INDIA'S 'SECOND GANDHI'

...They joined Vinoba Bhave's walking tour late in May...

...Suppose trie owner of a 10,000 acre farm has four sons and a fifth is born later," Vinobaji suggests, "would he not have to make five shares of his property instead of four...

...They cover about twenty miles a day, stopping during the hottest mid-day hours and again in the afternoon for the daily village Bhoo-dan meeting...

...Gaunt, bearded 58 year-old Vinoba Bhave (pronounced Bha-way) is building a movement which may prove as significant as the great freedom movement the Mahatma led...

...This trip netted 18,000 acres, and indicated the potential of the movement throughout India...

...Bhave is a scholarly Bhahman who gave up an early interest in violent means of winning India's freedom and joined the Gandhian movement...

...Called the Bhoo-dan Yagna or "Land-Gift Mission," Bhave's quietly revolutionary land reform movement is now being organized on a nationwide scale after two years of spadework in three provinces...

...He asks them to look upon the poor as members of their own families, and to give freely...

...The land was given, and "Bhoo-dan Yagna" was born...

...One of these co-workers in Bihar has been an American college girl, Patricia Mc-Mahon, from the University of Michigan...

...He has lived a life of utter simplicity, in recent years laboring as any peasant on the land of his ashram (or communal religious settlement) not far from where Gandhi lived during the latter part of his life...

...And to the thousands of land-hungry peasant families who can now call a piece of land their own, Bhoo-dan is an amazing revolution come overnight...

...It has thus far resulted in more than 1,200,000 acres being given to landless peasants...

...It was in April that a group of landless Harijans (the so-called untouchables) pleaded with him for land...

...Gandhi had great respect for Bhave, and in 1940 chose him to be the first to initiate passive resistance to Indian participation in World War II...

...Since then Vinobaji has concentrated in United Provinces and Bihar, where he is now walking...

...to leave Bihar, where the plight of the poor is desperate, until one-sixth of that province's cultivated land, or some 3,200,000 acres, has been contributed for the landless...

...I ask the landholders to regard me as an additional heir born to them and to give me my share for the benefit of the poor...

...He has promised not DOUG KELLEY and his wife Cynthia are studying Gandhian rural improve' ment work in India in preparation for educational work in Africa...

...No murdered landlords or violence of any kind, no expropriation, no burdensome long term payments by the new owners, no intervention on the part of the clanking apparatus of the state...

...Next came a two^months walk to New Delhi to testify before the National Planning Commission, at the invitation of Prime Minister Nehru...

...Largely as a result of Communist-led violence in Hyderabad (in south central India) Vinobaji set out on a walking tour of the affected areas of that state in 1951, seeking to understand the grievances of the peasants as the basis for planning assistance...

...Miss Pat," as she is called, is the first of a number of young Americans being sent to work with the Gandhians by the International Der-velopment Placement Association, in New York City...

...How has it happened...

...He assembled the people of their village and appealed to them to give their landless fellow villagers land to support themselves...

...But to the landowner who attends a Bhoo-dan meeting, listens to its stirring songs and prayers, hears Vinobaji's plea, and then perhaps painfully decides to stand and proudly announce his contribution, Bhoo-dan Yagna is above all such criticism...

...Having walked with Vinobaji for two months, she has now been sent off to study Hindi in preparation for more lengthy service...

...II Although one maharajah has given 100,000 acres, many gifts are from relatively small landholders...

...Bhave's conviction that his is the work of God makes for a kind of self-righteousness some observers consider unhealthy, and although Gandhians favor extreme decentralization in economics and government, this most promising of Gandhian undertakings has thus far been built around but one man, and subject to his direction...

...Some far-sighted critics also point to the need for large-scale mechanized farming on a cooperative basis, rather than the type of small individual holdings which Bhoo-dan is encouraging...

...Bhave's permanent entourage usually consists of about a dozen persons, each -with his own assigned duty—handling of land titles, typing, translating, publicity, food, housing, and baggage transport arrangements...

...Leaders of the ruling Congress party and' the opposition Peoples Socialist party are vying with each other in their support for Bhoo-dan...

...National direction of the campaign, however, rests with the independent organization of Gandhian rural improvement workers, the Sarva Seva Sangh, which is now dispatching workers, many of them enthusiastic young people, to all parts of India to begin their own Bhoo-dan walking tours...

...Donors appear to be motivated by a mixture of the religious and humanitarian sentiments which Vinobaji stimulates, fear of Communism, and desire for public approval...

...Meanwhile the Communists sit sulking on the sidelines, protesting that all this is intended merely to forestall their brand of revolution...

...Vinoba Bhave, affectionately and respectfully called Vinobaji by his followers, is simply walking through the countryside, as Gandhi did on some of his campaigns, asking landlords to give portions of their land to the poverty-stricken landless peasants of their villages...

...Bhoo-dan's shortcomings are not nearly so obvious as its merits, but they do exist...

...When Vinobaji left Hyderabad two months later he had received some 12,000 acres in trust for the landless poor...

...By 1957 he hopes to have received and distributed 50 million acres, or one-sixth of India's cultivated land...