1. A serious crisis has broken out in the field of Indian agriculture. The crisis is most glaringly manifested in the growing incidence of starvation deaths and farmers’suicides. While the largest number of starvation deaths are still routinely reported
from the backward regions of the country especially Orissa and now increasingly Rajasthan, the trend of suicides generally prompted by heavy indebtedness, crop failure, or inability to find a market for the produce, is noticed even among well-to-do farmers in the agriculturally developed areas of Punjab, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
The crisis has also led to a new phase of agrarian unrest. Peasants and farmers have strongly opposed the WTO, growing penetration of giant agribusiness firms and attempts to corporatise agriculture. Once again powerful farmers’ movements are being witnessed in the areas of green revolution, Punjab and Haryana in particular. But the original exponent of farmers’movement in the country, Mr. Sharad Joshi, now stands on the other side of the fence. The erstwhile World Bank official-turned-farmer leader today advises the NDA government on matters of agricultural policy while the farmers are braving lathis and bullets on the streets.
Apart from attempts to suppress the agitation, the ruling classes are also trying hard to divide and divert the movement. The Cauvery water crisis that recently rocked Karnataka and Tamil Nadu is a case in point. Instead of coming up with any solution to save the crops and the affected agricultural population in both the states, the two state governments and the central government made it into an issue of inter-state wrangling while bourgeois politicians in both the states addressed the issue in the narrow framework of regional interests and whipped up sectarian passions.
2. While the WTO agreements, especially the removal of quantitative restrictions (QRs) on imports, and as a result, the thoroughly unequal competition with heavily subsidised big corporate farmers from the western countries have aggravated the present crisis situation, at the root of it lies the accumulated anomalies of the underlying landlord path of capitalist development in Indian agriculture. The landlord path pursued in India under the slogan of the green revolution had typically been based on the betting-on-the-strong strategy with little benefits really percolating to the lower rungs of the agricultural population.
The macro-level results were of course quite impressive with foodgrains production recording major increases and thus enabling a gradual transition from extreme food scarcity and dependence on external aid to a semblance of food security and self-reliance. But the green revolution’s spread to relatively backward areas was constrained from the beginning by serious infrastructural problems. With declining public investment in agriculture and rising prices of all key inputs, the green revolution soon reached a point of saturation even in its initial strongholds. The farmers’movement in the 1980s with its loud demand for remunerative prices and cheaper inputs reflected this brewing crisis.
3. Against this backdrop, bourgeois ideologues within the farmers’ movement started demanding liberalisation of agricultural trade and reversal of land reforms. Sections of big farmers started dreaming about exporting to the world market and securing super-remunerative prices. This was quite akin to the corporate clamour for freedom from ‘licence-permit-quota raj’. But whether for the would-be ‘Indian’ MNCs or the Indian farmers eyeing their shares in the world agriculture market, it did not take long for the dream to turn sour. And then just as the corporate sector started demanding ‘level-playing field’ even as it began forging closer ties of collaboration with the MNCs, big farmers came up with the demand for insulation from the WTO. Yet behind this demand they too are developing a close nexus with agribusiness corporations. Just as the working class has to see through the corporate clamour for level-playing field, agricultural labourers, poor peasants and their small farmer allies must not be misled by the rich farmers’ apparent crusade against the WTO but intensify their independent mobilisation against WTO.
4. The official explanation of the present crisis veers around the hypothesis of overproduction. Instead of expanding the system of public procurement and distribution, the government wants to privatise the foodgrains trade and run a truncated distribution system in the name of better targeting. Farmers unable to sell their crops at minimum support prices announced by the government are therefore being advised to go in for crop diversification and switch over to cash crops. This indiscriminate diversification is bound to pose a serious threat to food security. Figures of per capita availability of food grains already show a stagnating and even declining trend.
The new agricultural policy indicates the official response to the growing crisis of the landlord path of capitalist development. Reversal of land reforms, corporatisation of agriculture, contract farming, crop diversification, expansion of food-processing industry etc. constitute the main components of this new policy. While fertiliser subsidies are being constantly reduced, and the price of key inputs like diesel and electricity is increasing steeply, food-processing industry is being showered with tax and excise exemptions. In other words, the subsidies being denied to the farming community are being transferred to mega corporations, which can be called a case of reverse cross-subsidisation. Introduction of genetically modified seeds and bio-technology is also strengthening the corporate stranglehold on agriculture. The new agricultural policy and WTO regime is also affecting the realm of procurement, distribution and trade. Dismantling of the official procurement and public distribution system and privatisation of the agricultural trade are the new mantras. While the government refuses to increase the procurement prices it has steeply increased the PDS prices.
