The story of Indra Lohar was brought to public attention in 1973 by Ashok Mitra, in his column “Calcutta Diary,” in the Economic & Political Weekly. Lohar, a petty sharecropper under oral lease, who despite the then more recent amendments of the West Bengal Land Reforms Act to plug loopholes, was dispossessed of the small piece of land he tilled and found to his horror a chronic denial of justice by the administration, the police, and the courts. Mitra’s prose sketches a profoundly depressing portrait of deliberate and callous discrimination against the poor sharecropper, and the fact that this detrimental outcome was the almost inevitable result of the disparity in political power and economic resources between the landlord and his sharecropper tenant, made worse by the absence of a “living, pulsating organised movement of the peasantry [which] could have made a difference.”64
“Spring Thunder,” Phase I, had been crushed by then; nevertheless, it had unnerved not merely the agrarian ruling class of large landowners, but also Indian big business, the multinationals, and the entire political establishment. A technical fix was already underway, not merely in India, to contain “Communist revolution” wherever it was brewing or might ferment. The Malayan communist insurgency of 1948–60, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, originally against the Japanese occupation, but which continued against the Filipino government during 1946–54, and the anti-French war of resistance in Indochina during 1946–54, in all of which peasants constituted the main guerrilla base, ultimately led to the weaving of Green Revolution into the fabric of American foreign policy.65
As far as India was concerned, the Telangana peasant uprising of 1946–51 had unsettled the establishment. Poverty estimates (headcount ratios) from 1951 onward, based on consumption data of the National Sample Survey Rounds, didn’t seem to show any time trend, but the numbers were very high in some years. For the period July 1954–March 1955, 64 percent and 46 percent of the rural and urban populations, respectively, were below the poverty line. In July 1966–June 1967 and July 1967–June 1968, likewise, the headcount ratios of poverty were 64 percent and 52 percent-53 percent of the rural and urban populations, respectively.66
In 1960, the Ford Foundation got the Indian government to initiate an Intensive Agricultural Districts Programme (IADP), an initial pilot run of Green Revolution techniques. In the meantime, it was food aid under Public Law 480 that was in place, which “bought time for more long-term solutions to be found to the problems of hunger and social unrest in the Third World,”67 including India. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was founded with American aid in 1962 in the Philippines to focus on developing high-yielding varieties of rice, Asia’s major food crop. The CIMMYT (in English, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre), though formally founded in 1966 with American aid, was already existed in the form of an American-aided program that began in 1943, and which the wheat specialist Norman Borlaug joined the following year, going on to be awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, raising eyebrows, for his was not the usual chemistry prize that such work in biochemistry might have merited.68
It was the new seeds from CIMMYT and IRRI alongside American aid for IADP that was the launch pad for the Green Revolution in India. Moreover, from 1966, U.S. deliveries of food under PL480 were subject to conditions. Emphasis had to be placed on the Green Revolution and population control, and the pecuniary interests of U.S. multinational corporations, especially in fertilizers and pesticides. The successive droughts of the mid-1960s had led to severe food shortages and the Indian government was enthusiastic and obliging. By 1969–70, around 37 percent and 12 percent of the total wheat and rice acreages respectively comprised high-yielding varieties.69
Political expediency, however, temporarily shelved the rightward shift that Washington wanted. Following the poor performance of the Congress Party in the general and state elections of 1967, during the subsequent sharp factional squabbles within the party, and with the party split in 1969, Indira Gandhi found it politically advantageous to take a leftward turn. Her government began to claim application of the principles underlying Articles 39(b) and (c) of the Constitution in framing certain laws,70 this with political rhetoric that mouthed Nehruvian expressions such as “socialistic pattern of society” and her own coining of “garibi hatao” (remove poverty). Maneuvering to her own advantage, she spearheaded a motion to bring in the Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Ordinance, 1969, and nationalize the fourteen largest commercial banks with effect from the midnight of 19 July 1969, soon introducing a bill to that effect, placed in and passed by Parliament. Her party, the so-called Congress (Requisition), then spearheaded the passing of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices bill in Parliament in December 1969 (just a month after the split in the Congress Party), the Indian Patents Act in 1970, the 26th Constitutional Amendment of 1971 to abolish the Privy Purses of the erstwhile royal families of the former princely states, and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act in 1973.
With control over bank credit passing into the hands of the public sector, the Green Revolution could now be adequately financed without a hitch. After all, the supply of subsidized high-yielding seed, fertilizer, pesticide, irrigation water, and agricultural machinery, including tube-wells and pump-sets, needed liberal bank financing, and to reduce the bank-default and commercial-farming risks, agricultural pricing policy had to ensure that the government’s procurement prices were well above ruling market prices. Indeed, the procurement price now acted as a floor price in the speculative trade. The heydays of the landlords, rich peasants/capitalist farmers, both of the kulak variety, and agribusiness traders had truly arrived. The output of food grains more than doubled over the next decade and a half, from 1970 onward.
With the growth of public sector industry and infrastructure sustained by drawing on the proceeds of indirect taxation and deficit financing, and the private sector in industry and agriculture liberally funded by the public-sector banks and other financial institutions, it was the terms of trade between agriculture and industry that remained the bone of contention between the landlords/rich peasants/capitalist farmers on the one hand and Indian big business and the MNCs on the other. It was this relative price that crucially affected the economic positions of these ruling classes in Indian society, as well as the process of accumulation and economic growth. A shift in the terms of trade in favor of agriculture in the initial years of the Green Revolution as a result of government intervention forced both the urban working class and the poor peasants and landless laborers to allocate a large proportion of their money earnings to food commodities, which led to a progressive shrinkage in their demand for industrial products, particularly mass consumption goods, thereby adversely affecting the pecuniary interests of Indian big business and the MNCs.71
This contradiction notwithstanding, the Green Revolution strategy, after an initial period of intra-ruling-class bickering over this relative price, seems to have cemented their political coalition with a fair degree of stability and durability, for the powers-that-be found a way for the landlords/rich peasants/capitalist farmers to get their high prices and subsidized industrial inputs even as Indian big business and the MNCs got their low-cost credit finance, duty drawbacks, and subsidized agricultural inputs. The whole program of industrial development was crucially predicated upon significant improvements in agricultural output per acre that would, other things equal, dampen food inflation and thereby check the rise of the industrial wage rate. But the pecuniary interests of those who were in the saddle in agriculture, the rural landed classes and the big traders of agricultural commodities, also had to be accommodated, for they were the main organizers of the rural vote banks and financiers of establishment politics in the countryside.
With the Naxalite movement crushed and the Green Revolution off the ground, the “crisis in the affairs of the ruling order” had been successfully warded off, at least for the present. Indeed,