For the past few months I have been busy so I did not post much.
In aid of getting back into writing for this blog, I thought I may as well begin with a few observations stemming from a paper I recently read by Jacob Rinck titled ““Failed” Not Futile: Reassessing Nepal’s 1964 Land Reform” in the journal Studies In Nepali History And Society.
The paper interprets the broader consequences of the 1964 land reform (often otherwise considered to have failed in its stated objectives) and contextualizes it with a broad brush backdrop of more than a century of state-society relations. There is a significant amount of information sewn together in this work: from how a class of large landowners became largely autonomous of the state in the early 20th century (p.8) to potentially the first direct interactions between tenant-cultivators and officials as about protections the latter would afford the former in the mid 1960s (p.16).
It offers many insights into Nepali political history that could serve as a basis of discussion. But ones I most became intrigued by initially were the reform’s ceiling on the maximum amount of land for the Tarai region (the lowlands) and past scholars’ assessment of purported failure.
The 1964 reform program’s supposed failure was due to limited land redistribution. It was an elite instigated effort. King Mahendra‘s government’s reform placed a limit of 25 bigha (or 16.9 hectares, 1 bigha is equal to about 0.67 hectares) on holdings in the Tarai. It also placed a limit on the amount of a harvest landlords could claim from sharecroppers. The government only redistributed 22,000 of the 50,000 hectares initially acquired as part of the program to peasant families, and just 34,000 of a further 66,000 hectares in a subsequent effort in the 1970s (p.4).
In 1961-1962, more than half of Nepal’s landholdings were less than a half hectare in size, more than a third were between a half hectare and three, and less than ten percent were above three hectares (and as Rinck notes, in the Tarai region inequality is historically even more pronounced) (p.20). Rather than use a strategically ambiguous term such as “excessive” in the law so officials could use discretion in land acquisitions among smallholders, the ceiling had a specific number to target landowners with very large landholdings. As Rinck puts it, “the threat of land reform helped the palace to keep large landowners in line” (p.23).
In the Tarai region there were landholdings “running into the hundreds and even thousands of hectares” (p.20). Or in other words, the kind of landowners who could threaten the authority of the King just four years after he led a coup d’état. At the same time, elites with less than 17 hectares seemingly did not need to fear expropriation. Was the 1964 land reform thus an old divide and rule strategy couched in (then) new development terminology? One that would not encourage lesser landed elites to side with noble families with vast estates, as well as one to gain the fealty of those same noble families? Was it one mostly intended to support Mahendra’s consolidation of power?
The limited redistribution of land to peasant families may have been how the 1964 reform was assessed and remembered. But very usefully, Rinck’s paper moves beyond that and furthers understanding of the long-term consequences of the reform by tracing changing relations in Dhanusha (a district in Tarai) between landlords, tenants, and the state, along with the dissolution of local landed elites’ political power and the expansion of middle-peasants. The analysis concludes with numerous further questions for research.
Some additional questions I was left with include: 1) Were any (or even many) of the elites who were dispossessed supporters of deposed Prime Minister B.P. Koirala (who was from a landlord family and who won a landslide election in 1959)? 2) Could the 1964 reform be assessed as instigating numerous successful medium-scale land grabs? 3) Relatedly, with just 48 percent of lands acquired in over a decade of state expropriation from the mid 1960s and into the 1970s redistributed to peasant families, what happened to the rest (60,000 hectares)?
Unfortunately at the moment the journal is not easy to access. Hopefully ease of accessing the paper, and others in the journal’s many issues, will one day improve so readers will be prompted to generate and pursue their own.
Peasant.blog 