Just as a practical consensus has evolved among almost all bourgeois parties, national and regional, over the new economic and industrial policies, with even the CPI(M)-led state governments complying with it, a similar agreement has also begun to crystalise around the new agricultural policy. And if anybody needed a shocking proof of this emerging consensus, once again it is supplied by the Left Front government of West Bengal which has commissioned the American consultancy firm McKinsey for formulating the policy blueprint for what the CPI(M) calls ‘consolidation of the Left Front’s gains in the field of agriculture’.
5. Barring small sections of big farmers the current agrarian crisis has obviously affected various sections of the agricultural population. The demand for remunerative prices has now been pushed back to the demand for minimum support price and guranteed procurement, or in other words, freedom from distress sale. Similarly in the case of agricultural labourers, the demand for assured employment has become one of the most key demands even as wages often remain depressed way below the officially proclaimed minimum level. But with their relative economic power and much greater political clout, the rural rich, the kulaks and well-to-do farmers always try to transfer the burden of the entire crisis on to the rural poor. It is the latter who are being forced to make the greatest sacrifice and surrender whatever gains they had achieved through years of struggle.
One look at the picture emerging from Left ruled West Bengal will indicate the extent of the growing burden of the accumulating agrarian crisis on the rural poor. We are singling out the case of West Bengal precisely because it is one state which boasts of the best record of land reforms and it is in rural Bengal that the longest serving Left-led state government of India is known to be most deeply entrenched. According to a recent status report released by the Land Reforms department of the Government of West Bengal, over 13% pattadars (who had been allotted land under the land reforms act) have been dispossessed and among the recorded sharecroppers 3.02% have been evicted from their barga land. If this is the officially acknowledged trend in Left-ruled West Bengal – activists familiar with the ground reality may well find the figures an understatement – the conditions obtaining in Congress and BJP-ruled states or for that matter in Rabri Devi’s Bihar and Mayawati’s UP are not difficult to imagine.
6. This changing agrarian scenario has once again sharpened the debate between the reformist and revolutionary agrarian programmes, in practice as well as in theory. The reformist line calls for broad peasant unity which is nothing but a euphemism for abject appeasement and unchallenged domination of the kulak lobby. And it sacrifices the interests and struggles of the rural poor at the altar of this undifferentiated peasant unity. It is to this end that in its updated party programme, the CPI(M) has watered down the land redistribution clause by deleting the provision that land for redistribution would be seized without payment of any compensation.
In practice the CPI(M)-led Kisan Sabha in West Bengal is now in many cases already brokering land deals and that too on behalf of the kulaks. In spite of resolutions to organise agricultural labourers as a class force, in West Bengal the party is still hesitant to make any beginning in this direction. The party’s West Bengal State Conference held in February this year confessed that wage struggles of agricultural labourers were being increasingly neglected by most district units of the party, wages being left completely at the mercy of market forces.
In sharp contrast to this pro-kulak collaborationist approach, the revolutionary approach takes the task of mobilising the rural poor and defending their interests as the point of departure. Organising agricultural labourers and other rural labourers as an independent class force – the rural proletariat – and protecting the specific interests of marginal and small farmers in the face of a deepening agrarian crisis remain our highest priorities. We must continue to uphold the revolutionary programme of radical land reforms and must in practice intensify the struggle for implementation of land reform laws while raising the demand for lowering of the land ceiling so as to make more land available for redistribution. Even in a state like West Bengal, the total area of redistributed ceiling-surplus land amounts to only 8% of the total cultivable land in the state.
Our agarian programme attaches a lot of importance to the issues and demands of the middle peasants and our class line calls for a resolute alliance with middle peasants while winning over even a section of the capitalist farmers as well. In practice, our reach however remains quite limited. Given the intensity of caste-class divide in many parts of rural India, especialy in states like Bihar and UP, and the rise of kulak-based regional parties, it has been difficult for the party of the proletariat with its strong identification with the rural proletariat to make inroads among the middle peasantry. The present situation of agrarian crisis marks a major opportunity for us to boldly address the issues of the middle peasantry without in any way diluting our primary commitment to the rural proletariat.
7. It is against this backdrop that we have to review our ongoing agrarian struggles and decide our future course of action. Recent times have witnessed a surge in agrarian struggles not only in our traditional strongholds of Bihar, but also in pockets of UP, Andhra, Orissa, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Punjab. While land, tenancy, wages and employment remain the basic and most common issues of agrarian struggles, we also find many powerful initiatives on issues like electricity rates, debt relief, procurement of food grains and various aspects of rural development and functioning of the panchayat system.
