Suniti Kumar Ghosh: His Contribution to Indian Historiography–II

Amit Bhattacharyya

[In the present section on Suniti Kumar Ghosh’s contribution to Indian historical studies, we begin with his book, ‘Imperialism’s Tightening Grip on Indian Agriculture’.]

In the preface to the book, Ghosh observed: “Science and Technology have given man powers which could not be conceived a few decades ago. If those powers are used for the good of mankind, they can banish want and misery from the whole world and enrich the life of every person on earth—materially and culturally. But those powers are used by a small minority, especially a few trans-nationals based in imperialist countries, among which the USA is prominent, for their own profit, for exploiting the resources of the entire world, for dominating other countries, especially the countries of the third world and for plundering them. Those who possess vast economic power also wield immense political power…”

“Multilateral world organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, which control the different aspects of the lives of the world’s peoples, are in reality controlled by a few imperialist powers, chief among which is the USA”.

“Science and technology have been harnessed to the imperialist chariot. Like other branches of science and technology, biochemistry and genetic engineering are made to serve the imperialists. Never before have so few exploited and oppressed so many… Perhaps this may be described as the highest stage of imperialism”. In this book, Ghosh analyses the nature of the ‘Green Revolution’ and its impact on Indian agriculture. This book is divided into nine chapters: Colonial Legacy, Land Reforms, Community Development Programme, Dependence on the USA for Food, Imperialist Restructuring of India’s Agricultural System, Green Revolution Phase 1, Superior Indigenous Technology Suppressed, Elite Training, Green Revolution Phase:2 and Agrarian Relations.

Indian agriculture, like other aspects of the Indian economy, was controlled by imperialism. During the colonial period, the British ruling class transformed Indian countryside into an agricultural hinterland for the supply of raw material to metropolitan Britain. What was true of the colonial period is generally no less true of the period after independence. In the post-1947 period, it was the USA, rather than the UK which took the lead in globalizing the world in her own interest. The object of America was to transform Indian economy in a way that serves the interests of US transnational corporations. The aim, according to Ghosh, was to decide for India what to produce and how to produce and to make Indian agriculture an appendage of imperialist capital. Let us begin our discussion with the period immediately following the transfer of power in 1947.

Land Reforms: Beset with various contradictions, the British imperialists, according to Ghosh, thought it prudent to transfer power in 1947 to “friendly and reliable hands”, who would preserve their economic, strategic and political interests. The Indian big bourgeoisie, comprador in nature, and the big landlords, mainly feudal in character, became the new ruling classes of India, pledged to keep India within the British Common Wealth (Ghosh, p.9). In this alliance the former class was the major partner.

During the transfer of power, native states were merged into the Indian Union and their princes who retained vast lands and other personal possessions India was faced, were rewarded with princely ‘privy purses’ for many years and a number of them were elevated to high official positions as governors, ministers, ambassadors etc.

But India’s ruling classes could hardly ignore the severe agrarian crisis with which India was faced. Food shortage was very acute and famine conditions prevailed in India before and after 1947. The Telangana peasant struggle soon developed into a peasant struggle for both land and state power.

In fact, in their many rhetorical exercises before and after 1947, Congress leaders like Nehru talked of ‘land to the tiller’. All these, according the Suniti Kumar Ghosh, were but “sops to the restive peasantry against the background of their militant struggles” (ibid).

The agrarian problem in India caused much concern to the US imperialists, too, who had grown sadder and wiser after being driven out of China in 1949. According to Chester Bowles, US Ambassador to India in the early 1950s and also in the 1960s, “In the coldest terms of stopping communism…the democratic world simply must carry out these [land] reforms before Communists can use the lack of them as an excuse to overthrow democracy” (Chester Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, pp.175-76). In 1952, he brought to India the foremost US experts in land policy, Wolf Ladejinsky and Professor Kenneth Parsons of the University of Wisconsin. He tried to impress on Nehru the urgent need for land reforms, the inadequacy in which Bowles regarded as “one of the most important weaknesses in the Nehru government”. After making intensive studies of several states ‘Ladejinsky reported that the bitter complaints of the peasants reminded him of similar complaints he heard in pre-Communist China in 1946. The land inequalities, he said, were as bad or even worse than he had seen anywhere in Asia” (Ibid, pp.114, 185).

