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Indian Freedom Struggle (1707–1947 A.D.)

Notes popularized among the peasants through resolutions passed at these gatherings. Other demands
included the stopping of illegal levies, the prevention of eviction of tenants and the return of
bakasht lands.
The Congress Ministry had initiated legislation for the reduction of rent and the restoration of
bakasht lands. Bakasht lands were those which the occupancy tenants had lost to zamindars, mostly
during the Depression years, by virtue of non-payment of rent, and which they often continued to
cultivate as share-croppers. But the formula that was finally incorporated in the legislation on the
basis of an agreement with the zamindars did not satisfy the radical leaders of the kisan sabha. The
legislation gave a certain proportion of the lands back to the tenants on condition that they pay
half the auction price of the land. Besides, certain categories of land had been exempted from the
operation of the law.
The bakasht lands issue became a major ground of contention between the kisan sabha and the
Congress Ministry. Struggles, such as the one already in progress in Barahiya tal in Monghyr
district under the leadership of Karyanand Sharma, were continued and new ones emerged. At
Reora, in Gaya district, with Yadunandan Sharma at their head, the peasants won a major victory
when the District Magistrate gave an award restoring 850 out of the disputed 1,000 bighas to the
tenants. This gave a major fillip to the movement elsewhere. In Darbhanga, movements emerged
in Padri, Raghopore, Dekuli and Pandoul. Jamuna Karjee led the movement in Saran district, and
Rahul Sankritayan in Annawari. The movements adopted the methods of Satyagraha, and forcible
sowing and harvesting of crops. The zamindars retaliated by using lathials to break up meetings
and terrorize the peasants. Clashes with the zamindars’ men became the order of the day and the
police often inteivened to arrest the leaders and activists. In some places, the government and
other Congress leaders intervened to bring a compromise. The movement on the bakasht issue
reached its peak in late 1938 and 1939, but by August 1939 a combination of concessions, legislation
and the arrest of about 600 activists succeeded in quietening the peasants. The movement was
resumed in certain pockets in 1945 and continued in one form or another till zamindari was abolished.
Punjab was another centre of kisan activity. Here, too, the kisan sabhas that had emerged in the
early 1930s, through the efforts of Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Kirti Kisan, Congress and Akali activists,
were given a new sense of direction and cohesion by the Punjab Kisan Committee formed in 1937.
The pattern of mobilization was the familiar one — kisan workers toured villages enrolling kisan
sabha and Congress members, organizing meetings, mobilizing people for the tehsil, district and
provincial level conferences (which were held with increasing frequency and attended by an array
of national stars). The main demands related to the reduction of taxes and a moratorium on debts.
The target of attack was the Unionist Ministry, dominated by the big landlords of Western Punjab.
The two issues that came up for an immediate struggle were the resettlement of land revenue of
Amritsar and Lahore districts and the increase in the canal tax or water-rates. Jathas marched to
the district headquarters and huge demonstrations were held. The culmination was the Lahore
Kisan Morcha in 1939 in which hundreds of kisans from many districts of the province courted
arrest. A different kind of struggle broke out in the Multan and Montgomery canal colony areas.
Here large private companies that had leased this recently-colonized land from the government
and some big landlords insisted on recovering a whole range of feudal levies from the share-
croppers who tilled the land. The kisan leaders organized the tenants to resist these exactions
which had recently been declared illegal by a government notification and there were strikes by
cultivators in some areas in which they refused to pick cotton and harvest the crops. Many
concessions were won as a result. The tenants’ struggle, suspended as a result of the War, was
resumed in 1946-47.
The peasant movement in Punjab was mainly located in the Central districts, the most active being
the districts of Jullundur, Amritsar, Hoshiarpur, Lyallpur and Sheikhupura. These districts were
the home of the largely self-cultivating Sikh peasantry that had already been mobilized into the
national struggle via the Gurdwara Reform Movement of the early 1920s and the Civil Disobedience
Movement in 1930-32. The Muslim tenants-at-will of Western Punjab, the most backward part of
the province, as well as the Hindu peasants of South-eastern Punjab (the present-day Haryana)
largely remained outside the ambit of the Kisan Movement. The tenants of Montgomery and

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