In Bihar, West Champaran district bordering Nepal and Uttar Pradesh has emerged as the latest stormcentre of land struggles. This district still has a very high incidence of well entrenched landlordism. Estates controlling thousands of acres of land are still quite common. Electoral politics in the district is directly dominated by these estates and apart from their own armed henchmen they also enjoy the loyalty of the local police. There is this revealing case of two MLAs belonging to the same estate, one MLA elected on a Congress ticket serves as a minister in the Rabri Devi cabinet while the other MLA elected under the banner of the BJP sits in the ‘opposition’! The Khet Mazdoor Sabha (agricultural labourers’association) in the district has successfully redistributed 400 acres of land in Gaunaha block among 600 agricultural labourers. In Mainatand block, landless poor peasants have secured control over 300 acres of land illegally controlled by one absentee landlord. The district administration is trying to suppress these struggles by unleashing barbaric police repression, but the masses are offering a determined resistance.
In the key central Bihar districts of Bhojpur, Patna and Jehanabad, where agrarian struggles had temporarily been relegated to the background by the reactionary violence unleashed by the Ranvir Sena, land and wage struggles are again gathering momentum. In Baruhi village of Sahar block in Bhojpur district, control has been wrested over 10 acres of ceiling-surplus land. This land had originally been captured in 1992 but the Ranvir Sena had managed to snatch it back. In July 2001, landless and poor peasants reestablished their control defying the police-administration -Ranvir Sena nexus. The next month, hundreds of agricultural labourers and poor peasants occupied 46 acres of math land in Andhari village. The land was hitherto controlled by the Ranvir Sena. In Raipura village of Charpokhri block an absentee landlord was gradually selling off land that earlier used to be leased out. The agricultural labour organisation intervened and rescued 38 acres of land. In Baga Math of Sandesh block, 55 acres of ceiling surplus land had been lying fallow. When the Mahanth tried to get the land cultivated with the backing of the Ranvir Sena and the police, hundreds of people from neighbouring villages chased away the Ranvir Sena goons and seized the land and resumed cultivation in a part of it.
In recent times, Jehanabad district has witnessed a series of wage struggles. During June-July 2001, Daidi village of Ghosi block became the centre of a determined strike that began around the issue of payment of compensation to an injured agricultural labourer. When the employer refused and all employers got united around a henchman of the local MLA and Jehanabad strongman Jagdish Sharmaa and threw up a challenge to the labourers, the latter too took up the cudgel and the strike now also raised the demand for minimum wages. Eventually the administration intervened and a sum of Rs. 15,000 was awarded as compensation. The wage settlement however came later after another round of struggle. When the employers tried to violate the settlement by taking away the customary facilities enjoyed by the labourers and denying equal wages to women workers, the labourers again resorted to strike and eventually the employers had to concede the demands. Protracted wage struggle is also going on in Rostampur village of Ghosi block where the local PWG leader has sided with the employers who, in turn, are backed by the Chairman of the District Council, while most of the PWG supporters have joined the struggle. Even in the face of police repression, the morale of the striking workers continues to be quite high.
In Koil village of Kaler block of the newly carved out Arwal district, the Khet Mazdoor Sabha won an important victory this year. This is the village of the health minister of the RJD government. Initially, in June this year when the local labourers struck work demanding wage increase and reduction of working hours, the pro-Ranvir Sena employers tried to crush the struggle with the help of the police and started hiring labourers from outside. The labourers fought back with a show of great unity and determination and forced the labouerers from outside to stop work. A dharna was staged in Patna exposing the role of the minister and the Ranvir Sena-police nexus. Eventually the district administration was forced to intervene and concede most of the demands including increase in wages from 2.5 Kg to 3.5 Kg, reduction of working hours from 12 to 8, transfer of the guilty police constable and withdrawal of all cases foisted on the striking workers. We can also see a revival of land struggle against Maths and absentee landlords in Kako. Kaler and Ratni blocks. The struggle for Konikuti Math land in Kaler block has seen poor peasants belonging to Yadav caste get united against the illegal occupation of the Math land by a landlord from the same caste.
