If successfully passed, an unintended consequence of the Land Ordinance Bill could also

mean the end of some of our long-celebrated village morals, which Ambedkar rightly
considered as just plain narrow-mindedness.
As Anna Hazare, the new age Gandhi consolidates his flock to protest against the
governments anti-farmer land ordinance, one is reminded of the original Mahatma and his
love for village life and polity. While Annas protest may be more about the right to private
property of the farmers, Gandhi had a moral vision that was larger and beyond just the risk
of farmers losing their land. Gandhi saw village life as the ideal form of intimate sacrifice and
high culture, where an anarchy based on self-sacrificing morals would sustain itself far from
the mess of modern industrial life and interest-driven politics. Can the present debate
around the Land Ordinance Bill and the sharp criticism from those opposing it help us revisit
the relevance of modernity to Indian villages?
Land, power in village life
During a lecture on modernisation theories of development and the importance of Adam
Smith, I shared with my class the history of progress in the United States and how from only
15 per cent of families having flush toilets in the 1900s, almost 99 per cent had them by the
1970s. A student from a semi-urban background was not convinced. He asked me why rich
landlords in Uttar Pradesh dont have toilets in their homes despite having money. Was the
U.S. experience relevant in our context?
What the student was suggesting was that I find a different logic of economic progress for
Indian villages. In caste-ruled villages, the management of faeces is generally governed by
gendered rules of touch, purity and pollution. Faeces is, therefore, kept away from the home
or removed by a manual scavenger. Labour, caste and purity are thus bound coherently and
peacefully in village culture, unlinked to economics.
land acquisition by the state for hyper-industrialisation may not seem unreasonable.
B.R. Ambedkar strongly disagreed with Gandhis celebration of village life and morals. He
considered the idea of a village republic as one based on undemocratic values. He said,
What is a village a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and
communalism. How relevant are Ambedkars observations today? As relevant as they were
in the late 1940s. Even now, close to 67 per cent of Indias population live in villages. In 2000,
about two-thirds of rural Dalits were landless or near-landless and close to half depended on
farm labour for their livelihood including in Left-ruled States. Much of the minimalistic
land reforms in many States of India ended up providing land to the tiller and not to the
labourer, which meant that the Sudra castes became powerful, landowning castes in rural
India.
The dependence on landowning castes for survival makes the Dalit assertion for freedom
and dignity difficult. Violence against Dalits that includes cutting off their noses or hands for
transgressing caste norms is, therefore, nothing unusual. Ambedkars cautioning against
rural morality, however, is not merely relevant for Dalits.
Our village culture and values are intrinsically linked to a control of land and agriculture.
Land in present times has turned out to be a major economic resource it gives access to
institutional credit, subsidies on fertilizers, power, farm equipment and almost
institutionalised, decadal loan waivers. Some numerically powerful landowning castes also
enrol themselves as Below Poverty Line (BPL) families. Land, thus, is a key form of private
property that yields persistent rent, which is not necessarily based on its actual merit and
which is, of course, not taxed. Above all, land signifies power how much dowry one gets
in villages mostly depends on the extent of land the grooms family controls. The cultural
value attached to lands and its patrilineal ownership has turned daughters into bad debts.

Non-farm economy and rural milieu

Land makes certain castes kingly in rural communities. The control of such castes on local
politics aggravates masculine hubris. Land and agriculture, thus, partially construct the
localised cultural peace in rural India.
City life is not free of caste prejudices either but the vulgarity of its form is minimised in an
uprooted context of anonymity. Modernity and its key economic constituents of urbanisation
and industrialisation bring with them some basic norms of civility. No landlord in a city or
small town can insist on tenants defecating in the open. You cannot ask the caste of a
person serving you chicken nuggets at a fast-food outlet, or insist on knowing the caste of
your fellow commuter in a cramped local train.
The illiberal aspects of rural society are changing slowly due to market pressures. Despite
subsidies and the absence of taxation, the social power of farmers is rendered mildly
vulnerable by a budding competitive market and non-farm possibilities in rural India.
Increasing urbanisation, migration, and non-farm employment have added some degree of
mobility and freedom to the landless in general and to rural Dalits in particular. Landless
labourers need not search for work that provides respect and value in the lands of dominant
landowning castes alone. Increasing urbanisation, labour mobility and monetisation of rural
economy have had significant poverty-reducing impacts on Dalits. The prescription of
classical economics to decongest (landless) labour from agriculture and farm dependency
still remains of utmost relevance. Even now, close to 80 per cent of Dalits live in rural areas
providing cheap labour, with limited productivity, to farms and farmers.
Past and present policies
The present government is enlarging the scope of the previous governments economic
policies by aggressively pushing for industrial modernisation. There was, however,
something peculiar about the Congress/United Progressive Alliances politics of
displacement and land acquisition when dominant castes lost their lands for public and
private purposes, they were generally paid exorbitant compensation whereas the colossal
loss of tribal lands with minimal compensation was treated like willing sacrifice for national
development. The present government, on the other hand, has rightly thrown the economics
of swadeshi back into the closet. The BJP is working out a delicate balance between free
markets, capitalism and Hindutva, with the last limited to the cultural-political sphere. In this
new onslaught of the market, Anna Hazare and his supporters would do well to help the rural
dominant classes get the best possible price for their land. If successfully passed, an
unintended consequence of the Land Ordinance Bill could also mean the end of some of our
long-celebrated village morals, which Ambedkar rightly considered as just plain narrowmindedness. It was the freedom of Dalits and women that was put at permanent risk by the
bigotry of the village polity and economy.
For Dalits and other landless groups, therefore, limiting their economic and cultural life to
village morals and farm boundaries offers little space for livelihood negotiation. To them,
land acquisition by the state for hyper-industrialisation may not seem unreasonable. The
NDAs new economism and hyper-industrialisation may well generate a new wave of liberal
values that positively unsettle our village economy and culture.