who are powerful...and the ruling class, the landed class. And this is what I am fighting." [http://indiatogether.org/interviews/pvr.htm#]. Even after acknowledging this they want to establish a people-centred development without demolishing this state of the exploiters. History has taught us that these ruling classes can not be reformed neither their state. Their state must be demolished, removing them from power to establish a workers' and peasants' state in order to change the relations of production in agriculture i.e. oust the vested interests that stand in the way of distributing land to the actual producers and move further ahead towards a new socialist society to ensure that political power is in the hands of the masses. Recognizing that necessity requires the necessity of recognizing the development of the class struggle and not negotiating with the state or participating in consultations to reform the state. For that, the classes need to be identified that by their very position in the relations of production can come together for the struggle to rise up against the capitalists and their state. In short it will be revolutionary class struggle for a revolutionary change that sweeps away all the vestiges of the old power that stands like a big obstacle. It cannot just come through some half-baked reforms within this capitalist-landlord rule. Whether in the course of that struggle land will come in the hands of the real toilers and producers redistributed as land to the tillers or as land nationalised by a workers-peasants state that the particular course of movement and its history will decide in this country in future.
But by not recognizing the class rule and the necessity of preparing for class struggle P V Rajjagopal, Medha and such other organizations are confusing the masses by raising hopes of another Bhoodan like "peaceful revolution" through negotiations and becoming partners with the anti-people exploiting state in development. Their role becomes clearer when they swear in the name of adoption of a Declaration on the rights of peasants by the Human Rights Council through platforms like La V?a Campesina and CETIM with active participation of the UN. CETIM itself declares it is "firmly committed, together with La V?a Campesina, the international peasant movement comprising more than 164 organizations....."; that "CETIM has long had a firm commitment to the adoption of binding international norms on transnational corporations (TNCs) to end impunity for the human rights violations that they commit." [http://www.cetim.ch/blog] In an informal consultation meeting on peasant rights held in the United Nations headquarters about a year back involving both state as well as civil society representatives the leaders of La V?a Campesina, identified in particular the recognition of the peasant identity along with the right to land, right to seeds, right to food sovereignty etc. Thus from the other side of the table the imperialist state, their agencies like the UNO are organising such meetings and inviting an international network of organizations to keep up the hope of some piece-meal reforms among the masses through such "people's right" and "civil society" benevolent(sic) organizations, declare some new laws and rights, while the forces of global capital go ahead rampaging everywhere for their loot and exploitation. One of the La V?a Campesina delegation has therefore lipped the words of these masters of exploitation world over, couched in a language that may become acceptable to the masses and befool them-- "there is a new reality, an offensive and attack against the rural world, that was unimaginable a few years ago, and that requires new legal instruments, new rights and new protections".
Thus P V Rajagopal, Medha and such NGOs represent this particular trend of thought in the "new reality" of increasing offensive of the capitalist-imperialist forces on the working masses. The adherents of this trend wants to sit down and discuss with their state representatives, the representatives of capitalists-imperialists themselves "for new legal instruments, new rights and new protections" while the capitalists craft newer ways of diverting and destroying any tendency in struggles that may emerge to challenge its rule. By raising such illusions about reforms they are helping in prolonging the life of the capitalist exploiters and their state that is in the recent times seen to face a number of mass struggles in different parts of the world questioning their exploitative policies. In such a situation of increasing disgruntlement among the masses, the vacuum created by the further blatant betrayal of the so-called left forces through their acceptance of the capitalist policies of globalization-liberalisation is more and more being sought to be filled up by such forces----NGOs, so-called human-rights, peasant rights organizations, et al, in programmes of which even the left leaders and the rightist Govindacharya, Anna Hazare now come together. The capitalist ruling class wants this and the NGOs and their followers make it successful for them. Thus Medha and Amit Bhaduri writes---"The traditional political differences have melted away in many respects in a homogeneous neo-liberal mass. In so far as the traditional Left is concerned, first Singur and then Nandigram drove home the point that, many of the left politicians are not that different from the 'dream team' of economic policy makers at the centre"... "A spectre of despair and popular anger is stalking in all corners of the country." And then from these facts they solicit "An economic alternative creating another kind of development is feasible, and elements of it exist even in the present political-economic system." [INDUSTRIALISATION: Which way now? - Medha Patkar and Amit Bhaduri April 26, 2007]. Therefore the state and the capitalists are also leaving space for such organizations, funding and promoting them. Thus these organizations, many knowingly and even if some unknowingly, are acting as tools of the capitalists to confuse, divert and waste the potential of the real struggles of the masses seen to emerge in the recent years from the increasing crisis and contradictions of capitalism, containing the aspirations to end this state of exploitation. The revolutionary communist forces must think where to draw the lines of demarcation from this trend instead of sympathizing or hobnobbing with these forces in different ways because of their weaknesses,which may only damage the efforts of rebuilding of the revolutionary working class movement against the rule of capital.
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