In Patna, following our impressive victories in the panchayat election in Dulhinbazar block, struggle was intensified to establish peasant control over the 28 acres of land lying with the Khapuri Math. The BPKS had seized this land in the early 1980s, but of late landlords backed by the Ranvir Sena as well as the local RJD MLA and the administration, have been trying hard to evict the peasants and stop all agricultural operation. On 16 August 2001, hundreds of peasants and agricultural labourers braved police lathis and firing by the Ranvir Sena to complete the work of paddy transplantation. A leading member of the Party District Committee and a mukhia were arrested and several people injured by the police. In Bara village of Naubatpur block, landlords belonging to the erstwhile Bhumi Sena and regrouping currently under the banner of the PWG unleashed severe terror and evicted 125 families from the village. The Khet Mazdoor Sabha launched a determined struggle on this issue and on 6 July 2002, a march was organised from Naubatpur to Bara. Armed men of the Ranvir Sena and PWG fired on the march but were bravely resisted by the people. An indefinite gherao of the block office followed and after two weeks the evicted families returned to the village following an agreement with the administration.
8. In Jharkhand, beyond our old pockets of peasant struggle in the Palamau-Garwah-Latehar belt, the Dumka-Jamtara belt of Santhal Pargana has emerged as a centre of intense agrarian struggles in recent times. In 1998, agrarian labourers/poor peasants of 13 pachayats in Kundahit PS of Dumka district waged a fortnight-long strike strike on the demand of minimum wages and better sharecropping terms. In 1999, this movement spread over another ten panchayats. Similar struggles broke out in Raneshwar block as well. As a result of this movement sharecroppers are now getting half of what they produce. In Kundahit a land seizure movement has also been successful. In this zone our work has now spread over 35 panchayats and around 3000-4000 people now get mobilised at the Party’s call.
In Uttar Pradesh, land srtruggle has acquired fresh momentum in the Lakhimpur-Pilibhit belt of Terai region. More than 100 displaced families of Sharda project area have been successfully rehabilitated in 300 acres of fallow land lying with the forest department. Defending the new settlement, known as Kranti Nagar, against constant attacks by the local land mafia-police-criminal nexus remains a major challenge. So far the rehabilitated families have been successful in retaining their control and beating back the enemy nexus. In Guthna Buzurg village of the district, struggle is on against attempts to evict allottees (pattedaars) from 104 acres of land. Recently when the local land mafia, which enjoys political patronage of the BSP, tried to forcibly harvest the standing crop of the land, women agricultural labourers offered heroic resistance. Several of them got injured and had to be hospitalised, but the women still remained firm. Other local women also joined in and burned effigies of Chief Minister Mayawati. Powerful protests were organised in the district headquarter and eventually the district administration had to intervene and uphold the legal rights of the threatened tenants and stop the land mafia from harvesting the crop. In Puranpur tehshil of Pilibhit disrict, our comrades have successfully frustrated attempts to evict the people settled in Rahul Nagar and 9 adjoining villages.
The eastern region districts have also emerged as a centre of growing agrarian unrest. In Chandouli district a militant struggle was launched against the labour-displacing application of harvester combine. On 5 December 1999 landlords attacked an anti-harvester mobilisation of the Khet Mazdoor Sabha at Bauri village and injured several activists. When agricultural labourers retaliated, the District President of the Samajwadi Party intervened on behalf of the landlords. There is strong resentment among agricultural labourers against the labour-displacing impact of harvester combines and they are rallying around the demand for stopping these machines till alternative employment is guaranteed. In Chakia tehshil of the district we succeeded in making some initial advances in land struggle against the illegal holdings of the Raja of Banaras. Following abject betrayal by the CPI(M) in 1998, our comrades captured the land held illegally by the Raja in Bairath farm and called upon the people to stop surrendering any share of crop and fight for patta rights. However we could not hold on to the gains in the face of the backlash that followed. We have to prepare our forces for the next round of battle. In another instance of land struggle in Chakia tehshil, 150 families were settled in cultivable government land in Rasia and it left a positive impact on the local BSP base.
The Party’s consistent political intervention against state repression and atrocities on dalits and adivasis has established some initial reputation for our organisation as the only reliable organisation for the rural poor in opposition to the arch-reactionary BJP and pro-Kulak parties like the SP and BSP. This has created good prospects for developing powerful pockets of agrarian struggles and establishing the Party on a bigger scale.
9. In East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, fierce land struggle is on centring around more than 80 acres of ceiling-surplus and bhudan land in Peddasankarlapude village located about 50 km away from Kakinada. The landlords, closely aligned with different TDP MLAs in the district have hired the services of a local mafia outfit operating under the banner of a self-styled CPI(ML) faction. In this district more than 3,000 acres of land have been captured and distributed during the last two decades. In Rayagada district of Orissa, intense land struggle is going on in Padampur and Ramanaguda blocks. In addition to 75 acres of land captured and cultivated since last year, another 60 acres of ceiling surplus land has been rescued from the illegal occupation of landlords well-connected to both the Congress and BJP. On several occasions, hundreds of tribal people have gheraoed the block office, police station and even court and jail. The secretary of our Rayagada district unit has been booked under several false cases and is currently in jail. Peasant struggle is also gathering memoentum in Kalahandi district.
