The End of the Road in Land Reform? Limits to Redistribution in West Bengal

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe hypothesis that failures of land reform programmes are due to the political power of dominant classes is problematic where land is scarce, ownership not highly concentrated and politics not especially exclusionary. Since the late 1960s, land reform in West Bengal has been initiated by radical rural political mobilization—with significant participation by the agrarian underclass. The Communist Party of India (Marxist)—the largest radical party in West Bengal‐has been unable to extend its redistributive land reform agenda beyond a point because of political difficulties rooted in West Bengal's intense competition for scarce resources. It has modified the land reform agenda to accommodate the competing demands of the poor and the non‐poor, and there are signs that land reform is losing saliency in the policy agenda. This paper argues that the weak implementation of land reform in West Bengal is explained not by the power of the dominant classes, but as an adaptation of policy to an environment of resource scarcity and a relatively low level of land concentration.