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AFTER lying dormant for years, the issue of land distribution has taken centre stage in Andhra Pradesh again. The Left parties, particularly the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have launched a State-wide "land occupation movement", and the government's efforts to pacify them have failed. What began as a token agitation in urban areas on May 6 for house sites has now spread to the entire State with activists and people's organisations taking possession of "arable government lands".
The agitation has often taken a violent turn, leaving many injured in lathicharges by the police, and has now spread to over 1,000 centres, covering every mandal headquarter. Over 350,000 people have participated in the agitation, taking "possession" of over 70,000 acres (28,000 hectares) so far. The police registered about 16,000 cases against the agitators including CPI(M) State secretary B.V. Raghavulu and CPI State secretary K. Narayana. While most of those arrested have been let off without charges being framed, more than 1,300 CPI(M) activists have been remanded in custody.
Realtors and their henchmen attacked agitators in Mallapur and Ibrahimpatnam mandal near Hyderabad. Two farmers committed suicide in Mylavaram mandal of Krishna district, leading to angry exchanges between the ruling Congress and the Left.
The Left parties say that in the three years that it has been in power, the Congress government has paid scant attention to the implementation of land reforms and neglected promises made before the elections and in the National Common Minimum Programme. Land was also one of the major issues in the government's talks with the CPI(Maoist), whose leaders have said that people are now taking things into their own hands because of the government's pro-landlord bias.
After the talks with the Maoists, the government constituted the Land Committee, headed by Municipal Administration Minister Koneru Ranga Rao, to look into land ownership patterns and other aspects of land distribution in a time-bound manner. The government made the panel's recommendations public recently and convened a workshop on June 12 to discuss their implementation. But the Left parties took issue with the government on its reluctance to make the entire report public. "How can we understand the essence of the recommendations unless we know the basis on which they were made?" asked Narayana.
There have been agitations over land distribution in the past two years, but these were sporadic. The only noteworthy incident was the hunger strike by Raghavulu in July 2005, a week-long affair that forced the government to promise that house sites would be given away in a phased manner. But a series of developments after that, including Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy's gesture of surrendering 930 acres of `assignment lands' in possession of his relatives in Kadapa district, brought the illegal occupation of government lands to the limelight again. (Assignment lands are those belonging to the government and given to landless Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe members for cultivation.) The Chief Minister set a 90-day deadline for all those in possession of assignment lands to surrender them and escape punishment.
The Left parties embarked on their programme of land occupation after the deadline expired. However, Left leaders say that it was "indiscriminate" allotment of land to Special Economic Zones and industrial houses and the denial of land to the poor on the pretext of non-availability that provoked the agitation.
The government's move to amend the Andhra Pradesh Assignment Lands (Prohibition of Transfers) Act, 1977, in the recent Assembly session, enabling regularisation of lands in unauthorised possession, flies in the face of the Land Committee's recommendation against amendments and has fed apprehensions. This was followed quickly by a draft policy, circulated among political parties, envisaging the regularisation of all kinds of government lands, including ceiling and surplus lands - of course, on payment. "This is a visible sign of the government going back on promises. The draft exposed the hollowness of the government's `Indiramma Rajyam' slogan," said Raghavulu, who is leading the land occupation agitation.
The Chief Minister, who met Left leaders to try and persuade them to call off the agitation, explained the steps that had been taken for land distribution. According to him, the government had distributed over 4.7 lakh acres in three spells, in addition to launching a massive housing drive under the Indiramma programme, which aims at putting roofs over the State's homeless.
The Left, however, questioned the government's sincerity, pointing out that it had suppressed the Land Committee's report, which had made several "progressive" recommendations in the interests of the poor. Moreover, no concrete step was announced to recover more than 12 lakh acres of land that the government admitted was in illegal possession. "The fate of the government's written commitment to fasting CPI(M) activists in July 2005 is not known," Raghavulu said.
After the talks with the government failed, Raghavulu said the movement would continue as long as the government continued to target land owned by the poor for development projects. The CPI(M)'s State Committee has decided to broad-base the agitation by taking along other political parties.
Raghavulu has urged the State government not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to recognise the popular aspirations that brought the Congress back to power in 2004. "The TDP [Telugu Desam Party] did not have the foresight to recognise the people's problems. The Congress will face the same fate if it does not learn the lessons from the past," he said.
Refuting the Congress' charge that the CPI(M) launched the agitation for the sake of its own survival, Raghavulu pointed out that there were no elections in the offing. But, he said, each public movement was bound to have a political impact. He described Rajasekhara Reddy's gesture of surrendering his family's land in Kadapa district as a "move to divert the attention of the people".
The increasing number of incidents involving the Chief Minister and his family in land-related issues that have been coming to light had a crucial bearing on his decision to surrender the land, he said.
He added that the government still had time to make up for its lapses and that the Congress could consolidate its strength if it took up land distribution in right earnest. Repressive measures and the use of force, he said, would not intimidate the people.
The Left leaders say the agitation has now reached a stage in which the government has two options - either to backtrack on its promises of recovering illegally occupied land or to take land reforms forward.
The Left, however, is not putting up a united front. Asked about the differences of opinion among the CPI(M) and the CPI that have surfaced, Left leaders say that the parties are prepared to coordinate with each other and that field-level cooperation already exists.
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