In Tamil Nadu some initial success has been achieved in organising agricultural labourers. In August 2000, in about 45 villages of Thanjavur and Nagapattinam districts, women agricultural workers led by the Tamizhaga Vivasaya Thozhilar Sangam (Tamil Nadu Agricultural Labourers’ Union) struck work for days together to demand the legally stipulated minimum and equal wages. Though the strike succeeded in winning only a partial victory, the message spread far and wide and generated tremendous enthusiasm among women agricultural workers.
In North Dinajpur district of West Bengal, poor peasants and agricultural labourers belonging to various SC-ST communities wrested 82 bighas of ceiling-surplus land in Raiganj block from illegal control of local CPI(M) bigwigs. Hundreds of peasants led by our party and the peasant association had sucessfully repulsed the CPI(M)’s initial attacks to regain control over the land. Several activists, including a member of the Party’s West Bengal State Committee, were arrested in connection with this struggle.
Two weeks ago, agricultural labourers and landless peasants led by the Paschim Banga Krishi Majur Samiti and Paschim Banga Krishak Samiti (West Bengal Agricultural Labourers Association and WB Peasant Association’) successfully captured 240 bighas of riverbed land in Nakashipara P.S. in Nadia. The landless labourers who had been allotted this land twenty years ago could never gain control. Pro-CPI(M) kulaks kept the land under their control with the help of share-croppers and agricultural labourers under the party’s fold. Earlier in February 2001, the PBKMS had made an unsuccessful attempt and the leadership got arrested. This time around, the police and hirelings of the kulaks had to retreat before the militant mood of the struggling labourers and peasants.
In Sonitpur district of Assam, work is going on among agricultural labourers. The agricultural labourers’association has succeeded in compelling the block panchayats to pay wages at the officially stipulated rate.
In most other states our work among the rural poor has still not acquired stable and organised character. In Utaranchal, some primary efforts have been initiated in Almora region to highlight the need for land reforms suited to the specific conditions of the state.
10. The Sixth Party Congress had emphasised the task of organising agricultural labourers as an independent class force. Even though agricultural labourers and landless peasants have always formed the mainstay of the peasant movement organised by the Party, it is only recently that we have started organising agricultural labourers separately under the banner of agricultural labourer association. This was taken up as a special point of emphasis during the Strengthen-the-Party campaign conducted between April and October 2000. More than 3,00,000 members were recruited in Bihar during this campaign. State level organisations have since been built in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal while district and regional level organisations are functioning in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh.
Apart from leading the spontaneous and localised struggles of agricultural labourers breaking out during busy seasons to clinch a wage hike or secure job guarantees in the face of increased mechanisation, the agricultural labourers’ associations have started launching campaigns on a larger scale to popularise the class demands and strengthen the class identity of the rural proletariat. State-level strike actions have been organised so far in Bihar and West Bengal. In Bihar, the agricultural labourers’ strike held in July this year was implemented in nearly 2000 villages and demonstrations were held in 134 blocks. Some 70,000 agricultural labourers joined this class action all over the state to demand implementation of the minimum wages act, enactment of welfare legislation at central and state levels, CBI inquiry into the PDS (public distribution system) scam in Bihar and mandatory inclusion of all families with an annual income of less than Rs. 20,000 in the BPL (below poverty line) list.
Earlier, a major campaign was conducted in the state on the issue of PDS scam demanding dismissal of the civil supplies minister and unconditional release of all arrested activists. Block level people’s courts were organised in 116 blocks in 20 districts in which nearly 75,000 agricultural labourers and red card holders (those who are legally entitled to subsidised supply of essential provisions but are often denied any facility in real life while the rich and influential corner all facilities).
In West Bengal a strike was organised in July 2000. Even though it was implemented only in 65 villages primarily in Nadia and Bardhaman districts, it helped generate considerable enthusiasm and also a sense of class solidarity and confidence. In the wake of the devastating floods in 2000, the PBKMS agitated for proper relief and rehabilitation and against the corruption prevalent in panchayats and the rural administration. A day’s strike was observed in Nadia, Bardhaman, Birbhum, Murshidabad and parts of Hooghly and North 24 Parganas districts.
