Agrarian Struggles: Movements of the Rural Poor in Post-Colonial India

When India gained independence in 1947, the promise of land reform raised hopes among millions of landless labourers, sharecroppers, and small farmers. Yet for decades after, the rural poor found that political freedom did not translate into economic justice. Land remained concentrated in the hands of a few, tenancy laws went unenforced, and feudal hierarchies persisted in the countryside. In response, the rural poor were mobilised into a series of struggles, often under the banner of Left-wing parties, demanding fair wages, secure tenancy, and above all, land. These agrarian struggles shaped the political trajectory of independent India and continue to echo in debates about rural inequality today.

The unfinished agenda of land reform 🔗

The roots of post-colonial agrarian unrest lie in an unequal land structure inherited from colonial rule. The British system of revenue collection, particularly the zamindari system, had created a class of intermediaries who extracted rent from cultivators without tilling the land themselves. After independence, the government attempted to dismantle these structures through legislation.

States enacted laws to abolish zamindari, impose ceilings on landholdings, and protect tenants. In West Bengal, for instance, the West Bengal Estate Acquisition Act of 1953 and the Land Reform Act of 1955 aimed to abolish the zamindari system and reserve a fair share for sharecroppers. On paper, these reforms looked progressive. In practice, implementation was weak and full of loopholes.

Landlords transferred holdings to relatives and fictitious owners (so-called benami transfers) to escape ceiling limits, evicted tenants to avoid recording their rights, and used local administrative networks to delay enforcement. The result was a deep and growing disillusionment among the rural poor, who felt that the political class had promised much and delivered little.

Who were the rural poor? 🔗

The “rural poor” was never a single uniform group. It included landless agricultural labourers who owned no land and survived on daily wages, sharecroppers (known as bargadars in Bengal) who cultivated land owned by others in exchange for a portion of the harvest, and small and marginal farmers who owned tiny plots barely sufficient for survival. A large proportion of these groups belonged to lower castes and tribal communities, which meant that their economic exploitation was reinforced by social discrimination. This overlap of class and caste oppression gave many agrarian movements their distinctive intensity.

The Left as the engine of mobilisation 🔗

In the decades after independence, it was primarily the Left-wing parties that organised the rural poor around their grievances. While the Indian National Congress had led the broad nationalist movement and continued to dominate electoral politics, it was reluctant to challenge the rural propertied classes who formed an important part of its support base. The Communist movement, by contrast, framed rural inequality as a question of class struggle and made agrarian issues central to its programme.

Communist organisers worked through the All India Kisan Sabha, a peasant front founded in 1936, to build grassroots committees, educate cultivators about their legal rights, and lead campaigns for higher wages and a larger share of the crop. Two early movements set the template for this kind of mobilisation.

The Tebhaga and Telangana precedents 🔗

Although they began just before and around independence, the Tebhaga and Telangana movements profoundly shaped the agrarian struggles that followed. The Tebhaga Movement of 1946-47 in Bengal saw sharecroppers demand two-thirds of the harvest instead of the customary half. The word tebhaga literally means “two-thirds.” Supported by the Bengal Kisan Sabha and the Communist Party of India, the movement, at its peak, involved millions of peasants, with women forming active resistance groups. Though it was suppressed, it directly influenced later tenancy reforms.

The Telangana Rebellion of 1946-51 was a communist-led armed insurrection of peasants against the feudal order in the princely state of Hyderabad. It is often described as the largest peasant revolt in Indian history. Peasants seized land, abolished bonded labour in areas under their control, and set up village governance structures. The armed phase ended after the Indian Army’s action in Hyderabad in 1948, but the movement forced the government to implement land reforms and abolish the jagirdari system. These two struggles demonstrated that radical politics could find fertile ground in the villages and provided organisational lessons for the generation that followed.

The Communist split and two paths of struggle 🔗

A crucial turning point came in 1964, when the Communist Party of India experienced a major split. The disagreement was about both strategy and ideology. One faction broadly favoured working within the parliamentary system and was seen as aligned with the Soviet path, while another opposed this approach and drew inspiration from the revolutionary methods of the Chinese Communist Party. Tensions over how to respond to the Congress government, and differences that surfaced during the Sino-Indian War of 1962, deepened the rift.

In 1964 the rupture became formal. The pro-Soviet faction retained the name Communist Party of India (CPI), while the breakaway group formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M). This division created two broad approaches to mobilising the rural poor.

The parliamentary approach 🔗

Both the CPI and the CPI(M) ultimately chose to contest elections and work through the constitutional system to advance the interests of the rural poor. They formed coalition governments, used legislative power to push land reforms, and built durable political organisations in the countryside. In West Bengal, the CPI(M) became the dominant force championing agrarian reform through state power.

The logic was straightforward. By capturing government, the parties could direct administrative machinery to record tenants’ names, vest surplus land above the ceiling, and distribute it to the landless. The risk, critics argued, was that participating in government drew the parties into the very system they had promised to overturn, tempering their radicalism over time.