The political and economic conditions, as Ghosh argues, urged the ruling classes to undertake some agrarian legislations. Different constituent states of the Indian Union enacted legislations like zamindary abolition and land ceiling acts. By the zamindary abolition acts the government acquired the interests of the ‘topmost layer of a hierarchy of intermediaries’ by paying compensation to them. The burden of it mostly fell on the peasants themselves. The zamindars were allowed to retain khasland and resume more in the name of cultivating it themselves. As a class, the intermediaries between the state and the actual tillers of the soil were not removed. The land ceiling legislation after making liberal concessions to the large landowners, religious institutions, orchards, plantations, sugar-cane firms owned by sugar factories, and so on, left such loopholes that allowed owners of large landed property to retain their possessions. In fact, before the enactment of the legislation they were permitted sufficient time to divide their landed property and hold it in their own, their relatives’ as well as under fictitious names.

Thus whole land reform legislations hardly benefitted the bulk of the actual tillers of the soil and as such were but a farce. According to Ghosh, all talk of taking over the land in excess of ceilings (which were fixed quite high) and distributing the surplus among the poor and landless peasants proved in practice to be mere rhetoric. According to a study undertaken by the statistical division of the Reserve Bank of India, the share of the lowest 25 per cent of rural households in the assets of all rural households in the country was only 1.3 per cent (Economic Times, 30 October, 1976).

In fact, more than 70 per cent of those who depend on agriculture as their main means of livelihood are poor peasants with very small plots of land and landless agricultural workers.

Suniti Kumar Ghosh was quite right while arguing that the land reform legislations were not intended by the ruling classes, notwithstanding their loud rhetoric, to bring about any significant changes in the ownership of land. In one of his speeches at the Nagpur session of the Congress held in the late 1950s, Nehru, the ‘architect of modern India’, said that “Though the imposition of ceilings would affect only an infinitesimal minority of landlords, and though its actual practical gains would not be much, the sentimental gains would be tremendous” (AICC Economic Review, 1 February 1959, (p.23); cited in Grigory Kotovsky, Agrarian Reforms in India, p.104). On the contrary, agrarian legislations actually strengthened the positions of the landlords and the upper strata of the peasantry.

According to Ghosh, the basic problem—the problem of ownership of land was not solved by the agrarian legislation: there was no fundamental change in the property structure of the rural society. It was not the purpose of the land legislation to solve the land problem, to liquidate semi-feudalism, the colonial legacy, but to curb the grosser manifestations of and develop capitalism in agriculture to some extent, convert gradually a section of landlords and rich peasants and into capitalist farmers and increase agricultural production.

On the contrary, the land reforms were intended to serve another purpose, no less important: this was to sow illusions among the peasantry, make “sentimental gains”, as Nehru remarked, and draw the bulk of the peasantry away from revolutionary struggles. In this task, as Ghosh asserts, the ruling classes found an ally in the Communist Party of India.

In fact, the kind of agrarian reforms undertaken by the Indian ruling classes, as Paul Baran pointed out, fails to break the feudal grip on the state. “They tend, therefore, as he observed, “to accentuate all the negative repercussions of agrarian reforms without leading the way to industrial development and to reorganization and rationalization of the agrarian economy resulting therefrom” (The Political Economy of Growth, p.169 fn; also p.170).

In fact, land ‘reforms’ failed to solve India’s problems. ‘Reformed’ agriculture could contribute not much surplus for investment in industry. Nor could it create a sufficiently large market for industrial goods. Without an agrarian revolution, there could be no industrial regeneration.

