INDIA: TODAY'S POLITICS AND BEYOND

...But, more important in the present context, these people, who travel a thousand miles for seasonal jobs, come home with stories of the rural wealth they see elsewhere, and now are forging in their own villages a rejection of poverty that is a strong force for change...

...Organizations formed by the farmers, or formed by the government on their behalf, are rapidly squeezing private traders out of their former footholds in the rural economy...

...Consequently the pricing mechanism—which is run jointly by the Food Corporation of India and its technocratic cousin, the Agricultural Prices Commission—has turned out to be as powerful in pushing up food output as any fertilizer could be...

...Usually, it is in nondemocratic systems that the rural classes have seized political power...

...The latest key production figures are 130 million tons of food grains, 7.5 million bales of cotton, 19 million tons of sugarcane (measured as before...

...For then some 300,000 farmers marched on New Delhi and held the most spectacular political rally ever seen there...

...They gave massive proof of that in the winter of '78-'79, only a few months after Charan Singh's rally in New Delhi, when, clearly as a counterblast, they organized a still more impressive rally of the landless, to which Bihar alone sent an estimated 150,000 farm workers...

...At the time India was consuming about 2 million tons of fertilizers a year...

...For, at harvest time, a stream of landless farm workers flows across these bridges—five, six, or seven hundred thousand people, no one quite knows how many are leaving that poverty belt for jobs in the richer areas on the other shore...

...The party again demonstrated its power at the end of 1978, some months after Charan Singh had fallen from office in the normal rivalries of intergovernmental politics...

...This is bound to get rectified, and how it is going to shake up economic group interests...

...This, alas, has cleared a path to the constituency of the landless for the Communists, who can be trusted to take full advantage of it...

...But this was only one of the reasons why urban power, now largely held by people who had been active in the freedom movement, turned upon the landlords in the early days of independence...

...in the greater part of West Bengal...

...Ram Manohar Lohia, a brilliant but erratic socialist leader, tried to fill this role a decade ago but, for one, the time was not ripe and, second, he was too unstable to succeed in building a durable party...

...The two found a fine affinity in their common enmity for Jagjivan Ram and for the Janata movement...

...AT THE TURN OF THE DECADE, from the 1960s into the 1970s, India had 37 million hectares of land under irrigation, with new areas being added at an average rate of just over 1 million hectares a year...

...Most of these new farmers are members of the middle and lower-middle Hindu castes, in the past (and popularly still to this day) classified as the backward castes...

...Now they do, and use their new knowledge so well that no party dares offend them or oppose even their unreasonable demands...

...Some key output figures, taking three different kinds of crops, were around 108 million tons of food grains, 5 million bales of cotton, and 13 million tons of sugarcane (measured in terms of boiled-down sugarcane juice...

...Market economists, too, have gotten over some preconceptions...

...Now the battle for its emergence has begun, and it is bloody, especially in Bihar, and promises to become still bloodier...

...The defeated antagonists in this first round were the feudal, usually absentee landlords, generally of the higher Hindu castes, who long had ruled over the villages with great economic and social power...

...December 10, 1979 Surface storms that shake up Indian politics, such as the one that uprooted Morarji Desai's government last year in mid-July or the more recent one over the year-end elections, are the only events in India's politics that catch the world's attention...

...Officially, she supported his bid for the prime ministry after he had broken with the ruling party...

...But the farm workers are retaliating, too, driven as much by a growing confidence in their numbers as by sheer desperation...

...THE RURAL PEOPLE'S NEWFOUND ACTIVISM is both cause and effect of their new political consciousness, which has greatly enhanced the impact of their vote...

...in democracies, rural society is still struggling for political power or, if it has captured it, it has seized an empty shell, drained of real economic power by the urban-industrial complex...

...This is part of the background of the bitter fight that has been waged for several months between Charan Singh's Lok Dal and the Jan Sangh, the party that represents the urban trading interests and is popularly identified with Hindu orthodoxy...

...Apart from Charan Singh's ambition to become prime minister before he breathes his last, it was this confrontation that brought down Morarji Desai's government in mid-July '79...

...despite some mechanization, they cannot cope with their rapidly expanding harvests...

...After victory was won, she planned to pull the rug out from under him at a time of her choosing—to try, quite by herself, to lead both the better-off farmers and the landless...

...Consequently, money is being pumped into the village economy as never before, both in expenditures on inputs and in output/ sales...

