EYES ON INDIA

...Superstition is another great obstacle to progress...

...in some places the big man is only a tax collector who collects specified taxes per acre...

...others feel he prefers this slow tempo...

...II At the time of independence, in 1947, the obvious solution lay in abolition of the landlord system, redistribution of land, elimination of the banias, improvement of farming techniques, and industrialization to meet the new needs of a more productive peasantry...

...Furthermore, the Plan itself only proposes to bring per capita living standards back to 1939...

...There is some incentive because his own yield would be greater, but it isn't enough, to excite him to greater efforts...

...The men working on a well nearby earned 26 cents a day...

...aid as France with only 45 million people...

...Under such circumstances the problems of a democratic revolution are formidable...

...The caste system has been outlawed, but only partially illegal-ized in fact...

...A British Labor Party type of austerity would help shift the burdens, redistribute income, and create inexhaustible enthusiasm...

...he will probably have three, four, or five sharecroppers working for him...

...we had to give up...

...mobilize the peasants for health inspection, birth control, and other social education...

...At Kohlapur the project officer told me that leather, carpentry, and other co-ops are in the planning stage...

...The gap between classes is more pronounced here than in the West...

...Why should a tenant improve land which doesn't belong to him...

...As yet the peasant's patience has not run out...

...As the Socialists and then the Kripalani neo-Socialists split away, these elements became even more important...

...China, rather than Russia, is the beacon to which gullible Asians look...

...and old methods are contributing causes...

...While the laws affect them only slightly as yet, the drive of the Nehru regime is in the direction of weakening this class and eventually destroying it...

...When we spread out our picnic lunch we were literally besieged by beggars...

...An American in Delhi has estimated that when it is completed there will be six million more unemployed than today...

...The landlords are being indemnified—usually about 25 to 33 per cent of the real value of their holdings, and the tenant has to pay sums beyond his means if he wants to purchase the land...

...Some large - scale industrialization and some small-scale village industries are planned around this development...

...At the moment there are 55 Projects, but soon there will be 110 covering six per cent of the village population...

...Americans and Europeans come to India, compare the atmosphere with the slothful conditions in the Middle Eastern nations, read the Five Year Plan, visit a community development project, and are "charmed...

...None of the improvements, however, is sensational...

...Almost weekly there is a press debate as to whether India or China is making the greater progress...

...The shrewd leader of this movement, Gandhi, wanted to dissolve it after independence, but leaders like Sardar Patel, the strong man of the Congress movement, and Nehru didn't go along...

...There is still no dent in the problem of unemployment in the cities or villages...

...They said seven cents a day plus food, or eleven cents without food...

...One night I had dinner at the home of a wealthy and well-read stockbroker...

...Jayaprakash and everyone else in Asia who is anti-Stalinist understand that thoroughly...

...Few nations on earth are doing so much original thinking...

...This is certainly an accurate appraisal...

...He would like to see full scale nationalization without any indemnity and a wiping out of debts as in Kashmir...

...I visited eight or ten villages in two of these projects...

...The common man may not feel that his living standards are improved, but he knows that he can go to his political leader with a petition and get some redress...

...Whichever interpretation is correct, the fact remains that the pace of the India Revolution is painfully slow...

...If it were not for the prestige and idealism of Nehru, the Congress Party might have swung far more to the right and it might have been as unimpressive as some of the nationalist movements in other areas of the East...

...There is also no disputing the fact that Nehru and his Party are filled with indecision, move slowly, and have made only a minor dent in the walr of poverty and insecurity...

...My wife, an Indian friend, and I visited Seven Pagodas, 50 miles outside of Madras...

...There are too many people, not enough land...

...Many Indians think he is disconsolate over results up to now...

...A country of eleven major languages, 362 million people, growing at the rate of four million a year, incredibly impoverished, deeply stirred with the clash of conflicting ideals, India does not permit easy generalization...

...Life has been so poor in India, the past so wicked, and hope so remote, that the very spirit of change that now permeates the country is a welcome relief...

...Those close to Nehru say—and I believe them—that he is dissatisfied with the pace of land reform...

...Nehru seems to bend with the wind...

...I am afraid the appeal of China'would become irresistible and that would affect the lives of millions and change the course of history disastrously...

...Eating became impossible...

...With a population growing at the rate of four million a year this may well be true...

...Political pundits, knowing that the Praja Socialist Party represents only 15 per cent of the electorate, claimed that Nehru—a socialist with a small "s" ¦—needed more leftist Socialists like Jayaprakash as a bulwark against the conservatives in his own Party...

...Usually he "rack-rents"—charges more than is permitted by law...

