Property Rights Drive Indian Politics: My take on land and Communism

• OPINION ASIA
• MAY 19, 2011, 8:05 P.M. ET

Property Rights Drive Indian Politics

Land has played a leading role in the story of Indian Communism and, now, Indian politics.

By ABHEEK BHATTACHARYA

How did the march of history turn into a funeral procession for India's Communists? This group was once one the most potent ideological forces in the world's largest democracy. As early as 1957, it was the first to challenge the electoral domination of Jawaharlal Nehru's Congress Party. In 1977, the Communist Party of India-Marxist stormed into power in West Bengal, then one of India's wealthiest states. It's held power since then—until a week ago.

Last Friday, the Trinamool Congress, a 13-year-old upstart party, trounced the CPI-M in state polls. Trinamool's founder Mamata Banerjee succeeded in ending the Communists' 34-year rule because she positioned herself on the right side of India's growing debate on property rights.

Historians are sure to ask what kept a Communist party, one which sometimes took cues from Moscow and Beijing, in power for so long in a multi-party democracy. The biggest reason: There was a time when the CPI-M was on the right side of the land debate too.

The CPI-M won Bengali hearts and minds through "Operation Barga" in 1978 that awarded tenancy rights to poor sharecroppers (called "bargadars") who tilled farms. Colonial laws and taxes had left these peasants unfairly beholden to landowners. So the party's move to let 1.7 million peasants cultivate land and get a fair share of the crop without the threat of eviction yielded a massive rural base for the Communists overnight.

This was not full land reform, since the tenants did not gain ownership rights. Yet the Communists' move to record and hand bargadars certificates of tenancy represented real progress. It expanded farm productivity, as well as sharecroppers' freedom. Rights to tenancy also raised expectations of full property rights some day. But when a land-reform bureaucrat in 1978 asked CPI-M's agriculture minister about awarding peasants full title, he was told that it wasn't the time for such a "drastic measure."

In truth, the Communists never planned to grant full property rights, and not just because it violated a fundamental tenet of their ideology. Operation Barga was designed to leave villagers politically beholden to the party. Awarding title, so a bargadar could one day sell his land and move on, would have defeated the strategy. This plan went hand in hand with the CPI-M's tack of penetrating village local governments, so as to dominate every level of administration and society in the countryside.

The combination of partial land reform and complete political control came back to haunt the Communists in the past decade. By 2001, the fruits of capitalism had started to become apparent, especially at the state level where chief ministers competed for investment and jobs. A new CPI-M chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, not at home in the culture of union strikes and economic lethargy that decades of Communist rule created, was keen on attracting investment. He didn't anticipate any trouble and used the state's eminent domain powers to transfer land to industry.

But trouble was brewing. In exchange for paltry compensation, the party was de facto seizing land from sharecroppers who, because they had no ownership rights, could only resort to protest. In Singur village north of Calcutta, where the Tata conglomerate received land at an undeclared price to build a car factory, peasants getting a raw deal revolted starting 2006. In Nandigram village south of Calcutta, sharecroppers protested that their fertile land was being handed to an Indonesian chemical firm. Party cadres and state policemen dealt with dissent the best way they knew, killing at least 14 villagers in Nandigram on March 14, 2007.

This certainly wasn't the first instance of party-sponsored violence, but it struck at the foundations of Communist legitimacy. For one thing, cable news programs broadcast these atrocities live. Across India, people began branding the Communists "fascist," the ultimate ideological affront for Politburo members who still hung portraits of Marx and Lenin in their offices. More importantly, bargadars who had come to see the CPI-M as their savior and protector felt betrayed.

That was the chink in the Communist armor Ms. Banerjee was looking for. Her base expanded once she led a fiery movement in favor of sharecroppers, one that culminated in last week's victory.

A populist who has attacked liberalization in the past, Ms. Banerjee courted both industrialists and farmers during her election campaign. In an e-mail interview last month, she made clear her Trinamool party is "for industry but against [the] forcible acquisition of land." Whatever the viability of her ideas or the sincerity of her promises, Trinamool appears to understand that land is the make-or-break issue that can keep it in power.

Trinamool's rise is a story not just of how Indian Communism was felled by its internal contradictions. It shows that property rights occupy a pre-eminent place in Indian politics today. The country's eminent domain laws give the state too much power, while constitutional protections for property are weak. This means, barring reform, conflict is inevitable as India industrializes faster.

This month, Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi was arrested in Uttar Pradesh—the state that sends most legislators to Parliament—for agitating against land acquisition. A leader of India's other national party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, went on a fast last week in support of these farmers. Clearly, both parties have learned the lesson from Trinamool's victory: If Communism's bastion in Bengal could fall, no party can afford to be on the wrong side of the land issue.

Mr. Bhattacharya is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Asia.