The radical, armed approach 🔗

Not everyone accepted the parliamentary road. A radical section within the CPI(M) believed that genuine land reform could only come through armed struggle, following the model of Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution in China. To this faction, the CPI(M)’s participation in a West Bengal coalition government in 1967 was a betrayal: the party that had promised “land to the tiller” was now part of the establishment.

This tension set the stage for the most dramatic agrarian uprising of post-independence India.

The Naxalbari uprising 🔗

In a remote cluster of villages near Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, accumulated grievances finally exploded in 1967. The region was marked by stark inequality, with tea-garden workers and tribal cultivators facing exploitation by landlords known as jotedars, even as a Left-led United Front government had just come to power on promises of reform.

The immediate spark came in March 1967, when a sharecropper was beaten by the men of a local landlord. In response, peasant committees organised by radical communists began seizing land, foodgrains, and arms from the landlord gentry, leading to violent clashes. Tension escalated sharply on 25 May 1967, when police opened fire on a group of villagers demanding their right to crops on disputed land. The firing killed several people, including women and children, and turned a local agitation into a symbol of state repression.

Leaders and ideology 🔗

The uprising was led by a trio of dissident communists, Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and Jangal Santhal, who had grown disillusioned with the parliamentary path. They drew on Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideas, arguing that India’s road to socialism lay through a protracted armed peasant revolution rather than the ballot box. Jangal Santhal, a tribal leader, was crucial in drawing the Santhal community and tea-garden workers, many of whom were tribals, into the struggle. This tribal participation gave the movement a character rooted not just in ideology but in the lived experience of marginalisation.

The uprising even drew international attention. Radio Peking described the events as revolutionary peasants in the Darjeeling area rising in rebellion, comparing it to the beginnings of China’s own peasant revolution. This endorsement deepened the ideological divide between the Chinese Communist Party and the CPI(M).

The response and the birth of the CPI(M-L) 🔗

The reaction of the West Bengal government was telling. Despite being led by a Left-leaning coalition, it treated the uprising as a law-and-order problem, deploying police and paramilitary forces to crush the rebellion rather than addressing the underlying grievances. The irony was sharp: a Communist-led state government was using force against Communist revolutionaries.

Though the uprising was physically suppressed within months, its political afterlife was immense. The radicals organised the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries and, in 1969, formally established the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI(M-L), under Charu Majumdar’s leadership. The word “Naxalite” entered the Indian political vocabulary, and the movement spread to parts of Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and beyond, influencing agrarian conflicts for decades to come.

From land seizure to Operation Barga 🔗

The shock of Naxalbari had a lasting impact even on the parliamentary Left. The fear of losing land entirely to a militant peasantry shaped how landlords responded to subsequent reforms, and it pushed the CPI(M) to demonstrate that it could deliver genuine change through state power.

When the Left Front, led by the CPI(M), came to power in West Bengal in 1977, it launched Operation Barga in 1978, a campaign to record the names of sharecroppers and give them legal protection against eviction along with their due share of the produce. Combined with the vesting and distribution of surplus land and the strengthening of elected village councils (panchayats), this became one of independent India’s better-known land reform efforts.

Operation Barga is often credited with reducing rural poverty and stabilising the Left’s rural base for decades. Yet it also drew criticism. Some analysts noted that it secured tenancy rights without challenging landlords’ ownership, and that much of the surplus land vested by the government was never actually distributed. In this sense, it represented a more moderate, negotiated form of agrarian change compared to the radical land seizures of the Naxalbari phase.

Why these movements still matter 🔗

The movements of the rural poor in post-colonial India reveal a recurring pattern. Reforms promised on paper repeatedly fell short in practice, leaving the landless and tenant cultivators to organise and demand their rights. The Left provided the ideological framework and organisational muscle for this mobilisation, but it split over a fundamental question that has never fully gone away: should change be pursued patiently through elections and legislation, or through revolutionary struggle?

The persistence of agrarian distress, rural indebtedness, and the unresolved demands of farmers in more recent decades shows that the issues raised by these movements remain alive. The mobilisation of the rural poor was never simply about economics; it was about dignity, justice, and the meaning of independence itself for those at the bottom of the social order.

What do you think? Was the parliamentary path of the CPI and CPI(M) more effective at improving the lives of the rural poor than the armed approach of the Naxalites, or did electoral participation blunt the radical edge needed for genuine land redistribution? And given the loopholes that weakened earlier land reforms, what would meaningful agrarian justice look like in India today?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barga
2. https://telangana.pscnotes.com/tspsc-mains-notes/tspsc-group-i-mains-paper-ii/tspsc-mains-paper-ii-history/peasant-women-tribal-and-workers-movements/
3. https://sociology.institute/economic-sociology/evolution-peasant-movements-india/
4. https://banotes.org/indian-gov-and-politics/indian-peasant-movements-historical-perspective/
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Communist-Party-of-India-Marxist
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalbari_uprising
7. https://sociology.institute/india-democracy-development/naxalbari-uprising-turning-point-indian-peasant-movements/