Left drops peasants' cause

The Left and the ultra-Left, who waged wars for farmers, are now crushing their rights, reports Anirban Guha Roy.

Land reforms in Bihar’s volatile countryside are on a retrograde path — gradually turning anti-poor from its strident pro-poor stand of the past five decades.

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The spearheads, Left and the ultra-Left, which waged a bloody war to secure cultivation rights for bataidars (share-croppers) and marginalised farm hands in pockets of Jehanabad and Bhojpur during the Seventies and Eighties, post enactment of the Bihar Land Reforms Fixation of Ceiling Area and Acquisition of Surplus land Act, 1961, are now crushing their rights.

The sharecroppers are tenants, who pay a part of their produce as rent to the landlords.

The Left-wing outfits are allegedly collecting levies from land-owners to allow them “peaceful cultivation”— sort giving them an “all-clear” to squeeze the poor farm-hands dry. Exploitation of landless tillers and sharecroppers is rampant in central and south Bihar. A farm worker makes Rs 25 for a 12-hour drill on the field as against the minimum government wage of Rs 68 per day.

Land Reforms Commission chairman D. Bandopadhyay, who toured the Left pockets in Jehanabad, said in his report, “The Left parties are collecting 10 per cent of the produce as levy from land-owners to allow them to till their land in red strongholds.” The levy is a kind of a “price” to ensure that the landlords have a free run.

Bandopadhyay is the architect of “Operation Barga”— which changed the land-ownership trend in West Bengal, paving the way for a 30-year Left Front innings.

“The peace levy system in Bihar is called the ‘two kathiya’ system, where the produce from two kathas per bigha is left for the dominant Left party. This tax gives the landowners the liberty to have a flexible crop-sharing arrangement system with the sharecroppers and change the plot every season, so that the sharecroppers are denied occupancy status,” the report said.

Bandopadhyay says this is perhaps the reason “why there has been no dispute over sharecropping in Jehanabad for the past 25 years despite a sustained struggle."

The startling revelations could rock the very foundation of the Left and the Naxal movement in Bihar. The CPI-ML (Liberation) and ultra- Left outfits like the erstwhile People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) had been fighting for sharecroppers’ rights, payment of minimum wages and distribution of surplus land to the landless.

Clashes between the armed Left groups and the private landlords’ militia had turned central Bihar into a killing field during the Nineties. The Commission observed that the Left parties, including the MCC, had forged covert pacts with the landlords after a 25-year struggle for “bloodless agricultural”— fostering a culture of “absentee landlordism” and “money batia (levy)” systems.

“The Commission is surprised that the MCC and other ultra-Left parties have sanctioned such mutual agreements, which are against the interests of the sharecroppers,” the report observed. Bandopadhyay said at a public hearing in Masrat village in Jehanabad, villagers complained that they did not receive land titles even after occupying gair majurwa khas land and shikast (ceiling) land. Their wages were as low as Rs 25 contrary to claims by officials that they were paid Rs 40- Rs 50 for routine  chores.

In an indictment against the Naxal movement in the state’s green bowl, Bandopadhyay said “Ultra-Left parties are more interested in grabbing power instead of espousing the sharecroppers’ and agricultural workers’ cause as they have grabbed space in the agrarian sector and are.....assured of regular flow of.....funds.”