LOOTING WITH LOVE
Noel, Don O. Jr.
A Walk with India's Bhave Looting with Love by DON 0. NOEL, JR. Delhi, India ON April 18, 1951, in the small village of Pochempelli in the heart of a Communist-agitated India, one of Gandhi's...
...One of Vinoba's supporters—a leader at Sevagram, Gandhi's old ashram—did recognize this basic conflict, and was frank in assessing it...
...The landlord system per se was unknown, and it is believed that a system of communal ownership similar to that which Vinoba advocates today was in use...
...The present rate of collection is not nearly sufficient to sweep through India's 550,000 villages within the year...
...But they give, and the phrase which perhaps best describes Vinoba's magic appeal is his own...
...It is true that Bhoodan can, and has already, been effective in just this role...
...In short, Vinoba plans the ec» nomic salvation of the Indian village in the slow, steady cooperative improvement of a basically simple life...
...In fact, however, Khadi .Board is increasingly promoting goods which, though cottage-made, cater to a luxury trade and will inevitably tie the village closer to the cash economy that Vinoba would avoid...
...Vinoba appeals to all the residents of a village, all the property-owners, to give up their property and deed it to the village as a whole...
...Like Gandhi, he eschews political tactics...
...The planting of only a single crop was encouraged, so that the villages became bound to a cash economy, selling their crops and purchasing the foods which they no longer grew themselves...
...Time is running out on the Bhoodan movement in its larger conception, and I think it is in response to this challenge that Vinoba has set his sweeping goals for the current year...
...others do so in the surge of group enthusiasm...
...He believes that, ideally, the funds needed for the development of a gramdan village should come from interested people near the needy village, who will offer funds, goods, or services as needed without any intermediary organization, without a centralized fund-collecting and administering agency...
...What is the total concept of Bhoodan as it has developed during the past six years...
...An agency of the national government, it is responsible for the encouragement of cottage industries in India...
...The village decides how many non-farming families—artisans and shopkeepers—it can support, and these families receive a token share of land, in order that they too can share in the tilling of the soil...
...I am not prepared to offer an opinion on the workability of Vinoba's program...
...Faced with this problem, the traditional economist insists that the only solution is all-out industrialization, the production of new goods and services which will create new employment opportunities...
...Pressed to be more specific, they often propose a watered-down program of decentralized industrialization, coupled with economic aid for villages, which is at best a poor compromise with the radical burden of Vinoba's real message...
...The Gandhian economy which Vinoba preaches," he said, "is incompatible with the industrialization of the Five-Year Plans...
...But a new cooperative spirit is called forth: new cooperative agencies develop, to handle marketing and purchasing, and often to serve as a credit agency as well...
...The direction which Nehru's Congress government has chosen is toward rapid industrialization of the country, and away from Gandhian ideals...
...Nevertheless a new, more dramatic appeal will be needed if the revolution is to be carried out this year...
...Even many of those who nominally support Vinoba are in fact advocating only a watered-down version of his program...
...but this is clearly a corruption of Vinoba's purpose...
...The West, he feels, has become in many ways the slave of its own machinery, caught up in a vicious cycle of consumption for consumption's sake...
...As originally conceived by Gandhi, the primary purpose of the khadi program is to teach the villagers .to be self-sufficient, to help them produce their own needs in the village...
...India has at the moment 150 million in her labor force...
...Again, the national government, although it offers lip service to the Bhoodan movement, often regards it primarily as a softening-up process which will facilitate legal land reform and subsequent centralized community development schemes...
...During the years prior to his emergence as Gandhi's spiritual successor, Vinoba had quite successfully been putting his theories into practice at his own ashram at Paunar...
...Now, as Vinoba moves through his seventh year of trekking and preaching, he is still telling Indians how they can help their neighbors...
...Inevitably, the villages became steadily poorer...
...Instead, he says, the unemployment of the villages can be plved by teaching the villagers their forgotten crafts, and teaching them |o provide within the village, with their excess labor, the goods and services they now purchase from the cities...
...Vinoba speaks today not only of gifts of land, but of village organization and the national economy...
...more than two-thirds are agricultural labor, which means almost automatically that they are underworked, underpaid, and undernourished...
