Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tian communities and other groups in Kerala, in 1959 the current Indian
Prime Minister at the time, Jawaharlal Nehru, imposed “President's
Rule” in the state. The national government dismissed the Communist-
led state government and placed Kerala under direct federal rule for sev-
eral months. W hen another election was held in early 1960, the CPI lost
the majority of its seats in Kerala's Legislative Assembly to the Congress
party, and state rule was restored. Despite this defeat, and atempts by
the Congress party and its supporters to alter Kerala's land reform bills,
Kerala's Communist parties continued organizing and mobilizing citi-
zens around redistribution. They and their allies won the majority of As-
sembly seats again in 1967.23
The implementation of Kerala's Communist-
driven Land Reform Act
of 1963 began in earnest in the 1970s. This revolutionary “land to the til-
ler” policy endorsed a society where cultivators could finally become the
owners of their land and their agricultural outputs—and ideally become
self-suicient as a community of small farmers. Over one million tenants
benefited from these reforms, and in excess of two million acres of land
were transferred to new farmers.24 During this process, the government
created new property rights and transitioned the economy from feudal-
ism to capitalism.
As with other reforms, implementation did not occur without struggle.
Several vested interests preferred maintaining the status quo of land re-
lations in the state. According to Herring, it took the Left several years to
build support for Kerala's land reforms, and what was eventually passed
in 1963 was a watered-down version of the Communists' earlier vision.25
However, Kerala's early government coalitions agreed that feudal land
relations had contributed to the stagnation of the agrarian economy. Ag-
riculture had become inefficient and yields low. The Communist and coa-
lition governments also agreed with the British colonial regime about the
importance of commercial farming for export, as a source of needed rev-
enue for the nascent state government. As the early series of official Five
Year Plans from Kerala shows,26 the state Assembly therefore encouraged
the new landowners to plant cash crops in order to bolster exports on
the global market. As explained in the last chapter, the state government
ushered in new technologies and chemicals, such as HYV seeds and en-