On the agricultural labourers’ front, we should now move towards building an all-India organisation and a powerful campaign on the demand for a comprehensive central legislation for agricultural labourers. However, we must ensure that an all India organisation of agricultural labourers is based on an adequate membership foundation, let’s say, not less than a million. In fact, the Bihar organisation itself has got this kind of membership potential. In recruiting members we must not remain confined to our own base but reach out to every section of the class. Special attention should be paid to enrolling women agricultural labourers. To increase the scope for intervention on issues like minimum wages and other aspects of welfare, agricultural labourers’ organisations may also be registered as trade unions and affiliated to our central trade union organisation. But this must be understood as a purely organisational arrangement, agricultural labourers’ organisations cannot and must not be confined to any narrow framework of trade union legalities.
11. Apart from launching separate organisations for agricultural labourers, peasant associations have also been restructured in Bihar and West Bengal. The reorganised Bihar Pradesh Kisan Sabha held a state conference and organised campaigns on issues like procurement of food grains, irrigation and various inputs and infrastructural facilities. In West Bengal, the organisation conducted a campaign on the growing symptoms of agrarian crisis in the state and held a ‘krishak bachao’(save the peasantry) mobilisation in Kolkata. In Pilibhit district of Uttar Pradesh, the Kisan Sabha forced the local administration to open separate purchase centres to procure the crop from small and marginal farmers.
In Punjab and Rajasthan, our organisations intervened to the best of their abilities in the farmers’ movement. In Mansa and Bhathinda districts of Punjab, our peasant comrades waged a militant struggle under the banner of Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ekta) on issues like growing indebtedness and distress sale of foodgrains. They fought successfully for cancellation of debts to the tune of millions of rupees and blocked the railways for days to force the then Akali-BJP government to purchase the crop at an increased minimum support price. In May 2000, tens of thousands of farmers in Rajasthan marched to the State Assembly in Jaipur to oppose the privatisation of the state electricity board and hike in power tariff. The Rajasthan Kisan Sangathan carried out a sustained and vigorous campaign on this issue. More recently, the organisation has developed a powerful agitation in Jhunjhunu district on the question of drought relief.
To develop the Party’s initiative on the agrarian front and give an all-India thrust to our intervention in the new current of peasant movement, the Party reorganised the erstwhile coordination of peasant associations as an All India Kisan Sangharsh Samiti. The AIKSS organised a peasant conference at Faizabad in UP against the new agricultural policy in March 2001. This was followed by a ‘lutera bhagao, krishi bachao’ (stop this plunder, save agriculture) campaign in the course of which mass signatures were collected on a ‘freedom charter’ against the WTO. In September an impressive ‘freedom from debt’ conference was held at Mansa in Punjab and finally on November 9 a massive anti-WTO rally was held in Delhi to protest the launch of a new trade round at the Doha summit of WTO. The organisation also sent fact-finding teams to visit south Orissa in the wake of starvation deaths and Haryana following police repression on the farmers’ movement.
This all-India initiative can however only be sustained if peasant associations in different states function properly. Occasional all-India campaigns are no substitute for vibrant local initiatives round the year. Striking a proper balance between national coordination and all-India campaigns and decentralised initiative and local agitations remains crucial for ensuring real all-round growth of our peasant organisations.
12. Our review of the agrarian front clearly shows that on the whole the land question continues to remain the central question of the revolutionary peasant movement. Greater penetration of capital and technology and greater integration of Indian agriculture with the global capitalist economy will only increase and not lessen the importance of the land question. Just as globalisation in the industry and service sector is being accompanied by labour reforms, in the agrarian arena we can already see a clamour for changes in land use pattern and also in land relations. Defending the limited gains of land reforms and advancing the struggle for radical land reforms therefore shall remain our central task.
In Bihar, the character of landlordism is undergoing a slow but unmistakable change. In most parts of the state upper caste landlordism has given way to a still not very organised kulak lobby from among intermediate castes. This ascendant kulak lobby in Bihar and eastern UP displays a low-key response to the agrarian crisis even as it organises and sponsors private armies and criminal gangs to suppress the rural poor. In advancing the land struggle we, however, often have to face middle peasants on the foreground while the feudal-kulak elements remain in the background. We must therefore exercise sufficient caution and discretion to ensure that land struggle remains targeted against the main reactionary elements. Land struggle must be accompanied by extensive propaganda and combined with other initiatives on other agrarian issues. Similar caution also has to be exercised in wage struggle. While maintaining the unity and morale of the agricultural labourers we should not hesitate to make interim adjustments whenever necessary. This is a continual battle and all demands cannot be achieved at one stroke.