...The model gramdan village plans a community center in its midst to house education, recreation, and community government...
...He appeals to the village to dedicate itself to a new, cooperative life in which all will better their lot together...
...But now he has disbanded the organizational support which has backed his pilgrim marches hitherto', and has called upon the masses of the people to take up the burden...
...and daily one hears of new groups which have started marching to collect land...
...Each villager is encouraged to spend a regular period daily spinning cotton yarn, in exchange for which the village weaver will make him his khadi clothing, freeing him from dependence on factory products...
...To understand the wider meaning of Bhoodan, and the difficulties inherent in the attempt to win acceptance of it, it is necessary to delve for a moment into Gandhian economics...
...As the land-gift movement starts its seventh year, Vinoba has given it a new impetus and a new sense of urgency by calling for the nationwide completion of his mission in 1957...
...particularly homespun cloth, but other handicrafts as well...
...and the many other marching bands, although less spectacularly successful than Vinoba himself, have nonetheless achieved striking results...
...The other needs of the village are to be met in a similar way: an oil press in the village can be used cooperatively (at present farmers sell their oilseed in town, and purchase finished cooking oil, losing both money 'an$W valuable seedcake in the bargai|| other cooperative industries can pfc| vide, largely on a barter-exchan|jj basis, such other necessities as soap, cloth, paper, building bricks, evei cement...
...I have been particularly struck by the numbers of young Indians I have met in the cities who express agreement with Vinoba's work...
...Moreover, even the village development work like that in Orissa is a far cry from the decentralization which Vinoba advocates...
...In so doing, he is consciously rejecting washing machines, automobiles, and most of the industrial products which are common in Western homes...
...1 It is my interpretation that Vinoba, consciously or not, has acted in re-:!>onse to a grave crisis which confronts the Bhoodan movement...
...The two smartest stores in Bombay are the Khadi Emporium and the Handloom House, both run tinder Khadi Board, and both filled with handcraft items appealing to ?he upper-class and tourist buyer...
...Vinoba believes in the simple life, and although he does not completely reject industrialization, he insists that only the truly essential industries must be allowed, to develop, and these in a highly de| centralized framework...
...The land is not his permanently, and may be reapportioned by the village as needed...
...A landlord, or zemindar, system grew up, and land ownership became progressively more lopsided...
...and the backlog of completely unemployed is conservatively estimated at 2.5 million in urban areas, 2.8 million in rural...
...India has 550,000 villages...
...And certainly a convulsive, nation-wide sweep of gramdan gifts such as he now calls for, starting the majority of India's villages on at least the first step toward a Gandian economy, would be a tremendous incentive to carry the movement successfully on to its long-range implications...
...The Second Five-Tear Plan, even more than the first, places emphasis on the development of heavy industry and transportation...
...and some undoubtedly give because they are shamed by others who have less but DON O. NOEL, JR., an American traveling in Asia, walked for several days with Vinoba Bhave and had unusual opportunities to watch the operation of Bhoodan first-hand...
...give more...
...Vinoba, on the other hand, replies that tq K^lihis course will only lead to E loss of all the traditional values IFlndian life...
...this is done by the villagers themselves, through a town meeting-like government...
...Services and industries, previously located within the village, were moved into the towns, again placing the villager at the mercy of a cash economy, and hastening the decline of the traditional village crafts...
...But even this program, one of the most ambitious to date, is relatively speaking on a miserly scale: divided among the 1200 villages, the budgeted funds come to about $1600 each...
...In one unusually back-iitranl tribal area of Orissa, where jlfcoba last year collected 1200 gramdan villages, an all-out program of soil conservation, irrigation, and cottage-industry development has been undertaken...
...Even those who profess to be Bhoodan sympathizers are in fact often far from the mark...
...He has called for hundreds of marching parties to spring up and collect land gifts throughout the country, and he has declared that his goal !* total success...
...Land redistribution is, in Vinoba's conception, an attack on only one portion of the overall problem...
...In the ancient organization of India, each village was to a large extent an autonomous unit, growing mixed crops which would provide its food needs, and maintaining within the village all the services needed by the villagers...