Community Development Programme
The Community Development Programme, which formed an integral part of India’s early five-year-plans, and the aim of which was the rebuilding of India’s villages and village-life, was undertaken under US inspiration and with US assistance. Ghosh points out that the programme, as Selig Harrison writes, “has a special significance for Americans because it was the American architect and town-planner, Albert Meyer, who developed the experimental project, at Etawah.” Chester Bowles brought US technical assistance funds and American rural sociologist, Douglas Ensminger, who directed Ford Foundation training of the Indians for the new ‘Community projects’. (Quoted in Rajani Palme Dutt, India Today, pp.274-75). Albert Meyer, who had served with the US army during World War II and who enjoyed Nehru’s confidence, developed in 1948 a pilot project covering 64 villages in Etawah in Uttar Pradesh with official support. As Ghosh argues, there were other more important factors in the launching of the project. In fact, Nehru expected it to serve “as a model for meeting the revolutionary threats from left-wing and communist peasant movements demanding basic social reforms in agriculture”, as George Rosen asserts. (George Rosen, Western Economists and Eastern Societies, p.49, emphasis added).

The aims of the programme were lofty ones: not only intensive agricultural development—land reclamation, irrigation, farm management, crop protection, application of scientific methods of cultivation like the use of improved seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and better implements—but also improvement of health and education, social welfare, road-building, formation of cooperative societies and so one. The whole of rural India was expected to be covered by the programme in stages. The programme proposed the formation of cooperative societies and panchayats, which would be entrusted with the task of framing plans of all-embracing village development and implementing them. In this way, the entire face of rural India was expected to be transformed—peacefully without any change in the property structure and avoiding all class conflict, as Ghosh observes.

Nehru was eloquent about the “peaceful revolution” that was unfolding. Inaugurating the first community projects in October 1952, he declared that “the work we are starting today” was the beginning of a great social revolution. He proclaimed: “We are now talking in terms of a big revolution, a peaceful revolution. Not of turmoil and the breaking of heads. It is in this manner that we shall transform our country. Peacefully, we shall remove the evils of our country and promote a better order. (Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-1977, pp.101-9); the quote is on p.109—emphasis added). As a matter of fact, as Suniti Kumar Ghosh argued, Nehru sought to use the programme to create an illusion among the oppressed peasantry that it was possible to reconcile the irreconcilables—the interests of the landlords and usurers with those of their victims. He expected through such device and his rhetoric to inspire the latter with the ideals which were transforming the face of post-Revolution rural China.

In fact, both the Nehrus and the US imperialists felt that the conditions in rural India were quite serious. They were afraid that if some important steps were taken, India might go the China way.

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations lent their support to the programme. US Aid for International Development (USAID) and the Ford Foundation worked together on the Community Development Programme. For its implementation, funds were provided by Ford Foundation, the USAID and the US Department of Agriculture, among others. About 50,000 workers were trained under the Ford programmes. The US land-grant universities and the Rockefeller Foundation were invited to help in setting up Indian agricultural universities and agricultural research institutions. Institutes like the Indian Statistical Institute, the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the Delhi School of Economics, and the Gokhale Institute in Pune worked in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were provided with funds by the Ford Foundation.

There is no doubt that the programme yielded fruit. But, Ghosh asks, what happened to Nehru’s “big revolution”, “peaceful revolution”?

“Besides ‘bringing some Americans and some Indians together’, it consolidated the interests of the landlords and moneylenders, who alone were able to take advantage of the ‘community projects’—the government funds that were invested in them and institutions created by the government like the credit co-operative societies and panchayats’(Ghosh, p.18).

Jayaprakash Narayan was not when he said: “You take the village as it is and you give it the right of electing the panchayat and carrying on certain functions and duties. What will happen in such a village? …the dominant castes or a few leading families or the bullies will capture the panchayats and run them for their own use”.(Quoted in Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama II, p.884, fn.2).

Ghosh argues that during that period, cooperative farming, like socialism, was a populist slogan. In China, cooperative farming has banished chronic hunger. But for its success, a protracted revolution of the violent type had been essential to get rid of the age-old political, economic and social system. However, Nehru’s ‘peaceful revolution’, a revolution without tears, only strengthened the social and economic status quo and the imperialist grip over Indian agricultural system. Quite naturally, it failed to resolve the food problem or the problem of employment of vast human resources in the countryside. Thus the food crisis grew worse with the passing of days.

[To be continued]

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Vol 57, No. 38, March 16 - 22, 2025