...And the creative potential of this third round is at least as great as was that of the earlier two rounds...

...The productivity index now exceeds 120...

...Jagjivan Ram, were he to become prime minister, would certainly provide inspiration and support for the lowest castes, who are hostile to Charan Singh's main constituency—and he would indeed be Mrs...

...In the past, too, the rural vote, because of its size, decided the fate of the parties...

...from the Pakistani border to the Jamuna basin in western Uttar Pradesh...

...The most important thing happening in India today, as I see it, is the ongoing transformation in the agricultural sector, and the related social and political causes and consequences...

...Their great chance came with the new agricultural planning projects of the mid- '60s, and since then they have made their farms thrive as never before, and are using their rising economic strength to mobilize ballot-box power in their own economic and political interests...

...This phenomenon now is seen annually when the time comes for the government to fix farm prices—or whenever halffrightened economists suggest that, in order to raise more desperately needed resources for development, the government should at least reduce, if not remove, the total income-tax exemption enjoyed by the agricultural sector...

...Ten years ago its operations were miniscule...

...the Middle-Caste Farmers • A most grave threat to the future shape of Indian politics is the relentless use of power by the tough, aggressive, middle-caste rural class that owns and cultivates the middle-sized farms...

...The most natural choice for leader of the landless might be Jagjivan Ram (who served as co-deputy prime minister with Charan Singh...

...In the first movement, the relatively well-off countryside is gradually taking over power from the city...

...ROUND II: The New Landowning Farmers vs...

...but progress was slow...

...A measure of what is being pumped in from the sale of produce is that the Food Corporation of India, which buys mainly food grains—and only about 15 percent of that crop (and only in order to balance the market interests of consumer and producer)—now has an annual turnover of about U.S...

...The dynamics of Indian politics in the coming decade is going to be decided by the course and outcome of this round-three battle, just as round two influencgel the course of the past decade...

...Yet, far more important events that take place deep down, at the rural base of Indian economics and politics, receive little notice— events signifying that democracy in India is alive, and accomplishing a few things no other democracy has yet accomplished...

...The Lok Dal party has used its political power to bend state policies to further entrench its political and economic clout...

...But, by capturing state power, rural interests will see to it that they are not milked in the name of industrialization...

...In the second, the poorer two-thirds of the village now is struggling to take over power from the richer one-third...

...another reason was the natural antagonism between these two rival aspirants for future economic power...

...But, on the other hand, she aimed to make him absolutely dependent upon herself, stressing that, 109 as he knew, his bid would be hopeless without her backing...

...Their retaliation may become very gory unless a politics of reconciliation will intervene and succeed...

...So, in the name of agrarian reform (granted, with much sincerity) and with the help of the votes of the vast army of the landless— the insecure, exploited tenants and laborers—this urban leadership carried out a swift and bloodless coup by passing legislation that abolished the old revenue estates...

...Jagjivan Ram is the oldest and most durable, the best-known and ablest leader of the lowest castes...

...In these clashes in Bihar, many farm workers are losing their lives every month...

...Its antagonists are the bottom-most people in India's social and economic pyramid: the landless farm workers, the poorest by class and the lowliest by caste...

...The battles between the rural factions, however, are often violent and even bloody...

...But those who work on the land will have the power to have a major say, through their representatives in Parliament, in deciding the means and ends of industrialization...

...Only when the farmers' own leaders began to form governments did some stability return to state politics...

...in much of Gujerat...

...So these farm workers from the other shore earn more here in the three or four months of peak farming than is India's per-capita income, and still, the demand for them remains unsatisfied...

...But then rural people largely were led by the nose by the predominantly urban leadership...

...Now, as the '70s have turned into the '80s, irrigation covers 55 million hectares and is being extended at an annual rate of 2.5 million hectares...

...They have discovered that "profit" means as much to the supposedly apathetic farmer as to any urban stockholder: farmers now invest, withdraw, and shift their crops as they perceive their economic advantage...

...This more than anything helped restore Charan Singh in the same office...

...Then, in round two, rural power launched its counterattack on 108 urban-industrial power...

...2,000 million, which makes it one of the top two or three corporations in Asia, including the Japanese giants...

...India, too, like today's industrial giants, most likely will continue to finance industrialization with agricultural surpluses...

...Had this program succeeded, the Janata movement would have assumed a role similar to the one Mrs...

