Evaluate the success of Indian peasant movements in achieving their goals. (2009)
Evaluating success requires stated criteria. Three are usable: goal attainment (did the specific demand succeed?), policy and legislative outcome (was the state compelled to act?), and structural transformation (did agrarian relations change?). Indian peasant movements score high on the first two and poorly on the third — they have been reformist in effect even when revolutionary in intent.
Where they succeeded
- Immediate redress. The Indigo Revolt (1859–60) led to the Indigo Commission and the collapse of forced indigo cultivation; agrarian unrest in the Deccan produced the Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act, 1879; Champaran (1917) ended the tinkathia obligation; Bardoli (1928) forced the revenue enhancement to be scaled back.
- Tenancy law. Tebhaga (1946–47), though defeated, carried the sharecroppers’ two-thirds claim into the Bargadars Act of 1950 and eventually into Operation Barga from 1978, the country’s most effective tenancy reform.
- Structural gains in one region. Telangana (1946–51) abolished vetti forced labour, cancelled debts and redistributed land across thousands of villages before it was suppressed — and, with the wider Kisan Sabha agitation, made zamindari abolition politically unavoidable after 1947.
- Price and relief politics. The new farmers’ movements from the late 1970s won procurement prices, power tariff concessions and repeated loan waivers.
- A legislative veto. The Samyukta Kisan Morcha agitation of 2020–21 forced the repeal of three central laws in November 2021 — an outcome few movements anywhere achieve.
Where they failed
- The land question is unfinished. Ceiling laws were evaded through benami transfer; tenancy went underground rather than being recorded. The NSS Situation Assessment Survey (77th round, 2019) found 50.2 per cent of agricultural households indebted, average outstanding debt of ₹74,121 and monthly income of ₹8,337.
- The poorest were left out. Agricultural labourers, overwhelmingly Dalit, have never been the subject of a sustained national movement. NCRB recorded 10,786 suicides in the farming sector in 2023, of which 6,096 were agricultural labourers.
- Declared revolutionary goals were not met. Telangana was called off in 1951; Naxalbari (1967) did not capture state power — Ramkrishna Mukherjee observed that the revolt in practice targeted the excesses of the system rather than the system itself.
- Unfinished current demands. The legal guarantee of Minimum Support Price at the C2 plus 50 per cent formula of the National Commission on Farmers under M. S. Swaminathan remains unconceded; the Committee on MSP constituted in July 2022 has produced no public report.
Explaining the pattern
D. N. Dhanagare showed that leadership came from richer strata, which sets a ceiling on how far demands can go. A. R. Desai divided post-1947 struggles into rich-farmer and poor-farmer streams, and the state has consistently accommodated the first — subsidy is cheaper than redistribution. Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow add the general point: outcomes depend on political opportunity and elite alignment, not on mobilisation alone. A democratic state buys off an organised producer bloc; it has no comparable incentive to satisfy the unorganised landless.
Conclusion
Indian peasant movements have been remarkably successful at extracting concessions and remarkably unsuccessful at altering the distribution of land and labour. Their record is a measure of Indian democracy itself — responsive to organised claims, unmoved by unorganised need.