...In other instances the landlord has proprietary rights and charges 40, 50, or 70 per cent for the use of his land...

...Every child has his horoscope written out at birth...

...I talked with some of the followers of Patel, who died a few weeks ago...

...If India fails to present anything but a pale picture of a welfare state...

...Overall, the Plan is quite modest —probably conservative...

...The Social Heritage India is a land of great culture, despite the fact that literacy is only 15 per cent...

...All this is heartening, but, unfortunately, those most enthusiastically supporting the projects were the "rich" peasants with 10 or 15 acres...

...The concensus is that there is little difference...

...Project workers go into the villages...

...The Congress Party, while fighting for independence, was a bloc of all kinds of people, from extreme right to extreme left...

...Manual laborers are probably better off, white-collar workers worse off, and the villagers who comprise 70 per cent of the population about the same...

...Poverty How can you describe it...

...Such inequality is intolerable in a country so close to the famine level...

...Plans for the projects seem enormously impressive...

...Mao's Stalinists have brought dozens of Indian trade unionists and others to Peking for carefully conducted tours, at the end of which there are the usual statements—with some interesting exceptions—about "great progress" in China...

...The main problems —indebtedness, landlordism, and a method to give "land to the tiller"— have hardly been touched...

...Yet the social heritage of the nation is a great impediment to development...

...The major handicaps to a more complete development are both internal and external...

...Superimposed on this backwardness has been the vicious landlord and money-lender system...

...A factory worker will earn $12 to $14 a month, a factory manager 20 to 40 times as much, and a full-fledged capitalist sometimes hundreds of times more...

...Has poverty declined after six years of independence...

...I know one zamindar who had 2,500 villages, with a million people, all subservient to him, His yearly income, he told me, was something like $8,000,000 — in a country where average annual earnings are $55...

...Even where the big zamindar goes, the smaller landlords remain...

...Even the Socialists and Communists pay wary attention to caste when they choose candidates for office...

...But meanwhile the majority of the villagers are reaping pitifully meager benefits from agrarian reform...

...When a crumb from a piece of cake fell on the ground two children dived for it...

...There is no gainsaying the fact that in Nehru the nation has an honest leader who genuinely wants to better the plight of the common man...

...In this respect the Socialist's second observation lends itself to justified pessimism: "May I also point out that you seem to have been unduly impressed with the chits that foreigners have given your government...

...On a per capita basis that means that we are doing about 60 or 70 times as much for France as for India...

...Internally, the Nehru leadership is filled with curious contradictions...

...Nowhere are there so many astrologers and palmists roaming the streets...

...Everywhere you go there are countless beggars...

...Some increase in urban production is already recorded—the most notable the new state-owned Sindri fertilizer factory, which now produces 230,000 tons...

...In each province the landlord class has been challenging the statutes for years up to the highest courts, thus delaying their implementation...

...A villager with ten acres is considered well-to-do...

...The government's Five Year Plan may be laying the basis for a better life in the future, but little of it is now visible...

...organize the peasants to build roads, wells, latrines, schools...

...Thus the old Party became transformed into an instrument of vested interests...

...Despite pre-independence promises of "land to the tiller," the laws provide only for reduced rents, occupancy rights, and restriction of high interest rates...

...But every one is only partially, often half-heartedly, in operation...

...Schools were going up, children were being trained, the harijan (outcast) children were sitting with the caste children, experimental plots were using new techniques in farming...

...The large majority with either no land or only small patches benefit only slightly if at all...

...The best one can hope to do is summarize the major problems and what the state has done about them...

...Only the joint family system, by which relatives share their meager pittance with their less fortunate brothers, saves the country from mass starvation...

...So would the completion of land reform...

...Harijans are still outcasts...

...In a generation or two it will probably be finished, particularly since most indemnification is partial and inheritance laws are being stiffened...

...More than 300,000 people who have no homes in Madras sleep on the streets...

...Cultivation is primitive...

...The children ate the bananas whole, skin and all...

...The types of landlordism vary from area to area...

...His fears, unfortunately, have substance...

...teach them the Japanese method of growing paddy...

...Only India can dim that beacon and replace it...

...Optimists claim that at this rate the standard of living will double in 25 years, but with current income only $55, that is hardly a breathtaking prospect...

...I have seldom met a man as well-informed...

...distribute better seed and fertilizer...

...Small scale industries and village cooperatives are planned for the landless laborer...

...Since independence in 1947 there is a new atmosphere in the country...

...Externally the country needs capital and needs it badly...

...I would not rate those chits too high . . . Often they come expecting to see a backward people just learning to manage their affairs, and when they find the Parliament, the Central Secretariat, the D.V.C., the polished English—well, they are just charmed . . ." Jayaprakash Narayan is neither doctrinaire nor sectarian...

