Land reform drive to help poor
Follower of Gandhi successfully appealed to landowners to donate land, villages in 1950s
A FEW years after his return from South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi made the Sabarmati Ashram (hermitage) on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, his home. The Sabarmati Ashram was home to Mahatma Gandhi for most of the period between 1917 and 1930, and also the epicentre of India’s freedom struggle.
Nestled in a corner in Sabarmati Ashram is the Vinoba-Mira Kuteer (hut), named after two of Gandhi’s ardent disciples – Vinoba Bhave and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a rear admiral in the British Navy), who stayed in the hut at different points in time.
“Indian Raga” will today focus upon Vinoba Bhave, freedom fighter, activist for non-violence and human rights, social reformer and Gandhi’s spiritual heir.
However, he is best known as the initiator of the Bhoodan Movement.The Bhoodan Movement or “Gift of the Land” movement was a voluntary land-reform movement which aimed to encourage landlords with big parcels of land to voluntary donate part of them to landless farmers.
The drive was started by Bhave in 1951, four years after India’s independence, from the village of Pochampally in the present-day province of Telangana in southern India. The village was appropriately renamed as “Bhoodan Pochampally”.
Bhave first came in contact with Gandhian thought while studying at the famed Banaras Hindu University. Soon thereafter, in 1916, he is said to have burnt his school and college certificates as a way to break free and immerse himself wholeheartedly in following the ideals of Gandhi.
Gandhi was thoroughly impressed with the devotion and commitment shown by the young man and invited Bhave to stay with him in Kochrab Ashram, the predecessor of Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad.
Bhave turned out to be a true disciple of Gandhi. He adopted an ascetic lifestyle, like Gandhi, his spiritual and political guru, dressed in “khadi”, hand-spun and handwoven cotton fabric which came to be identified as the fabric of freedom during the struggle for independence, devoted his life to working for the betterment of the disadvantaged sections of society, and spent several years in colonial prisons following his active involvement in the freedom struggle. He earned the moniker of acharya (teacher).
Bhave so immersed himself in following Gandhian values that it was hard to distinguish him from his mentor. His later-day critics argued that he was more Gandhian than Gandhi.
He was chosen by Gandhi as the first individual “Satyagrahi” (one who follows the quest of truth) in October 1940 following the policy of non-participation in World War II and to protest against the British edicts which banned public assemblies and speeches. He spent most of the next five years in prison.
It required an individual of this mettle, conviction and training (by the master himself) to address an issue as complicated and sensitive as land redistribution, and successfully initiate a peaceful and voluntary process.
And how did he accomplish this seemingly impossible task?
The nation-building process in the years after independence in 1947 was going through birth pangs. While the process of the integration of more than 560 different geographical entities into the Union of India was in the works, social and economic divides as a result of more than 200 years of colonial exploitation came to the fore in the form of conflicts and violence in some regions. One such region was in present-day Telangana.
True to his Gandhian upbringing, Bhave undertook a peace walk in 1951 to assuage the effects of violence in violence-torn areas. It was during his peace walk that in April 1951, families from the disadvantaged sections in Pochampally asked him if he could help them in getting about 32 hectares of land, and provide for their sustenance.
At a village meeting, Bhave made an appeal to the landlords to come forward and donate land for this cause. To everyone’s surprise, Vedire Ramachandra Reddy, a prosperous landlord, immediately offered a large parcel of his land as a donation.
The land was to be transferred to Bhave, who would then redistribute it among the needy. Thus began the Bhoodan or Gift of the Land movement in India, which was to be termed independent India’s first mass movement. Over several years, Vinoba Bhave travelled on foot across the nation and appealed to the owners of large tracts of land to offer one-sixth of their land holdings as a donation. Such parcels of land were then handed over to the local Bhoodan council, which redistributed the land as individual plots to the landless poor.
The new owners of the land could settle there and cultivate it to provide sustenance to their families, but couldn’t sell it.
Going a step forward, starting in 1954, Bhave started asking for donations of whole villages; his appeal led to the donation of more than 1 000 villages. The programme was named “Gramadan” (Gift of the Village). The newly formed provincial governments passed legislation, called Bhoodan acts, which gave a legal framework to the process around the redistribution of land in this manner.
The movement continued across India for around 13 years and met with good success. It led to the redistribution of around 202 000ha of land in the 1950s. More significantly, it helped heal the fissures between the landowners and the landless, and brought about harmonious, mutual understanding.
Choosing him to be the first recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1958, the award committee noted that Acharya Vinoba Bhave recognised the “force of a single act of human generosity, dedicated himself to the propagation of a new kind of social revolution in India, and has awakened a consciousness of inner strength and nurtured a social morality”.
A true Gandhian that he was, the acharya could not be present in person to receive the award, for “his padyatra, or walking to villages, must continue until the land problem of India is satisfactorily solved”. This was his Satyagraha, the quest for truth.