Swarajya, February 14, 1959
What true socialism should work for is to bring into existence a state of things in which every one in this vast rural continent has a free and gainful occupation. The more independent the occupation is of government intervention, the greater is the achievement. That is where it differs from the communist way of life which is one where the State owns the citizens and all their private lives. We are drifting into this very state all the while scoffing at communism. The Leviathan is taking the place of the landholders.
Reform requires change but not every change is reform. The truth is lost sight of.
Change is reform and the more 'leaping' the change, the more rapid our march to progress - this appears to be the policy notion of the Government of India today.
The party-managers in the various States lay down proposals simply upon their appraisement of the vote-value of the change - it may often be a wrong appraisement - and these become the unanimous resolutions of the Congress Working Committee and thereafter it is the policy decision of the Government of India. The ideas of the party-bosses of the various States are just guesses as to what will please the numerically larger groups of voters, not necessarily what will benefit them - it is enough if it seems to benefit them. A morbid pleasure in cruelty is the malady of the poor in countries whose people have been emancipated from colonial rule and hunger for happiness. Democratic statesmanship consists in coping with it, not in conforming to it.
A very recent judgment of the High Court of Madras has passed strictures against the manner in which the Government seeks to obtain legislation in contravention for compulsory land acquisition. It may be the Government take the case on appeal and even win. But the attempt to ignore the spirit and defeat it through the latter means, remains reprehensible all the same. Compensation has become a mockery where rights are taken away in the name of land reform. Shares are valued at market rate when companies are taken over. But arbitrary principles govern compensation for land.
"An insignificant number of people only will be affected by the 'ceiling' on land ownership. We have promised land-ceilings to the people. It would be betrayal to go back on it", say the Congress bosses. The confiscated land, they know, is not enough to serve any general purposes, such as giving economic farms to the large rural population. Nor will new management raise the food production. It is an accepted fact that fragmentation is detrimental to good production. It is planned, therefore, to organize cooperative farms with the land taken over. The transfer will be from interested efficiency to irresponsible inefficiency, from owner-management to that of an official of the Government who will be placed to supervise the cooperative concern, like a British Resident in the old native States. There is no rural or agricultural foundation in the education or subsequent training of the officials concerned.
The idea of exempting well-managed farms from the adumbrated ceiling law is a confession and a snare. It is confession that the proposal to expropriate above a level of acreage is not a measure of socialistic levelling down but issues out of a notion that Government is going to make arrangements for better management of lands which have been neglected by greedy owners. The notion is a bundle of contradictions and based on the well-demonstrated fallacy of good management resulting from too many cooks. The exemption programme of 'well-managed' estates will be a fine opening for collecting funds for the ruling party for political nepotism. It is needless to dilate on the dangers of discretionary expropriation, the discretion being entirely or ultimately in the handle of the executive.
'Leaping progress', Mao of China wants. That is what the Congress too wants in India. 'Revisionism' is treason in the communist countries. So also it is looked upon in India too, now. Slave-citizenship and totalitarianism will be the natural terminus of this 'leaping progress', if mismanagement does not bring about an earlier breakdown of the scheme.
A reliance on compulsion - the compulsion of law - as distinguished from a reliance on the people is what has become the policy of land reform. What socialism really demands is a change of heart, not an unwilling people yoked to the law. A new way of life, a new culture, is what is aimed at. This cannot be achieved by coercion but only by a heart-change. If we do not know how to bring about a change of heart, it will not do impatiently to rely on coercion, which will lead on, step by step, to nothing else but what the communists believe in. The British Commonwealth and the American Government erect bastions against communism and we are very much involved with them. We too vigorously attack the Communist Party whenever occasion lends itself, while we at the same time do all that is required to install their system of government and their way of life, and suppression of the individual in place of democracy.
What true socialism should work for is to bring into existence a state of things in which every one in this vast rural continent has a free and gainful occupation. The more independent the occupation is of government intervention, the greater is the achievement. That is where it differs from the communist way of life which is one where the State owns the citizens and all their private lives. We are drifting into this very state all the while scoffing at communism. The Leviathan is taking the place of the landholders.
