When Kairon faced the ire of farm women

M Rajivlochan

Historian 

The present-day turmoils in India remind one of an interesting episode from the spring of 1959 when Sardar Partap Singh Kairon, the then Chief Minister of a united but arid Punjab, had to face agitated farm women who feared that the Chief Minister would impose a heavy tax on their lands for providing canal waters. This was the anti-Betterment Levy agitation, the Khush Hasiyati Tax Morcha. The morcha lasted all of 46 days. It was crafted by the Communist Party of India. Those were the days when Communist parties thrived on imagining the overthrow of bourgeois regimes by revolutionary peasant struggles under Communist leaderships.

The agitation began as a result of Kairon following the advice of the Planning Commission to charge a small fee from all landholders and a water rate of Rs 10 per acre from those who availed themselves of canal waters. The idea, as the economists from the Planning Commission explained, was to use the money thus collected to finance the construction of the Bhakra Nangal project, which at current rates was estimated to cost about Rs 170 crore.

The government estimated that a total of 27,72,000 acres was liable to the levy in the spring of 1959. This was the area where the introduction of canal irrigation had resulted in more than doubling the crop from about six maunds per acre to about 15 maunds per acre. The government hoped that the eventual spread of irrigation would make the district of Hisar the granary of India.

In the first week of February, official teams, led by patwaris and naib tehsildars, went from village to village to collect the levy. Initially, people paid up. However, with the harvest yet to come in, people were short of cash. And angry at having had to hand over money to the government. The Kisan Sabha, a part of the Communist Party of India, decided to step in and give direction to the anger in the countryside.

Under the leadership of Harkishan Singh Surjeet, Communist cadres spread across Punjab to spearhead the agitation. Entire families of Communist workers joined in. The Communists, who till then barely had a presence in Punjab, suddenly became an important political force to contend with. Briefing the Communist Party leadership in Delhi, AK Gopalan, President of the Kisan Sabha, hoped that this would be the necessary launch pad for creating a Communist government in Punjab in the future.

Kairon initially did not take the agitation seriously. After all, most of the people who were asked to pay the betterment levy had paid up. A handful who did not were fined and then they paid up the fine as well. Moreover, Kairon believed that he had a far greater connect with the people of the countryside than did the Communists. He and his Cabinet colleagues had been incessantly touring Punjab, keeping in touch with the people, talking to villagers and the people had demonstrated their confidence in Kairon and the Congress by repeatedly voting for them.

However, the agitation soon engulfed nine of the 18 districts of Punjab. Hundreds would gather and shout against the officials. The government expressed its concern that many of the agitators were not even from the villages that had been affected by the betterment levy.

In the villages of Atiana, Natur and Dhaliwal in Ludhiana and Sangrur districts, the police had to resort to firing to disperse the agitating villagers. Even greater concern was caused by many Congress workers and leaders joining hands with the agitators.

When on March 10, a police party in Sherpur Kalan village near Ludhiana was attacked with weapons while resisting the execution of attachment warrants, Kairon accused the Kisan Sabha of trying to create a Communist government in Punjab. He maintained that the government was determined to deal firmly with the ‘deliberate and violent’ defiance of lawful authority. In the Vidhan Sabha, Kairon asserted that there was no question of giving quarter or granting concessions to unruly and defiant elements.

AK Gopalan, on a tour of Punjab, was served an externment order on March 12. Three days later, Gopalan would report to the Communist leaders in Delhi that the morale of the agitators was high and they had refused to be cowed down by the repressive measures of the government. He also announced that the Communists were mobilising kisans for political purposes.

The government too noticed that there was a pattern to the political mobilisation by the Communists: “they provoke the police into action and when it (action) is taken, they come out with all sorts of charges against the government.” Out of the 2,700 persons arrested at Jalandhar recently, the government spokesman said, only 156 were those affected by the betterment levy. “The rest were all troublemakers.” The government claimed that a total of 7,000 persons had been arrested.

By now, however, Kairon had admitted the failure of the Congress organisation to adequately reach out to the farmers of Punjab and explain to them the logic underlying the betterment levy. Minimally, he said in an interview to The Tribune that the Congress should be able to explain that the levy was chargeable only on fully matured lands and that too only for 15 years. He also suggested that the government make a distinction between the Communist agitator and the peasant who had joined the agitation concerned about the unfairness of the government in charging a betterment levy. Later, the official spokesperson of the Punjab government would explain that the government had used only the minimum force required to stop Communist attempts “at creating another Telangana in the Punjab”.

At this stage, at Kairon’s instruction, a new way of dealing with the agitators was initiated. On March 15, the wife of the Secretary of the Punjab unit of the Communist Party led a group of over 100 kisan women in a satyagraha to protest the betterment levy. They were arrested and sentenced to pay a fine of Rs 200 each. While the known Communist leaders were kept imprisoned, the other 80 women from Jalandhar who had courted arrest in protest against the betterment levy were taken to the site of the Bhakra Dam to see for themselves the project that was behind the levy. They returned, impressed with the new construction and publicly announced that the Communists were misleading them into joining the agitation.

In the next few days, people stopped responding to calls from the Kisan Sabha to join any protest. A worried Communist leadership now reached out to Kairon to enable it to withdraw the agitation gracefully. Kairon, whose younger brother was a leading member of the Communist Party, concurred and announced a postponement of levy collection.