What has been the political fallout of the Green Revolution in India? Explain. (2019, 15 Marks)
The Green Revolution produced a new political class as well as grain. It gave money, marketable surpluses and a common grievance to the cultivating castes that M. N. Srinivas called “dominant castes”. Within two decades local dominance had become state and national power.
A new agrarian class
- Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 1987) named it: “bullock capitalists”, self-employed owner-cultivators on middling holdings who use family labour and sell a surplus. Numerous in the median constituencies of north and west India, they practise demand-group politics: prices and subsidies, not structural change.
- Francine Frankel (India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs, 1971) found the other side in district studies: class polarisation, as patron-client ties gave way to open conflict between owners and labourers, sharpest in Thanjavur.
End of the Congress system
- Charan Singh gave the class its ideology. Against Nehruvian industrial priority and cooperative farming, he defended the peasant proprietor. He left the Congress in 1967, founded the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (1967), later the Bharatiya Lok Dal, and was Prime Minister in 1979-80.
- The 1967 elections cost the Congress nine states: a class that could fund its own politics no longer needed its brokers, and turned to parties such as the Lok Dal and Akali Dal.
Farmers’ movements: from land to prices
- Sharad Joshi‘s Shetkari Sanghatana (Maharashtra, 1979) framed the struggle as “Bharat versus India”: the countryside against a protected urban economy, with remunerative prices as the demand.
- Mahendra Singh Tikait‘s Bharatiya Kisan Union mobilised western Uttar Pradesh’s Jat cultivators over power tariffs and cane prices, filling Delhi’s Boat Club in October 1988.
- Ashutosh Varshney explains the result: the rural vote won price and subsidy transfers, but not public investment. The landless labourer, who buys food, was left outside; the ecological damage later bred its own seed-saving and natural-farming counter-movements.
Caste assertion
- Prosperous Jats, Yadavs and Kurmis turned economic power into claims on office. This paved the way for Mandal (1990) and OBC-based parties. In the north, the Green Revolution class and the Mandal caste bloc largely overlap.
Punjab’s crisis
- The greatest success turned most violent. Fragmenting holdings, rising costs and jobless educated youth gave a base to the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973) demands on autonomy and river waters, and then to 1980s militancy. Agrarian stress was necessary; federal and religious politics drove it.
A lasting subsidy settlement
- Free power, fertiliser subsidy, MSP procurement and loan waivers became politically irreversible. Pranab Bardhan sees rich farmers as one of India’s dominant proprietary classes.
- The line runs to the 2020-21 farm-law protest. The Samyukt Kisan Morcha, led by farmers from the procurement belt, forced repeal in November 2021 and still demands a legal MSP. Its July 2026 Kisan Ghat protest against the India–US interim trade framework continues that politics.
Conclusion
The political fallout was double-edged. The Green Revolution democratised power by moving it from upper-caste notables to the middle peasantry. It also created a sectoral veto: organised enough to defend prices and subsidies, but not to demand the investment and diversification that agriculture now needs.