The farmers agitation in areas of western Uttar Pradesh is not just about land and its correct recompense to the farmer, it encapsulates within it all the apprehensions and fears of old India as it confronts the new one.
It?s a well known fact that agriculture as a sector has stagnated in the last few years and despite several government interventions in correct pricing, government procurement and other measures, its attractiveness as a means of livelihood has seen a consistent decline. Many state governments then turned to industrialisation through marquee projects as a way out of the economic stagnation in the countryside.
Economists may argue till they are blue in the face that industrialisation would flatten out inequality and that there is no question of anyone being left out, and yet project after project in rural and tribal hinterlands of the country appears to be mired in difficulties, specifically related to land acquisition. To an outsider, the agitation by farmers looks like a protest against private funds and business; it is in fact specifically targeted towards the state and the government of the day. If Naveen Patnaik is the villain in Orissa, it?s Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh.
It is a fallacy that farmers want to ?preserve? their way of life and reject any fruits of industrial development that may come their way. They too want urban facilities, cash incomes and access to a better life. Therefore, the protests show a deeper malaise at work, which deals directly with the way land is acquired across the country for these projects.
The Land Acquisition Act of 1894 is the basis for most of the legislation on the subject. Framed and implemented by an imperial power, it defined public purposes narrowly and gave almost unlimited and arbitrary rights to the state to acquire any land for any purpose on favourable terms for itself more or less.
After Independence, this law remained pretty much the template for land acquisition across the country for even government projects. The agitation in Aligarh against land acquisition is frankly against this very arbitrary fixing of land value, and the state acting as a real estate agent for private industry. Instead of an imperialist power, it is democratically elected governments that are doing this. Every chief minister wants the image of being someone who brought in industrial prosperity to a starving, stagnant countryside. And if some land deals are a little suspect in the whole scheme, the greater common good would subsume that.
It was against this background and the bloody foreground of Singur and Nandigram agitations that the new improved Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill and the concomitant Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2007, were proposed by the then UPA government. It is a measure of just how badly the state wants to retain its hold as the only procurer of land for industrial projects that both the BJP and the Left parties rejected the Bill in the standing committee in Parliament. Quite clearly, the desire to hog the credit for industrialising the countryside appeared too difficult to let go of. The idea of clinging to the old mai baap sarkar model retains a powerful hold among the governing classes.
The agitation in Uttar Pradesh?a politically sensitive state for national politics?may, just may, allow passage of the two Bills, which firmly reject the role of the state as a real estate agent for private industrial houses and lays down humane and market-related conditions for the acquisition of land.
The old India of the all-pervading state handing out largesse according to its discretion and deciding what the greater common good is needs to be phased out. The farmers in Nandigram, Singur, and even Aligarh raised their agitations on their own, with political parties being caught unawares of the popular current, and Mamata Banerjee cashing in just in time.
All these agitations started as a demand for a just settlement of land value and a desperate articulation that the development bandwagon would take the best of rural resources, leaving farmers and farm workers with nothing. It is not, unlike what is being tried to be portrayed, a Luddite protest against modern industrialisation. A just law, promising fair recompense and an opportunity to better oneself is what rural India is looking for. If the political class is not careful, it may cling too long to its old patronising role and find itself on the wrong side of history.
nistula.hebbar@ expressindia.com