The Congress, Communist and Peasant Movements in Colonial India

The peasants had been the worst sufferers of the British Raj in colonial India. Even before the Congress decided to mobilise the peasants, the latter had already developed their organisations and were in fact protesting against the local Zamindars who, to them, were the main enemies. Thus there has been much peasant unrest and occasional uprisings in the pre nationalist era. The two most important uprisings in the pre nationalist period were the movement of the Indigo planters of 1860 and the Moplah uprising of 1921 in Malabar. In the initial years the Congress ignored the urgency of improving the agrarian situation. It was only in the 1920s that Gandhi sought to convert the Congress organisation into a mass organisation and hence thought of bringing the peasants into the fold of the Congress. Two important developments were in fact responsible for the establishment of contact between the peasants and the Congress in the late 1920s. The first was the constant banging of the Congress doors by the peasants on the one hand and second was the need by the Congress to enlist peasant support for the national movement.     Despite the fact that the Congress took a late initiative in reaching the peasants in the countryside, it became a strong force to reckon with very soon. Since the Congress wanted to become a political party of all the classes in the Indian society, it attracted even the landed rich to enter the organisation and once the later entered, it is the latter who in fact dominated the organization and decided the rural strategies of the party and hence the Congress could not pursue any radical peasant agitation. The Congress was more interested in enlisting the support of the bulk of the peasants for the purpose of national agitation but never went for and encouraged class war with the upper strata in rural society. In a nutshell, it can be said that because of Gandhi’s and Congress’ emphasis on class harmony and because of its primary emphasis on sociocultural revival of the rural community that the Congress could never launch serious agitations in the countryside, though it was able to draw the support of a part of the rural community during its anti imperialist agitations. Apart from the Congress, the Communists were the other major force that mobilised the peasants. Though the CPI was formed in 1920, (to some in 1925), its serious engagement with the peasantry started with the formation of the All India Kisan Congress later renamed as the Kisan Sabha and the primary purpose of the Sabha was to mobilise the peasants. It is after this pursuing broadly a tactics of ‘United Front’ in cooperation with the national movement the CPI increased its membership in the peasant front and set the stage for the most revolutionary struggles in the countryside, though most of the struggles, as we shall see later, were local in their spread. The tactics that the Communists adopted were to work at the grass root level and this tactics paid them rich dividends. In the countryside they worked through the Kisan Sabhas. In the beginning it was not a class based organisation, it represented even the well to do peasants, though, in this period, the Communists ensured that the Kisan Sabha would take up at least some of the issues of the rural poor. The rural rich were well represented in the Sabha because of the Congress Socialists’ emphasis on a multi- class organisation. It was only in the years 1941-43 that the AIKS passed into the hands of the Communists and it Swami Shajanand who tried to build the Kisan Sabha as an organisation of the rural poor and this alienated the rich and the middle peasants. The control of the CPI over the Kisan Sabha was complete by the year 1944-45. The membership of the Kisan Sabha kept on increasing and by 1944 it increased to 553,427 (Dhanagare, 1980). After completely capturing it the CPI and the Kisan Sabha could in fact make the Sabha an organization of the poor peasants.  It is with this base that it could, in the later years, launch and lead agrarian struggles, in the pre-independence period.

The Telangana Peasant Uprising

The Telangana peasant movement started in mid-1946 and continued till the October of 1951.

The movement engulfed the whole of the Telangana region of the Hyderabad state and the adjoining districts of the Andhra delta. It has been regarded as the most revolutionary of all the movements in India, in its character and political objectives. The CPI through its peasant wing, the Kisan Sabha, launched the movement. It appears that the CPI could launch the movement after it eschewed the strategy of ‘United Front’ and adopted a strategy of initiating insurrectionary struggles. In the whole of Hyderabad state to which the Telangana region belonged, there were two main types of land tenure. The first was the Khalsa or Diwani tenure, which was similar to the raiyatwari system that is the peasant-proprietary system. Under this system the landowners were not called actual owners but were called pattadars (registered occupants) and under this system lay around 60 percent of the land of Hyderabad. The actual occupants were the shikmidars, who had full rights of occupancy but were not registered. When the pressure on land grew the shikmidars also leased out their land to the tenants but the later were not the real owners, neither had they any protection against eviction. The second kind of tenure, which existed, was under the jagirdari system. Sarf –e-khas was the special land assigned to the Nizam himself. These were the crown lands and the Nizam’s noblemen, who were granted land in return of military services during emergency administered these lands. The peasants, under the jagirdari system, were the most oppressed. In the whole of Hyderabd state, the peasantry in the Telangana region suffered the most oppressive system of exploitation.The movement led by the Communists began in Nalgonda district in 1946 and then spread to the neighbouring Warangal and Bidar districts and finally engulfed the whole of the Telangana region. The objective of the movement, from the very beginning, was a broad one and was concerned with the whole of the peasantry against illegal and excessive extraction by the rural feudal aristocracy. The most powerful demand was that all peasant debt should be written off.