As the 132nd birthday of Dr. Ambedkar is approaching and the capital has witnessed historic resistance from the farmers recently, the agrarian crisis, land question, and related rights have resurfaced in the political arena. The opposition and the Dalit parties have tried to address the question in their restricted frameworks. In such a scenario, we try to look at Ambedkar’s position on the land question.
Ambedkar acknowledged that in a predominantly agricultural society, where land was the major source of sustenance, Dalits were not in a position to purchase this resource. However, the barriers to Dalit land ownership inherently go beyond economic reasons. He believed that the entire agrarian structure is anti-Dalit and would persist if not resisted effectively. To be more specific, caste Hindus would always oppose Dalits to hold lands as that would generate Dalits as an economically independent class. Ambedkar wrote “In an agricultural country, agriculture can be the main source of living. But this source of earning a living is generally not open to the Untouchables. This is so for a variety of reasons. In the first-place purchase of land is beyond their means. Secondly, even if an Untouchable has the money to purchase land he has no opportunity to do so.” (Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches (BAWS), Vol. 5, p.23). Ambedkar also described the nature of Indian land titles and asserted that land was not just an economic issue, but an issue concerning social status and hence, “a person holding land has a higher status than a person not holding land” (BAWS, Vol. 15, p. 913). He realised that land ownership in India was not only a matter of
social and economic freedom, but also of dignity. From his early days in 1918, Ambedkar in his article “Small Holdings in India and their Remedies’’ observed the significant quantity of smallholdings and
the social divisions among farmers as the root of the agrarian system in India. He argued firmly against the system of land tenure (Kothi) where rural Dalits were subjected to sheer exploitation. This writing has been mentioned as one of his finest articles related to economy. He identified the innumerable number of
smallholdings and social classification within the peasantry as the fundamental basis of agrarian question. The article deals with the uneconomic nature of the smallholdings which Ambedkar identified not only in terms of size of holding but also in measure of the several necessary attributes for generating an optimal
production. He wrote “A small farm may be economic as well as a large farm; for, economic or uneconomic does not depend upon the size of land but upon the due proportion among all the factors including land” (BAWS, Vol. 1, p. 468). On the question of transformation of the agrarian sector, Ambedkar was convinced that consolidation of land holding alone cannot play a pivotal role if not supported by
appreciable capital and corresponding development of industries to employ the huge labour from the agrarian sector and reduce the pressure on land. Unfortunately, the Dalit movement that restricts Ambedkar within the framework of Constitution consciously or unconsciously avoids this text in general reading or at a theoretical level in formulating the pathway of Dalit liberation
The thoughts of Ambedkar related to land exploitation and class subjugation of farmers were reflected even before that, during his dissertation at Columbia University, where he presented an elaborate and comprehensive critique of the land revenue system that the East India Company had implemented in different parts of the country highlighting the extraordinary rents and land taxes extracted
in zamindari area of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa and ryotwari areas of Madras. He expressed the inhuman suppression and exploitation of the farmers by the government-appointed officers and other intermediaries in the complete system of revenue collection in his writings (BAWS, Vol. 6, pp. 5–50). In ‘The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India: A Study in the Provincial Decentralisation of Imperial Finance’ (1925), Ambedkar questioned the fundamentals of his coinage “State Landlordism”, or the right of the State to collect land revenue. This challenge generated from his in-depth study of the periods between 1792–93 and 1855–56 where he noted that the average share of land revenue in total revenue in India was about 54.1%, varying from 66.2% to 31.7%. The humongous amount of land tax deprived the people of almost all the benefits and put a stop to further development of the agricultural production
system. Even he pin-pointed that the revenue was fixed on a unit of land without considering the revenue generated from it in a year. He depicted that the land revenue administration “taxes the poor peasant with only one acre to cultivate and the landlord owning hundreds of acres at a uniform rate without realising that as the total incomes of the two must be vastly different this uniformity of taxation must produce a glaring inequity of treatment as between the rich and the poor” (BAWS, Vol. 6, p.231). In 1927, in the Bombay Legislative Council, Ambedkar highlighted the levy of land revenue on rich, small and poor
farmers in the context of income tax. His arguments stood for exemption of land revenue derived from the same principle that allowed unemployed people to pay no taxes (BAWS, Vol. 2, p. 3). In 1934, in the
Kolaba District Peasants’ Conference, Ambedkar opposed the term shetkari (farmer) as it encompasses everyone from the landlord to the landless agricultural labourer. He spoke on similar lines in the Constituent Assembly in 1949 where he claimed the word “agriculturalist” to be misnomer as it included big landlords as well as small cultivators (BAWS, Vol. 13, p. 933). In March 1947, Ambedkar wrote
“State and Minorities: Their Rights and How to Achieve It in the United States of India” where he pointed land-ownership to be root of arrogance of large land-owners and the humble nature of the landless. Several other instances could be cited to project Ambedkar’s position against zamindari and his empathy for the vast section of farmers and his consciousness on social classification within the peasantry. In short, Ambedkar’s view on land was comprehensive as it identified the crux of landlordism, peasant differentiation and the context of the landless Dalits. Ambedkar‘s idea of collective farming and nationalization of agriculture was prominent in his famous statement made in the Constituent Assembly on 15th March 1947 where he demanded the incorporation of State Socialism into the Indian Constitution. He argued that agriculture would be a State Industry and land should be cultivated as per the directions 88 of the government and the state should provide the finance to agriculture. This idea was
completely contradicting the demands of Congress in British India which had nothing to offer to the small farmers. Even the agenda of the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee set up by the Congress Party in 1948 was quite complex as it could clearly defined whether whether agrarian reforms simply meant zamindari abolition or the implementation of the longstanding demand of “land to the tiller” and Ambedkar believed the land-reform policy to be useless for the Dalits. This made him more focused on the question of land for the Dalits and in the Report of Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes for 1953, Ambedkar emphasized on methods through which land could be given to the Dalits. He took up Uttar Pradesh as an instance where the average size of landholdings was small, and most of the cultivable land was occupied. Ambedkar’s vision of land reform influenced renowned RPI leader Karmaveer Dadasaheb Gaikwad who led the massive state wide satyagrahas of the landless in 1959 and 1964. In this movement, the leaders of the Communist Party like Shamrao Parulekar, Godavari Parulekar, Krantisimha Nana Patil, R.B. More and thousands of peasants and agricultural workers took active part and courted arrest. For the first time in history, the red flags of the Communist and the blue flags of the Republican Party came together in struggle. Truly speaking, the wish of Ambedkar for land to landless Dalits got partially realised through the Naxalite movement where the militant struggles gave the flavour of land and political power to the oppressed(‘oppressed’ as per the Brahmanical ideology) in certain parts of the country.