...Politically he was "leftist" and anti-Stalinist...

...Big plantations—particularly those owned by British interests—are not touched...

...Thirty-five per cent of village inhabitants are landless laborers...

...It could make India a beacon of hope for all Asia and Africa...

...Even without foreign aid much more could be done...

...the same percentage are tenant farmers, who are cheated and swindled by the zamindar (tax-collector), his various subalterns and intermediaries, the banias (moneylenders), and anyone else who can get in on the act...

...Not only is the nation poor—$20 billion income for a total of 362 million people—but it has the heritage of thousands of years of sloth, superstition, and fatalism...

...The landlord class knows that, from the long view, it is fighting a rearguard battle...

...We gave away our mutton, bananas, and bread...

...It is a sad commentary on our American foreign policy that India and Pakistan together—with 450 million people ¦— receive only about a seventh or eighth as much U.S...

...In still other cases the state is the owner but the ryot belongs to a middle peasant who in turn rents to less fortunate peasants...

...The center of gravity of Congress shifted quickly towards those disinclined to social reform...

...I asked a group of women who were working a paddy field how much they earned...

...And of the rest, 15 to 20 per cent own only two to five acres...

...The negotiations fell through...

...Nehru, and Nehru alone, has saved the nation from such catastrophe...

...But whether he can mobilize the sluggish machine of his Congress Party for a great effort in that direction is still an unanswered question...

...Ill In each village Patel set up his machine, usually by doling out favors to the richer peasants and village leaders...

...it serves as a substitute for a birth certificate in a nation which doesn't keep a record of all births...

...This is clearly a step forward, but it only reinforces the thesis that the common man has not yet begun to see the benefit of his India Revolution...

...neither are large farms which employ agricultural labor instead of tenants...

...It would again bring forth the immeasurable idealism of the independence struggle, now temporarily in eclipse, and mobilize the youth for a great effort...

...Land Here is the nub of the Indian problem...

...A Chicago labor leader, Lens is the author of two books, "Left, Right and Center" and "The Counterfeit Revolution" and has written for many publications, including The Yale Review, the Harvard Business Review, and The Bui-letin of The Foreign Policy Association...

...For the man at the bottom of the rung nothing much has changed, since he has always been beholden to the smaller landlords who were intermediaries for the bigger ones...

...But two of the Socialist leader's observations are worthy of serious consideration...

...The tens of millions of cows, bullocks, and buffalos (almost as numerous as the human population) are sickly, half-useless, unproductive—but they waste thousands of acres of grazing land and give little milk and no meat at all because of Hindu belief that the cow is sacred...

...rice productivity, for instance, yields only one-third as much as in Japan...

...To Nehru's credit it can be said the country is embarked on a democratic course...

...Some time ago Nehru invited the Socialist leader Jayaprakash Nara-yan to discuss "coalition...

...But the weight of his party pulls him down too...

...all too frequently a party's vote is not a vote for its program but a vote of one caste against another...

...But even these wages don't tell the whole story...

...My impression is that if he had had his way there would have been no elections for ten years and India might well have trod the road of Chiang Kai-shek...

...I met one crew of rice laborers who told me their boss owned six acres and therefore did no work himself...

...By 1956 it is expected that nine million more acres of irrigated land will be added to the current 49 million and that more than one million kilowatts of electricity will be generated...

...Taken together this could form the base upon which a rapid transformation would be possible...

...In a letter to "My dear Bhai" [Nehru], Jayaprakash wrote: "China and India are the two countries in Asia to which all Asia and Africa are looking...

...launch night school sessions for the adults and day sessions for the children...

...Tens of millions are out of work entirely—and in India there is no unemployment compensation, work relief, or social security...

...Industrialization A five-year plan, now two years gone, provides for an expenditure of $3}/2 to $4 billion for irrigation, electricity, and industrialization...

...Each province—there are 27— passed its own land reform law...

...To introduce progressive change democratically in India is no mean achievement...

...Yet before the evening was over he pulled out a nine-foot sheet of decorated paper with his horoscope on it, and argued more than an hour about the scientific character of astrology...

...IV No one can brush aside the fact of progress...

...Lack of fertilizer, constant exploitation, SIDNEY LENS, on a year-long swing around the world, is reporting his major findings in a series of articles for The Progressive, of which this is the seventh...

...Next to Nehru he is unquestionably the most popular man in the country...

...To improve the agricultural economy the government, with American aid, has instituted Community Development Projects...

...Every one of these features has been undertaken by the Nehru government and its provincial satellites...

...Even these moderate laws are usually not obeyed...