Land relations in West Bengal in the last 30 years have gone out of kilter. The celebrated land reform programme of the ruling Left Front, which went a long way in changing the age-old relations between landowners and sharecroppers, was effective in the first 10 to 15 years of the Left rule.
The CPI(M)-led Left Front has been ruling the state uninterrupted since 1977.
Bijoy Mukherjee, professor of philosophy at the Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, belongs to the class of landed gentry of Birbhum, who saw from close quarters the ‘Operation Barga’ and the related land reforms movement introduced by the ruling CPI(M) in 1978.
According to Mukherjee, in the first decade of land reforms, the relation between landowners and sharecroppers was acrimonious, as the owners were conscious they were going to lose their traditional hold over their land. At that time, the CPI(M)-led government decided to support the sharecroppers in the form of cash grant and encouraged the rural banks to release agricultural credit.
But the cash-strapped state government could not sustain this. Banks also lost their enthusiasm soon, as they found such a programme was not sustainable.
So, willy-nilly the sharecroppers went back to the land owners in some areas and patched up with them.
Landowners started pumping money into their land and in return got a two-thirds share of the crop. Mukherjee called this reversal of land reform the ‘replacement of Barga entitlement’.
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The other side of the land reform movement was distribution of land to the landless. But that also showed signs of reversal. The state government, in its first Human Development Report (2004), admitted that the landless peasants who got land began losing it to the relatively well-off farmers because of the lack of support from banks and the government.
The report put the figure of these peasants at around 15 per cent.
Thus, the aggressive posturing of the government on land reforms was somewhat blunted and a ‘social stability’ was restored in rural areas.
When the CPI(M) established its writ in rural Bengal, the Congress, whose support base was built around the landowning class in the villages, lost its vital supporting plank.
With none too gentle nudging from the newly empowered poor peasant, the landed gentry started leaving the villages for district towns. Those who could not — and it was a large number — took shelter under the wings of Left parties other than the CPI(M). Thus arose some pockets of resistance in the 1990s in districts like North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Birbhum and elsewhere, where sporadic clashes took place between the supporters of CPI(M) and that of Forward Bloc or Revolutionary Socialist Party, both constituents of the ruling Front. In Nanur, the clashes between RSP and CPI(M) supporters were a regular feature in the late 1990s and afterwards. According to RSP sources, from 1970 to 2010, both sides lost over 30 people each in these clashes. Now, the Trinamool Congress (TC) — the CPI(M)’s main rival in the state — has replaced the RSP in this battlefield.
The rural poor are invariably the immediate victim of this political violence. Since the question of capturing the land of the landowner is not relevant now, political parties have turned their attention to the panchayat system.
In the Nanur block in Birbhum, there are 11 gram panchayats. In the last civic body elections in 2008, the CPI(M) won 10 seats, and the TC, one. But according to a CPI(M)-backed village council head, most of the council heads and other elected representatives have been brought under control of TC leaders at gunpoint.
He cites the case of Dharitri Saha, the chief of the Chalkal gram panchayat, who is regularly taken to her panchayat office and is forced to sign cheques at gunpoint.
In the Bolpur subdivision, there are as many as 40 gram panchayats that got Rs 42.6 crore last year under the Centre’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme alone. Kabir Suman, the Trinamool MP from Jadavpur, has hinted at rampant pilferage of panchayat funds in the South 24 Parganas district, which is being held by the Trinamool Congress at the panchayat level.
Trinamool activists who are involved in the ‘loot’ of panchayat funds have only been emboldened by this.
“The CPI(M) have been looting the panchayat funds for the last 30 years. Now, it is our turn.”
Thus, while panchayat funds had become a source of big income, first for the ruling Left and now for the TC, it has also led to subjugation the rural poor.
Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee recently said she wanted transparency in the functioning of the panchayats and would like to review it every three months wherever her party is in power. “Since we don’t have any system of social and physical audit, mere scrutiny of the completion/utilisation certificates won’t reveal the real picture,” commented a senior official of the panchayat department.
Amid the political war for capturing the rural areas, the poor people continue to bleed.
Most of them have little option but to remain in their villages, often at their own peril. The passivity is not rewarded; they are forced to rally behind the warring factions.