...The Indian peasantry now has begun to ensure that, in the future, state power will not be used, as in so many other countries and in India, too, up till now, to exploit the rural mass for the benefit of the industrial, powerful, few...

...Strange things happen in India's world of byzantine politics: Madhu Limaye, the best-known heir to Lohia's socialism (like Lohia himself, a victim of his own brilliance), has become Charan Singh's close ally and chief theoretician...

...As important as these economic aggregates are, 106 certain changes in attitudes, too, have stirred up agriculture, and a hotbed of political change they have proved to be...

...For a poignant vantage point to literally observe this change I recommend, at harvest time, any of the bridges over the rivers that separate this, India's most extreme, poverty belt from the more prosperous areas that stretch westward to the Pakistani border...

...The index of per-acre productivity was below 90 in the mid-'60s and 104 at the turn of the decade...

...In that process it has opened yet another front of round two: with the Lok Dal's influence, rural-agricultural power now is not only pressuring the industrial sector of urban power but the urban trading sector as well...

...By its ruthlessness it has sparked off and given a blazing start to round three...

...To get a sense of this transformation, let us, first, look at two of its obvious, measurable repercussions—the rapid increase in inputs into agriculture and in its output...

...The party's, and Charan Singh's, ambitions soared still higher when Sing made his bid to become prime minister late last July...

...and now the message is beginning to catch on in medieval Bihar, where it is creating an unprecedented upheaval (more about that later...

...A bloody rebellion now is going on in Bihar (and a still more bloody suppression of it)—a rebellion as much against social as against economic hierarchies, because the landless see both as the causes of their misery...

...I say "begun" advisedly, because even now the agricultural sector receives merely a quarter of the total sum budgeted by the government for development, though it contributes nearly half of the total GNP...

...Better marketing is as much a reason for better farming in Punjab and Haryana as the hardiness of farmers in a frontier belt, and poor marketing is as much a reason for the backwardness of farming in Bihar as are its caste conflicts...

...The Communists also have in their favor a record of good work for the landless chalked up by their government in West Bengal, a neighbor state of Bihar...

...Some of the recent turmoil in India's government though it may seem merely the result of sordid clashes of personal ambitions also reflects in part a struggle for the future leadership of the landless...

...India's first sustained effort at improving the technology of farming, begun in the mid- '60s, was starting to show results by the end of the decade...

...This change of attitudes—although in quite a different way—can be observed in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, too...

...But whether they do or not, in the future India will be hearing a lot more from its landless than it has heard so far...

...Farmers not only accepted the new inputs but fought to receive them, as examples proved that the benefits justified the costs, and the planners' problem ironically turned out to be—and a continuing and dangerous problem it has become—how to keep pace with the demand...

...And so, for such laborers, and not just for the landowning farmer who has a surplus to sell, agriculture is no longer the rags-tomorerags economic cycle it used to be...

...Though as yet largely unorganized, this is India's most massive political constituency...

...For some years now he has not been active in this role, having cast himself instead in the role of a general national leader...

...in most of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu...

...But this is only another round—the third—in a 30-year-old fight, in which more and more of India's people are struggling for a voice and a place in the country's economy and politics...

...Her aim, on the one hand, was to placate him and make him an ally, so that the two could carve out the rural vote between them...

...But, to their enormous surprise, at the touch of the first effort this fastness crumbled— and the planners' preconception and worry turned out to be only another of urban India's superstitions about rural India...

...The middleman grain trader has been almost entirely eliminated by the Food Corporation of India, which is now actively keeping up farm prices for the benefit of the farmers who have a surplus to sell rather than, as in the past, lowering prices as production rises...

...And this is happening before urban-industrial India can monopolize real economic power and make the loss of political power meaningless...

...Bihar and other poor provinces are paying a far higher price for the (much slower) transformation of their agrarian economy than was paid by the richer provinces in southern and northwestern India...

...This is not merely happening in some pockets of the country—but in the whole of the Indo-Gangetic plain...

...For the rural, agricultural sector won over power from the urban, industrial sector in a struggle that escalated slowly and was mostly peaceful...

...In a good month in Punjab an unskilled farm worker from Bihar, of very little experience though he may be, earns as much as a graduate-school teacher or an upper-division government clerk...

...The fat of the land will fuel industry in India, too...

...It may well be fought at a bloody pace—unless, in the meantime, policies of rural reconciliation will prevail...