...The needed capital should be given in the same spirit of direct sharing which typifies the original village gift...
...Delhi, India ON April 18, 1951, in the small village of Pochempelli in the heart of a Communist-agitated India, one of Gandhi's closest disciples, a man named Vinoba Bhave, saw a new way in which a few people might help their needy neighbors...
...By the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, in 1961, 10 million new jobs will be needed for new entrants into the labor force—again, approximately two-thirds in the rural areas...
...Although funds are indeed allotted for village development work and national extension services, they represent a minor part of India's budget and operate in a framework rather different from which Vinoba preaches...
...In the new gramdan village, the first step is the redistribution of land...
...To what extent this system was already breaking down, and to what extent British colonial rule hastened its disintegration, is a moot point which Indian nationalists and British apologists will argue forever...
...To meet her most pressing employment needs, India must produce jobs for 15 million people within the next five years—and this will not touch the "disguised unemployment...
...But the concept has broadened, deepened: Bhoodan has become a program which carries the full burden of guiding India toward a Gandhian economy...
...Vinoba's party alone has been receiving several villages daily...
...Vi-noba, like Gandhi before him, believes that the lot of the villager will not permanently be bettered until village industries are re-introduced, mixed farming re-instituted, and the cash economy as nearly as possible eliminated from the villages...
...The first three months of 1957 have definitely produced a new surge of Bhoodan work: no longer tied to a laborious system of committee organization, the movement now rests on the personal initiative and concern of the people...
...Beyond this point, in most of the villages, each farmer is on his own, sowing and harvesting and marketing his crops as a private entrepreneur...
...It is difficult to tell whether Vinoba himself has thought of the problem consciously in these terms...
...Previously Vinoba had set his workers' goals in terms of hundreds of thousands of acres, of hundreds of villages...
...The traditional economist, of course, boggles at this, and usually the first point of attack is the problem of unemployment...
...There are, to be sure, some regions .lyhere government has stepped in to provide a sizable boost for gramdan Peas and has given Vinoba's workers $ free hand...
...And let there be no question: the appeal works...
...It is based today on an appeal not for individual land gifts, but for gramdan—village gifts...
...Some villages have established themselves as out-and-out communes, but most have merely apportioned to each family a share of the village's total lands, based on productivity and on the needs of the family...
...However, given the course which India's government is following, Vinoba's wider program will never be given a fair trial...
...The International Labor Organization has estimated that "disguised unemployment"—i.e., workers whose marginal product is nil—may be as high as 15 million in agriculture alone...
...I am," he says, "looting with love...
...but it is a solid indication of the success which Vinoba's primary appeal-—for land redistribution—is having...
...But I will venture the opinion that any Westerner who walks with Vinoba's group, who experiences the serenity and satisfaction of the simple life as Vinoba himself lives it, cannot but cherish the hope that this way of life may somehow spread...
...Some who give do so in a genuine spirit of sacrifice and sharing...
...The Khadi Board is perhaps a good example of this...
...During the past year and a half, since he first began to base his campaign on the larger concept of village gifts, the number of villages collected has reached into the thousands...
...but like Gandhi, he seems to have a magician's flair for the right move at the right time...
...But the act of village gift is only the first step in the building of a new economic system...
...and in so doing, he feels, man cannot but lose sight of many of his spiritual values...
...For insofar as Bhoodan is more than simply the redistribution of land and a new concept of economic organization for India, it has thus far failed to win any substantial measure of popular or governmental support...
...But it is a matter of history that during the British reign in India, the entire fabric of village life was re-oriented...
...Bhoodan must start a revolution from the grass roots which will force the government at the top to change its policies...
...and a full-fledged cooperative store, founded on share capital raised in the villages, is planned at the center of every cluster of perhaps ten villages...
...I leave that to the economists...
...He called his new idea Bhoodan—literally, "the sharing gift of land"—and began trekking around India to tell more and more people how it might be done...
...And with the growth of industrialization, with its concomitant migration to the cities, the villages became more and more bound up in an economy in which they sold food to the cities—often foregoing their own nourishment in order to earn more cash—and bought their clothing and other necessities from the city industries...
Vol. 21 • October 1957 • No. 10
