Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Well, I found out. And alongside knowledge of agriculture came also the knowledge of how much was being done by my comrades.

This is what Samir said — When we first came here a few months ago, in the summer, they thought we were another party looking for votes. If they could have brought themselves to do it, they would’ve set upon us with their lathis. First of all, they vote for whoever the village head asks them to cast their vote for: either for the twin-bullocks sign or the hammer-and-sickle sign. The head is paid in kind for this, you know, his food grains taken care of for a year, or a parcel of land suddenly made out to his name. No such rewards for the farmers, mind you. And there’s a lot of murderous rivalry going on with acquiring these vote-banks, as you can imagine. Two years ago, during the drought, CPI(M) cadres were doing some relief work here, distributing sacks of grains to hard-hit villagers, but on the understanding that they would be casting their vote for the hammer-sickle-star. The aid relief was received only by villages that have always voted for them. There had been some mistake: some people in Changripota had already received some rice from the relief people when it was discovered that they had voted for Congress in ’62. The cadres went back and took away the rice from the starving farmers.

So it wasn’t easy for us to convince them that we hadn’t come for their votes. One of them spat at us, an old man, thin, wiry, a bit stooped, white moustache on a black face. He said, ‘Twenty years we’ve been independent of foreign rule, but things have remained the same for us. No, they’ve got much worse. At that time we used to be told that the sahebs are sucking our blood dry, the sahebs are taking our land away, our crops away, the sahebs have stolen all our possessions from us, but the sahebs have long gone now, why are things still the same? We’re foolish, illiterate people, we can’t read, we don’t understand much, but we understand at least this: the bloodsuckers are still there, their skin colour has changed. That’s the only change that has happened.’

— Later I found out that this man, Mukunda Mashan, used to be the tenant of four bighas of land. His father had been the tenant on it before that. Under the Land Tenure Act, Mukunda was eligible for occupancy because his father and he had rented it for so many years. When the government officials came to measure the land in this area, the jotedaar gave Mukunda a choice: if Mukunda wanted to register as a tenant, he would be evicted immediately; if he didn’t, he would be kept on as a tenant. What would he feed his family, what would he eat, how would they live if he got evicted? And in these times? And you know how people like to say that listening to what the landlord says, obeying him, is hard-wired in these classes of people. But the landlord and his legion of supporters and yes-men have other ways too: arbitrarily increasing rents, say, from half the yield on the land to three-quarters; or killing the tenant’s bullock so that he cannot work the rented land efficiently enough, thus falling behind with the rent; a son or a daughter or a wife threatened. . these are probably some of the more benign methods of intimidating him. Fear is a much more reliable tool than hard-wiring, no?

— And then there’s good old deceit: the jotedaar didn’t tell Mukunda that if he registered, he couldn’t be evicted, because of the number of years that had passed in their tenancy. They were illiterate people, so they didn’t, couldn’t, find out more. Mukunda thought that things had ticked along without registration for two generations, so what did it matter now? On top of that, Mukunda belonged to a lower caste, so it was not in the interest of the village head or any official to enlighten him. Soon after that the jotedaar evicted him anyway, and Mukunda had no recourse to the law because he was not the officially registered tenant.

So the jotedaar pushes a family down, a demotion really, from tenants to wage-labourers, a demotion from year-round work to work for a quarter of the year. We know what that means for the family. And all for what purpose? To add four bighas of land to his existing 250.

This was something about human nature I’d never been able to understand. Why did words such as ‘sufficient’ or ‘enough’ have no meaning, no traction in our lives? Greed ate the soul. Sometimes I felt that the haves in our society became giant magnets and, following some law of physics or astronomy transposed to human affairs, sucked in more and more, enlarging their states. You know that Arunima goes to a missionary school, so she has to study the Bible. I have occasionally browsed through her copy. One day a sentence leaped out and hit me between the eyes: ‘For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.’ This was the way the world was, so why did I refuse to acknowledge and accept this truth? Why did I keep pushing against it and fighting it as if it were the greatest wrong in the world? Not as if; it was. That was why the only way to live was to battle its great error.

Teaching the small farmers, the daily-wage labourers and the sharecroppers the politics of class was not my duty. Samir and Dhiren were seeing to it. They said that class analysis was something they found easy to get across. The day-labourers had an intuitive understanding of it. All over the villages here our comrades have fanned out, taking on the task of first educating the farmers, giving the examples of peasant revolutions from the last twenty years — Tebhaga and Telengana and Naxalbari — to encourage and enthuse. I was beginning to think that the basic work, a belief that things could not, need not, remain the same for ever, had been achieved.

A little politics lesson now (I promise to keep it short):

These regions had seen, in the last few years, a radical solution to the reduction of enormous landholdings by greedy jotedaars. Landless peasants, organised under some leftist party or another, have marched on Congress-supporting jotedaars, carrying knives and spears and lathis and axes, have driven out the landlords, planted red flags on the four corners of his illegally acquired (and illegally consolidated) land, distributed their hoarded grain, seized their crops. What were the police doing in all this? you may ask. Nothing. Orders had come from up high, from the CPI(M) headquarters, that this was legitimate, this was the true democratic struggle, the first step towards land reform and the ultimate abolition of private ownership of land.

Was it?

No.

At first I too thought that it was. As Harekrishna Konar, the then Land Minister, put it: abolition of large-scale landholding → distribution of land to the landless → education of peasants in the disadvantages of cultivating small landholdings → peasants voluntarily adopt collective farming → END OF PRIVATE LAND-OWNERSHIP. Five easy steps, and the first two were already under way, the second one with the support of the police.

How wrong I was. How innocent I was not to have understood the vote-bank calculus of the CPI(M). By appearing to be on the side of the landless peasant, they added nearly five lakh of them to the party in a clean, swift stroke. You had to admire them for their far-seeing chicanery. They had no intention of pursuing real and radical land reforms, as envisioned by Charu Mazumdar. They only wanted enough votes so that they could come to power in West Bengal as a majority, not in a coalition, as they are now, in the United Front.

Their mask slipped when Naxalbari happened. They had not reckoned for this — they had wanted the peasants to stay within the boundaries set by them. They underestimated what would really happen if the landless were given a taste of their own power. So when that began to happen, the CPI(M)’s true colours were revealed — every bit as reactionary as the Congress, every bit as supportive of the Establishment, as fearful of upsetting the apple-cart, as ingratiating to the central government. . If they alienated the central government with their tacit, even open, support of all this militancy and land-grabbing, they would never come to power in the state. So they had to trim their sails to that end.