Agrarian Struggle in India

2.  An agrarian society (or
agricultural society) is
any society whose economy is based on
producing and maintaining crops and
farmland.
 Another way to define an agrarian
society is by seeing how much of a
nation's total production is in agriculture.

3.  Forceful or violent efforts to get free of
restraint or constriction.
 Social movements are a type of group
action. They are large, sometimes
informal, groupings of individuals or
organizations which focus on specific
political or social issues.
 In other words, they carry out, resist or
undo a social change.

4.  The society acknowledges other means of
livelihood and work habits but stresses
the importance of agriculture and farming,
and was the most common form of socio-
economic organization for most of
recorded human history.
 With the development of agriculture,
came cities. Cities seemed a lot better
than living in a hunter-gatherer world. This
is how it began.

5.  Farming would bring a surplus of food.
People began to settle around the crops
so they can get some food instead of
having to hunt and scavenge.
 With the surplus, other professions
appeared. Most people were still farmers,
but jobs like merchants and potters
appeared.

6.  Also, a form of government. People
wanted to feel safe from the outside, but
also inside the city. Some people took to
profession of a soldier. Someone needed
to hold the city together, and so kings and
priests appeared.
 These cities would soon become
overpopulated, and a civilization
appeared because the communities
needed to expand which led to the first
civilizations like Sumer or China.

7.  Agrarian societies have existed in various
parts of the world as far back as 10,000
years ago and continue to exist today.
 Agrarianism most often refers to a social
philosophy which values agrarian society as
superior to industrial society and stress the
superiority of a simpler rural life as opposed
to the complexity and chaos of urbanized,
industrialized life.

8.  True agrarian movements have arisen
whenever urban interests have encroached,
in fact, or in seeming, upon vital rural
interests. Hence agrarian movements take
place whenever urban penetration occurs in
the rural areas.
 It may be also through the influence of
urban values, or through the acquisition of
better lands in the rural area, imposition of
land revenue, land tax and so on.

9.  The trend of Agrarian unrest in India can be
traced to the period of British rule.
 After obtaining the diwani of Bihar, Bengal and
Orissa, British introduced different land
revenue policies.
 To meet the high demand of revenue, the
peasants perpetually remanded indebted to
the local money-lenders. Further many of them
lost their lands to these greedy moneylenders.

10. 1. Champaran Satyagraha (1917)
 Gandhi made the experiment of non-
cooperation by leading the Champaran
(Bihar) and Kheda (Gujarat) peasant
struggles.
 The basic idea was to mobilize the peasants
and make them attain their demands.

11. Some of the important causes: -
1. The land rent was increased enormously.
2. The peasants were compelled by the
European planters to grow indigo, which
restricted their freedom of cultivation.
4. The payment of wages was meager to the
peasants, which was not sufficient to earn
their livelihood.
5. The peasants of Champaran were living
under miserable conditions and were
suffering from abject poverty.

12. 2. Kheda Peasant Struggle
 Kheda is situated in the central part of
Gujarat and was quite fertile for the
cultivation of tobacco and cotton crops.
 The peasantry of Kheda consisted mainly of
Patidars who were known for their skills in
agriculture
 The Patidars were well-educated.

13. Some of the important causes: -
1. Reassessment of Kheda land was done by
the government based on the cultivation of
crops.
2. There was a severe famine in Kheda, which
resulted in the failure of crops. The
government did not accept the failure of
crops but was insistent on the collection of
land tax, not taking the conditions of
peasants into consideration.

14. 3. The Bardoli Movement in Gujarat
In the year 1925, the taluka of Bardoli
suffered from heavy floods and severe
famine which affected the crops very badly.
This situation led the farmers to face great
financial troubles.
At the same time, the Government of
Bombay Presidency raised the tax rate by 30
per cent. Without taking into consideration
the requests and petitions of the civic groups

15. 3. The Bardoli Movement in Gujarat
 Patel along with Parikh, Vyas, and Pandya
took the help of some activists of Gujarat
who were close to the government in order
to know the movements of the government
officials.
 The government agreed to restore the
confiscated property and also cancel the
revenue payment for the year and also
cancelled the raise of 30 per cent until next
year.

