INDIA: End of the Zammdars

Some 12 million Indians last week celebrated an independence day of their own with laughter and tears, street parades, community sings and free candy for the kids. In the state of Uttar Pradesh it was Deliverance Day, the day that marked the end of zamindari, a system of tax collecting which has held most of India's plain people in thrall since the Middle Ages.

Originally, the Indian zamindar (land agent) was a creature of the Turks, who ruled India in the 13th century. His function was simply to skim off a fat slice (often 50%) of the peasant soil-tiller's earnings, keep a cut for himself, and turn the rest over to his superior on the feudal ladder. Under the Moguls, who followed the Turks, India's peasants were systematically exploited but rarely dispossessed.

Unconcerned. Then came Britain's merchant conquerors. The squires of the East India Co. kicked out the petty princelings and chieftains of the earlier regimes, and appointed their own zamindars from a hodgepodge of ex-rulers, bandits and local opportunists. Their only duty was to pay a fixed revenue each year to the new government. What they collected from the peasants or how they collected it was of no concern to the British. The zamindar imposed taxes at will—to pay for his daughter's wedding, his wife's funeral, his son's birth. If a peasant objected to levies as high as 80% or 90% on his crops, the zamindar could seize his land (or his daughter) in payment. The zamindars gradually became the landholders, the peasants mere sharecroppers. "The most creditable products of zamindari," wrote the London Economist, "have been Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, and the Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram, the cricketer . . . The majority have been as vicious as Thackeray's Lord Steyne, as idle as Jane Austen's Mr. Bennett, and as drunken as a Surtees squire."

Unconstitutional. For 30 years the Congress Party of Prime Minister Nehru has cried for the abolition of zamindari, but India's constitution leaves land reform to the individual states. For five, the powerful zamindars themselves fought a bill to outlaw their kind in Uttar Pradesh, largest in population of the 28 states. Last year the bill was passed, and the zamindars hired the best lawyers they could find to prove it unconstitutional. Led by Nehru, India's parliament amended the constitution against the zamindars. The Supreme Court upheld Nehru. Last week Uttar Pradesh's law came into force.

Uttar Pradesh's 12 million peasants will henceforth pay taxes direct to the government. They may no longer be evicted from the land they till, even though a zamindar claims it. Those willing to pay ten years of taxes in advance will be granted full ownership of their plots, including the right to sell. Meanwhile, the 2,000,000-odd dispossessed zamindars of Uttar Pradesh, many of them only small holders themselves, will be paid for their lost lands at a rate eight times the land's annual tax value.

"I congratulate you on the abolition of the system," Prime Minister Nehru told 50,000 peasants of his native Uttar Pradesh last week. "At last," said one of the cheering crowd who heard him at Modinagar, "I can walk erect."