A complaint is often heard these days that many people who have benefited from land struggles are becoming passive and that their involvement in various struggles and political mobilisations is on the wane. Such a negative turn is generally sought to be rationalised by referring to the change in the class position of these persons. This is just a case of barking up the wrong tree. A landless peasant gaining a plot of land may at best turn into a poor or lower-middle peasant but that by no means should automatically render him passive, corrodes his class outlook and weakens his spirit as an activist. This passivity is nothing but an expression of economism which in turn breeds all kinds of bureaucratic or anarchist distortions. Just as a ‘pure’ economic struggle or the general framework of trade union movement can never break the barriers of bourgeois consciousness, no amount of militant land struggle can on its own guarantee a durable revolutionary consciousness or spirit.
The gains of any economic struggle are bound to turn counter-productive after a point unless such gains are politically consolidated under the conscious leadership of the Party. Winning and enforcing the people’s right to basic natural resources like land, water and forest is a fundamental question of people’s democracy. We must not allow any laxity in matters of formulation and enforcement of proper policies of land redistribution and collective democratic management of all resources under the Party’s close guidance.
13. The Agrarian Programme adopted in the Party’s Third Congress (1982) and the Policy Resolutions on Agrarian Question adopted in the Varanasi Congress (1997) have already clarified the Party’s position on the essential question of developing the proletarian agrarian strategy in opposition to the bourgeois strategy of reformed landlordism. Many issues may come to the foreground in the course of the movement and every issue that concerns the development of agriculture and especially the interests of the broad masses of agricultural labourers and poor and middle peasantry, is a legitimate issue of our peasant movement. Of course, we must learn to relate specific issues to the overall agrarian programme and take a dynamic view of the developing situation.
Periodic investigation and systematic study of the developing situation and basic agrarian conditions is central to a Marxist understanding of agrarian relations. In the absence of a solid Marxist approach, things will be left to spontaneity and our response will remain ad-hoc and empiricist. Comrades in West Bengal took a good initiative in this regard. While the State Committee conducted a survey covering nearly 4,500 households, the Kolkata chapter of IIMS revisited the panchayats on the basis of which a team commissioned by the State Government had earlier prepared a report. We now need to lay special emphasis on a thoroughgoing Marxist study to deepen our understanding of the agrarian conditions obtaining in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Otherwise our understanding is bound to be influenced by the dominant discourse in this region which is obsessed with caste, crime and communal violence to the utter neglect of the underlying agrarian reality.
14. Our experience shows that agrarian struggles almost everywhere are confronted with systematic state repression and organised feudal-kulak violence. In the concrete conditions of Bihar where the caste-class division is very rigid and feudal remnants are particularly stubborn, this feudal-kulak violence often takes the shape of private armies perpetrating brutal massacres. Such armies can however no longer really be dismissed as just private armies – connivance of ruling parties and systematic backing of the police and administration have given a semi-official status to such formations.
The Ranvir Sena’s intricate political-operational nexus with the state and its ties with the BJP and sections of RJD have been common knowledge in Bihar. The recent formation of the so-called Jai Shri Ram Sena (the sena has since renamed itself as Shoshan Mukti Sena) in the Bihar-UP border region with the express purpose of combating the CPI(ML) is yet another evidence of the private army strategy in action. It is interesting to note that the formation of this new Sena has been publicly endorsed by a police official of a rank no less than the DGP of Bihar.
15. The revolutionary mobilisation of the rural poor must be advanced by resisting and defeating this state-sponsored network of feudal-kulak violence. The Varanasi Congress had emphasised a three-pronged strategy to combat the combined onslaught of feudal forces and the state: political initiative, movements on popular issues and popular resistance. It was also rightly stressed that the point is not just to smash this or that sena by some method or the other, but more importantly, to raise the level of political consciousness of the people, effect a change in the social and political balance of forces and ensure the broadest mobilisation of the people in the process. At the same time, to promote popular resistance, the Varanasi Congress had called for getting rid of the ‘three dependencies’: (i) dependence on sophisticated firearms, (ii) reliance on the administration and (iii) waiting for instructions from above. Above all, the Congress had called for improving our state of preparedness and higher level of organised resistance to deliver decisive blows to the enemy.
Thanks to this overall strategy of resistance, it has been possible to mount steady pressure on the Ranvir Sena even though its strike power is yet to be eroded sufficiently. The failure of the Ranvir Sena to weaken, let alone wipe out, the CPI(ML) despite repeated massacres, internal bickerings within the Sena and its anti-peasant activities have led to a significant thinning of its social support. The internal crisis of the Sena was perhaps best reflected in the surrender of its chief. At a time when the morale of the Sena has been low and the organised forces of the rural poor have started reclaiming the lost gains, the police once again came to the rescue of the Sena. In the recent incident in Kurmuri, the police openly sided with the Ranvir Sena men to launch a combined attack on the fighting people.
