Objective and Causative Factors of Collective Agrarian Violence

In one line

MU has set this question in almost these words, and the answer it wants is three layers of cause with evidence at each, not a list of episodes.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the causes of collective agrarian violence in India operate at three depths. The structural causes are the distribution of land, the terms of tenancy, the wage and the debt, which produce a standing conflict whether or not anything happens in a given year. The institutional causes are the failure to implement the legislation that addressed each of those, together with the character of the local police and administration, which converts a standing conflict into a grievance with no lawful outlet. And the precipitating causes are the particular events that turn a grievance into an episode: a demand for the notified minimum wage, an eviction, an assertion of social equality, an election, or a harvest.

Why the three-layer form

Because an examiner setting a question about objective and causative factors is asking for analysis, and a chronological narrative is not one.

Three layers also make the answer usable. Each layer answers a different question. Structural causes answer why the conflict exists at all. Institutional causes answer why it is not resolved lawfully. Precipitating causes answer why it happened in that village in that week. And each layer has a different remedy, which is why the last chapter of this module can be written at all.

Layer one: structural causes

The distribution of land. Concentrated ownership beside a large landless population. This is the condition, and every episode in this module occurs inside it.

The terms of tenancy. Mostly unrecorded, terminable, and defeated by the resumption clause.

The wage. Fixed by custom below the notified minimum, which the chapter on the wage showed is forced labour within article 23 on the Asiad reasoning.

Debt. Informal, at rates no crop or wage can service, repayable in labour, and reaching bondage at its extreme.

And the coincidence with caste. The landholder and the labourer belong to different castes, so every economic dispute is also a status dispute, which is why the violence takes the form it does and why it is prosecuted, if at all, under the Atrocities Act.

The evidence for this layer is the module's own material: the settlements, the agrarian structure chapter, and the record of what land reform distributed.

Layer two: institutional causes

Land reform was not implemented, for the six reasons in that chapter: the district was the unit, the record was the landholder's, the interval was used, the beneficiary had to initiate, the exemptions were wide, and there was no consequence for inaction.

The protective statutes are unenforced. The minimum wage, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 and the tenancy legislation all depend on an officer acting or on the weakest party complaining.