Land reform and Agrarian change in India and Pakistan since 1947: 1

Abstract

Analysing the class character of land reform in India and Pakistan the author makes a distinction between ideology and programme. Judged by its ideology, land reform in India is sharply anti‐landlord and pro‐peasant and is thus a mobiliser of peasant support for the ruling elite. The programme of land reform, however, serves primarily the interests of an emerging intermediate class of under‐proprietors and big peasants. This intermediate class makes a joint front with the rural poor to curb the privileges of landlords. But it makes a common cause with the landlords to thwart any prospect of agrarian radicalism turning into a pro‐poor agrarian programme. In Pakistan the conflict between the old landlords and the emerging intermediate class is not as sharply articulated as in India and land policy therefore had a more pronounced pro‐landlord bias than was the case in India. In Pakistan at best it denotes the tension between the old moribund and a new dynamic landlord class.†

Notes

Professor of Economic Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi The author is grateful to several persons for their help in preparation of this paper: especially to Professor Ajit Biswas for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper; to Dr. Dharm Narain, Dr. C. H. Hanumantha Rao and Dr. Andre Beteille for discussions on a number of points; and to Dr. Suren Navlakha for help in preparing the final draft of this paper. This article first appeared In Studies in Asian Social Development. I.