16. Close on the heels of the Varanasi Congress, the Ranvir Sena perpetrated the biggest ever massacre till date at Laxmanpur-Bathe village of Jehanabad district. Powerful protest mobilisations were immediately organised in the district and elsewhere in Bihar and also in Delhi. Some of the perpetrators and their accomplices were also killed in retaliatory action. The Bihar government was forced to appoint a commission to probe the political links of the Sena. In spite of its unprecedented scale and level of brutality, the Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre could not demoralise the masses or dampen the spirit of their assertion.
The Strengthen-the-Party campaign once again drew the Party’s attention to the crucial agenda of unleashing people’s resistance. The renewed emphasis on this aspect found its reflection in several instances of armed confrontation with the enemy. During the campaign period, Comrade Viswanath Ram, a brave hero of people’s resistance was killed by the police in Bhojpur. The Party gave a call to gherao the collectorate to protest his killing. Thousands of people gheraoed the collectorate on 30 August 2000 to demand action against the police. The administration tried to terrorise the people by unleashing indiscriminate fire that killed four protesters and injured many more. This has however only strengthened the people’s resolve to intensify mass resistance. In Jagdishpur village near Siwan-Gopalganj border, seven young comrades went down fighting against an armed criminal gang. Earlier, in Sujayatpur village of Buxar district, the masses had fought a pitched battle with the police-Ranvir Sena combine. In Patna, a key man of the Ranvir Sena was killed in mass resistance. But some other key elements of the Sena including its chief had a couple of narrow escapes.
The campaign also brought to the fore some major weaknesses and problems on the front of people’s resistance. The question of organising people’s resistance is often not seen as an integral part of the Party’s agenda. There is thus a danger of the task getting devalued in practice and the masses getting demoralised. As a result we find this paradoxical situation that while the level of arming has gone up, there is a serious erosion in terms of spirit and basic discipline bordering, at times, on near amateurism. Some unfortunate heavy losses could probably be avoided with better planning, coordination and discipline.
Strengthening the organised forces of people’s resistance is an urgent task facing the Party. In all those areas where we face armed offensive of the enemy, the Party must seriously take up this question and take all necessary measures to strengthen this key aspect of our movement.
17. In organising people’s resistance to reactionary violence, we also have to contend with the growing attacks on our Party by anarchist outfits like the PWG and MCC. Till a few years ago, the PWG had no presence in Bihar. It succeeded to manage an entry following the erstwhile Party Unity group’s decision to go in for a merger with the PWG. In the Jharkhand region, the PWG suffered heavy losses at the hands of MCC before the two groups came to some kind of cease-fire agreement. In Bihar, the PWG is present primarily in the Patna-Jehanabad belt and it has become a convenient banner for remnants of the erstwhile Bhoomi Sena and in some areas also for certain elements of the Ranvir Sena. Ironically, while it had entered Bihar with tall talks of wiping out the Ranvir Sena, over the last four years it has provided more examples of hobnobbing with the Sena than confronting it. The PWG’s guns have boomed only against our comrades. More than fifty of our leading activists have been killed by the PWG in Patna and Jehanabad districts. In one single incident in 2001, eight comrades were killed by the PWG in Shahwajpur village in Patna.
In Andhra, the PWG is not much active in our areas of work in the coastal region. Even then it has issued death warrants against our leaders in East Godavari and Srikakulam region. In Orissa too, it has been issuing similar threats to our leaders in Rayagada. In Jharkhand, several of our leading comrades in Palamu-Garwah-Latehar region have been killed by the PWG. More often than not, the PWG attacks on our leading comrades are instigated by our political rivals, especially the RJD. All its election boycott calls are nothing but a smokescreen to cover up its acts of political bankruptcy and betrayal.
Earlier, in Hazaribagh and Chatra districts of Jharkhand, we had similar experience with the MCC. In recent periods the MCC has also repeatedly attacked our organisation in Ranchi, Bokaro and Giridih districts. However, in Giridih district, our comrades have succeeded in frustrating their attacks with powerful mobilisation of the masses.
On our part we have always tried to avoid or minimise tension with the PWG because we consider it a diversion from our main thrust of anti-feudal and radical agrarian struggles and it gives the entire movement a bad name. But the PWG treats our patience and considered political judgement to be a sign of weakness and there is no let-up in its violent campaign against our Party. And in this it also does not hesitate to join hands with the enemies of the rural poor. While offering necessary resistance to defend our organisation, we must make it a point to isolate them and effectively expose their true colours among the masses and all friends of the democratic movement. q