The Punjab Zamindars’ Conference

THE Punjab Zamindars’ Conference held at Lahore last week was the first gathering of its kind in the province, and its organisers are to be congratulated on its substantial success. The zamindars constitute the bulk of the population; and as time goes on and the powers of government get more and more into the hands of the representatives of the people, the rural classes are bound to acquire the importance which is undoubtedly theirs not only on account of their numbers but also on account of the contribution that they make to the public revenue. It is, therefore, of the highest importance that the rural mass of the population should be properly and adequately organised, and steps should be taken to educate the rural electorates as regards their rights and duties. The proper organisation of the agricultural and rural classes is, indeed, the most pressing problem before the province at the present time. To neglect to solve it or to allow it to be handled in a haphazard fashion is fraught with a double risk. In the first place, the continuance of the prevailing political backwardness of the rural classes would be a source of weakness to the province as a whole and a hindrance in the way of its achieving complete political freedom without avoiding loss of time. It does not require any extraordinary perspicacity to realise that no political advance can be real or worth counting upon unless it is broad-based on the political self-consciousness of the masses, and this is obviously not possible when more than four-fifths of the population is politically inactive.