From left, Jagdish Rattanani, Mayank Chhaya and India's fifth Prime Minister Charan Singh in Bombay,sometime in 1984. (Photo: Gopal Shetty)
I do not recall a whole lot about my only personal interview with India’s fifth Prime Minister Charan Singh, whose 119th birth anniversary falls today. By all reckoning, fellow journalist Jagdish Rattanani and I, both working for the Free Press Journal then, met Singh in Bombay in late 1984.
Singh’s tenure was among the shortest lasting between July 28, 1979 and January 14, 1980. It ended abruptly in after the Congress Party withdrew its support to him just one day before a parliamentary meeting was scheduled to discuss that very issue. By the time we met him he was already 82. He died three years later. However, among my clearest memories was how taut his face looked at that age. I also remember how devoid he was of the frills of power even though by that time he had been the country’s prime minister, deputy prime minister and twice chief minister the country’s largest and most politically consequential state of Uttar Pradesh. I might as well mention that he was also the most high-profile face of the country’s farmers, always a powerful political constituency.
Here was a man who was among the earliest movers of land reform which attacked the very heart of the oppressively exploitative system of zamindari or landlordism. Some of this very self-serving landlordism and feudal impulses that lent themselves the the predatory and colonially motivated East India Company to make deep inroads into India.
Charan Singh had the bearing of someone who did not need much to get by. I remember him asserting how deeply influenced he was by Gandhi, particularly his ideas of rural economy and its importance for an independent India.
Singh indeed came of age during the tumultuous decades of the British Raj. He was already 45 years old when India gained independence. Perhaps it was that reason he seemed like someone unburdened by having been in powerful political positions for a long time. The fact that he spent more than half his life before India became independent had deeply informed his politics.
It struck me that sitting with was an 82-year-old politician here was a powerful politician who had spent an almost equal amount of time on either side of India’s independence, seriously engaging with two journalists in their early 20s. Jagdish was 22 and I 23. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he did not take us seriously. He answered all our questions in detail. I am sure the printed version of that interview can be found but I do not have a clipping.
On a separate but related note, the movement for land reform is a grossly understudied aspect of India's independence struggle. Six years ago I had written a short piece in these columns about Vinoba Bhave, the pioneer of an extraordinary land equity movement. I might as well republish it.
March 18, 2015
Vinoba Bhave (September 11, 1895-November 15, 1982) is a very prominent presence at the Gandhi Ashram here in Ahmedabad. With the current political ferment in New Delhi over the Narendra Modi government’s land acquisition policy, where farmers’ consent to their lands being acquired is the main bone of contention, Bhave’s life seems fictional.
While waiting for the shoot to be set up at the Ashram yesterday for my interview with Dr. Tridip Suhrud, a well-known Gandhi and Narsinh Mehta scholar, who also happens to be the director of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, I began thinking about Bhave.
Arguably one of Gandhi’s most consequential followers, Vinoba was an extraordinary figure whose was, in many ways, a uniquely Indian story. He set out for a life as a Himalayan hermit. As part of that quest his first stop was Varanasi in early 1916. Newspapers then there were full of reports about a man called Mohandas Gandhi and his defining speech at the newly founded Benaras Hindu University. He sought a meeting with Gandhi and subsequently met him in June of that year. That changed his life and put him firmly on a lifelong mission to perfect non-violence as a tool for social transformation.
His chosen tool of transformation through non-violence was ‘Bhoodan’ (Bhoo meaning land and dan meaning donate) or gift of land. The idea was exquisitely simple yet enormously difficult. Using the power of his personal morality, mass public contact and the essential goodness of people’s hearts he would make the landed voluntarily gift tracts of land for the landless millions of Indians. Vinoba believed that along with air and water land too was a natural human right. But he also knew that it was far more difficult to part with than the other two.
During a meeting with the disenfranchised and landless people of the village of Pochampalli in Andhra Pradesh he found out that barely 80 acres of land could change their lives. He did not know how to get them the 80 acres. It was then that a local landowner, Ram Chandra Reddy said he could gift 100 acres. That set the stage for what turned out to be a remarkable movement. Starting September 12, 1951 he walked thousands of miles throughout India for 13 years exhorting large landowners to donate pieces of land for the landless across the country.
According to Bhave’s official website over 4.1 million acres of land were gifted as part of his Bhoodan movement. The actual land distributed was about 1.2 million acres with over 1.8 million acres being found unfit. The remainder was perhaps never donated. Even if it was just 1.2 million acres of land, it is quite an accomplishment for a frail, barely clad, man to walk the lengths and breadths of the country and getting people to donate something for which massive wars have been fought.
At a time when the country is discussing fair ways to acquire land from farmers for infrastructural development, Bhave’s is an exceptional story. To me it is also strikingly cinematic and not in the least because of his unusual presence. It is a great movie waiting to be made.
