The Hindu Business Line : Farmer suicides — Why let history repeat itself?

The Vidarbha suicides have to be taken as symptoms of a deep-rooted malaise that have to be dealt with immediately or they can spiral out of control.

Almost one and a half centuries ago, in 1869, an ICS officer, Arthur Brandeth, Commissioner of the Multan Division in Punjab, brought to the government's notice the huge, but nascent, political problem likely to be caused by the severe indebtedness of the peasantry.

The Punjab episode

The astronomical debts, rapidly built up by the compounding of interest rates of over 10 per cent a month, led to the alienation of large tracts of peasant land into the hands of the moneylenders of Punjab. It took the Punjab government a generation to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. In the meantime Arthur Brandeth was pulled up for his intemperate views, which the government initially suggested was based on faulty evidence.

Nevertheless, by the turn of the 20th century, the seriousness of the problem was acknowledged and the government passed the Punjab Land Alienation Act in 1900. Many Deputy Commissioners, Commissioners, and Lieutenant Governors had observed, first hand the enormity of indebtedness, and legislation was passed to rectify matters.

As a result of the efforts of civilians such as S. S. Thorburn and Sir Malcolm Darling, the cooperative credit movement received a boost to wean the peasantry away from moneylenders. Subsequently, as a result of the greening of parched land, by the creation of a vast canal network, Punjab became the granary of India, and still is along with Haryana.

The Bengal experience

Across the country, from a nondescript town called Naxalbari in northern West Bengal, Kanu Sanyal led, in 1967, a peasant movement, to re-possess land that had been alienated. The Naxalite movement, which had its political moorings in the writings of Marx and Lenin, eventually turned violent and was suppressed in the 1970s through draconian police intervention.

The seeds of the Bengal problem, however, date back to the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793, of Cornwallis. This law alienated the peasant land and placed them in the hands of a loyal class of zamindars, who would, dutifully, pay rents to the Company. Most of present day West Bengal, Bangladesh and Bihar, other than areas such as Chota Nagpur, now Jharkhand, came under the Permanent Settlement system. The negative attributes of the zamindari system was, in part, responsible for the partition of Bengal. The abolition of zamindari after Independence, and the passage of the Zamindari Abolition Act in 1950 in East Pakistan, formally ended the system. Yet, it continued informally until the eruption of the Naxalite movement in 1967 and showed the deep resentment of the peasants against the status quo.

The principal agenda of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which came to power in West Bengal in 1977 and continues to hold the reins of the State after winning seven elections, was land reforms to end alienation of land and vest property rights in the person who actually used the resource.

Property rights are, in liberal literature, a key factor that makes the capitalist engine move. Their specification, inalienability and the ability of the institutional system to uphold these rights are what make a competitive capitalist economy succeed. Secure property rights are essential for dynamic productivity growth, as the economic history of mankind shows.

Paradoxically, it is the CPI(M) Government in West Bengal that has implemented the most far-reaching transformation of property rights in India with obvious results.

The Deccan story

The Vidarbha case of indebtedness of peasantry, alienation of land and destitution are not new phenomena. They have been features since time immemorial and the village moneylender is the most hated man. In the Deccan itself, such phenomena were widespread. When the British established the Central Provinces in the 1860s, one of the first pieces of legislation was the Deccan Ryots Bill, to control peasant indebtedness in what is present-day Vidarbha.

This Bill eventually became the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act of 1879. It was recommended that its provisions be widely copied throughout India. The Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900, in fact, based its institutional rules of law and civil procedure on the Deccan Act so that peasants would find support in the court systems of Punjab and moneylenders would not be able to use the legal system as a tool to continue exploitations.

Lessons from History

How is all this history relevant today? It is indeed quite shameful to see history repeating itself now with farmers committing suicides because of indebtedness. Such indebtedness is alienating land from the real owners — that is, those who till it — into the hands of moneylenders.

The farmer suicides in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region reveal that an extremely important agenda for policy-makers should be the overhaul of property rights in India so that these remain inviolate and inalienable for those who own the assets and the moneylender does not exploit the judicial system to overwhelm the agriculturists and grab land.

The Vidarbha suicides reveal a political issue that needs to to be taken seriously. Else, why should the Naxalite movement spread from Bihar, right from its borders with Nepal, through Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

A cancer appears to be gnawing the heartland of India. The Vidarbha suicides have to be taken as a symptom of a deep-rooted malaise that has to be dealt with immediately or it can spiral out of control, as happened in 19th century Punjab and 20th century Bengal. Negative political consequences could be in store if property rights reforms and, more fundamentally, an overhaul of the procedures to implement them are not put through. The Vidarbha suicides should not become the sparks that will overwhelm the country.

(The author, Professor of Technology Strategy, University of Texas at Dallas, can be contacted at majumdar@utdallas.edu)

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