...For henceforth India will have more of rural agricultural politics, politics real and necessary for a country that is predominantly rural...

...Although among India's most densely populated, these richer areas suffer a farm-labor shortage...

...Gandhi's formidable rival in her bid for the leadership of the landless...

...This is true especially in such areas as Bihar, where the power of caste so long has combined with the power of class to keep the landless, who are the lowliest castes and the poorest class, under a relentless heel...

...Then, let us consider the nonquantitative aspects of these changes, for they are indeed most relevant to India's present politics and to its future...

...Agriculture's share in the total planned government expenditure has risen by about 35 percent since the mid- '70s, and industry's share has declined by just under 20 percent...

...Gandhi wishes to play...

...And these events bear out that our storms indeed are merely Indian democracy's turbulent way of breaking new ground, of bringing new areas and classes into the political process...

...Therefore two parallel movements are active in India's ballot-box politics, and both originate in the village...

...the Urban Middle Classes • The farmers' political emergence—under the banner of their own party, the Lok DAL People's party"—rocked the parliamentary boat in many states about ten, fifteen years ago...

...For this class is far more determined to defend its newly won privileges than the old, indolent feudal landlords ever were...

...When the scientific planners began to work in the agricultural sector, their biggest worry sprang from their own belief that India's farmers were so cut off in their cocoon of stagnation, ignorance, and apathy—so paralyzed by their acceptance of poverty as an act of God no mortal may challenge—that they might never respond to such mundane stimulants as more water, fertilizers, and high-yielding seeds...

...Now democratic politics in India is accomplishing what has not been accomplished in other democratic countries: political power is passing swiftly from the urban-industrial to the 107 rural-agricultural India...

...In March 1977 the Lok Dal party emerged on the national scene when Charan Singh, their most famous and most ambitious leader, became a deputy prime minister...

...Thus a new rural class was born: a class of hardy and experienced farmers who now cultivate their own farms—by Indian standards, of middling size—of about ten hectares...

...Consumption of fertilizers has more than doubled, to 4.5 million tons, has risen by 66 percent since 1974-75 (and there now is a thriving black market in all kinds of fertilizers and chemicals...

...the Old Feudal Landlords • In the first round, fought immediately after India had gained independence, the winners were the urban middle classes (and especially the rising class of industrial entrepreneurs), whose members had been in the spearhead of the freedom movement against British rule...

...Gandhi's other mutual adversary,—at the time in government (but since fallen)—had a well-considered program for reconciliation in rural politics...

...The Janata movement, Charan Singh's and Mrs...

...In that crisis, Mrs...

...A Janata government also might have brought about a fairer distribution of the fruits of rural development, which are at present hogged by Singh's constituency...

...ROUND I: The Urban Middle Classes vs...

...ROUND III: The Low-Caste Landless vs...

...It is very likely that the last bout in round three will be fought by Charan Singh's new farmers on the one hand and the Communists on the other...

...Her defeat in the March '77 elections was due mainly of course to the general revulsion caused by her "emergency" rule—but partly also to Charan Singh's new farmers' bitter hostility toward her for her championship of the low-caste and landless...

...Gandhi played a double game with Charan Singh...

...Gandhi, too, tried to fill the role, in a fashion, with her adventures in the politics of populism during the first half of the '70s but paid a heavy price for it...

...Yet, as every kind of politics, agricultural politics has its haves and have-nots, and, as usual, in this politics, too, the have-nots are in the majority...

...For the landless still have to find a leader—their equivalent of Charan Singh...

...This class division in rural politics is much more inflamed at present than the rural-urban division ever was...

...for they did not know how to act in their own interests...

...If we set the overall index of agricultural production in 1969-70, the base year, at 100 (the base), it was around 80 in the mid'60s...

...Most of these feudal landowners had been supporters of India's British rulers...

...Indeed, our planners spent much time worrying about how to reach rural India in its fastness of subsistence farming...

...State or cooperative farmers' banks now are the farmers' money lenders, which formerly had been the shopkeepers...

...Last year, in mid-July, he nearly pulled that off when, after a temporary falling-out with Prime Minister Desai, he made a bid for that top job—a bid that ended, as we all know, in failure...

...Three years ago the index of agricultural production rose to just under 133, two years ago it rose by 2 percent, last year by 4 percent, and by now it should be over 140...