4 - The rise of agrarian power in the 1970s

Summary

The 1970s were a turning point for rural India. Until the late 1960s, the power of dominant agrarian groups was confined to state politics. As argued in the last two chapters, these groups had the capacity to defeat the implementation of agricultural policy but little control over its formulation, which remained a function of intragovernmental struggles and factional battles within the top echelons of the Congress party.

By the end of the 1970s, a new agrarian force had emerged in national politics. On the one hand, this force was dramatically represented in the personality and ideology of Chaudhary Charan Singh, one of the most powerful peasant leaders in post-independence India, who came to occupy important ministerial positions in the central government and brought his peasant-based party into the uppermost strata of the power structure. On the other hand, new ideologies of rural political mobilization began to take root. Agricultural prices increasingly came to replace land reforms as the major element in agrarian unrest. This was a development with major political implications, because land reforms had mobilized only the subaltern rural classes against the landlords, never the rural sector as a whole. Agricultural prices, as the decade closed, began to emerge as a sectoral, as opposed to a class, issue which, to the great surprise of urban intellectuals, attracted small farmers too.