16. 4. Peasant Revolt in Telangana
 The movement started against Nizam of
Hyderabad against the unlawful tax system.
5. The Telangana movement
 The Communist Party of India initiated the
Telangana Peasant struggle.
 Severe famine struck the Telangana region
in the year 1946. All the crops failed and
there was shortage of the availability of food
and fodder. The prices of food and other
commodities increased.

17.  There was a revolutionary turn to the
Telangana peasant struggle, and the
peasants turned into an army and on a few
occasions also fought guerilla wars.
 Apart from the peasant agitation, a parallel
para-military voluntary force was organized
by Kasim Rizvi. The members of this
organization were called Razakars.
 The Indian army marched into the state of
Hyderabad on 13 September 1948. The
army was successful enough in suppressing
the Nizam’s army and the Razakars.

18.  The term new social movements (NSMs) is a
theory of social movements that attempts to
explain the plethora of new movements that
have come up in various western societies
roughly since the mid-1960s (i.e. in a post
industrial economy) which are claimed to
depart significantly from the conventional
social movement paradigm.

19.  Unlike traditional social movements the new
social movements are highly participative
and have strong programme of actions. This
phenomenon of new social movement can
be traced back to the post world war II
period. The end of World War 11 witnessed
the emergence of a number of new states in
the Third World. These states were formed
with high expectations and thus there was a
larger demand for political participation and
power distribution .However many of these
states failed to meet the demands of the
citizen. This can be understood as a major
cause for the emergence of new social
movements.

20.  New social movements emerge around new
scopes and range of politics. The
environment, the rights, and role of women,
health, food and nutrition, education, shelter
and housing, the dispensation of justice,
communications and the dissemination of
information, culture and lifestyle, the
achievement of peace and disarmament
none of which were considered to be subject
matter for politics in which ordinary people
were involved, are major concerns for the
new movements

21.  These popular movements have some
middle-class leadership of middleclass
intelligentsia, professionals, teachers,
priests, etc. who offer their services as
leaders, organizers or advisers to these
community and other.
 The assertion of new social movements in
the contemporary world is clearly linked with
the concept of civil society.

22.  Urbanization: Urbanization led to larger
settlements, where people of similar goals
could find each other, gather and
organize. This facilitated social interaction
between scores of people, and it was in
urban areas that those early social
movements first appeared.

23.  Industrialization: The process of
industrialization which gathered large
masses of workers in the same region
explains why many of those early social
movements addresses matters such as
economic wellbeing, important to worker
class.
 Mass education: It is a major reason behind
social movements. Many social movements
were created at universities, where the
process of mass education brought many
people together

24.  Communication Technologies: The
development of communication technologies
accelerated the social movements. With the
development of communication
technologies, creation and activities of social
movements became easier - from printed
pamphlets circulating in the 18th century
coffeehouses to newspapers and Internet, all
those tools became important factors in the
growth of the social movements.

25.  Democracy: The spread of democracy and
political rights like the freedom of speech
made the creation and functioning of social
movements much easier. It permitted people
to organize freely without governmental
restrictions. People can freely discuss
matters and forums of free expression slowly
developed.

26. Globalization & Social Movements
 Globalization promotes an agenda of economic
liberalization in trade, investment and finance.
 It makes states increasingly powerless to
control their own economies, and that states
adopt rhetoric of powerlessness to divest
themselves of broader social responsibility.
 The new social movements view globalization
as representing forces that disrupt communities,
cultures and livelihood patterns of the poor
without offering any viable and dignified
alternative.

27. New Social movements in India
 In recent years in India, a number of social
movements emerged. These movements are
varying in nature and methods. However,
they do have a substantial shared ideology.
The following are some shared
characteristics.
1. They claim to represent the people –the
downtrodden Indian masses.
2. Most of these movements are against the
demerits of globalization

28. 3. They claim to be fighting for oppressed groups
such as Dalits and Adivasis.
4. They oppose the state as well as large
corporations and large funding agencies such
as the World Bank. They also oppose large-
scale projects. They claim to be fighting for the
protection of the environment.
5. They criticize the mainstream industrialized,
corporate West.
6. The new movements reject universal indices of
measuring development and progress such as
GDP, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy
rate, etc. Rather, they argue in favor of
subjective and local yardsticks.