What Agrarian Violence Is

In one line

Agrarian violence is violence over land, done by and to the people who work it, and it is the oldest and least reported form of collective violence in India.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: agrarian violence is collective violence arising out of the relations of production on land, that is to say out of who owns it, who cultivates it, who labours on it and on what terms; MU's own label pairs it with repression, which is violence by the State or by those the State tolerates, directed at suppressing a movement rather than at punishing an offence; and the two words together tell a student that this module is about a conflict with two sides, not about crime in the countryside.

Why this is a category of its own

A student might reasonably ask why a murder in a village is not simply a murder. Four things distinguish agrarian violence and each recurs through the module.

It is about a relation, not an incident. The dispute is not over an event but over a standing arrangement: a tenancy, a wage, a debt, a boundary, a right of way to a field. The incident is a symptom, and prosecuting it leaves the arrangement in place.

It is recurrent and seasonal. It follows the agricultural calendar. Harvest disputes come at harvest, wage disputes when labour is scarce, and boundary disputes when the crop is sown. A police station in an agrarian district can predict its own trouble.

It combines with caste, almost always. In most of India the landowner and the labourer belong to different castes, so the same dispute is simultaneously a class dispute and a caste one. That is why Module II and Module IV overlap so heavily, and why a great many agrarian killings are prosecuted under the Atrocities Act.

And the State is a party, not a referee. MU's word is repression. The land settlements were made by the State, the revenue was collected by the State, the tenancy laws were passed and not enforced by the State, and the force used against peasant movements was the State's. That is what makes this module different from an ordinary study of rural crime.

The three actors

The landholder. Whether zamindar, jotedar, malik or a substantial peasant proprietor, he has land, credit and, characteristically, the ear of the administration.

The tenant or sharecropper. He cultivates another's land on terms fixed by custom or contract, is liable to eviction, and has historically been the group whose position law tried hardest and least successfully to secure.

The agricultural labourer. He owns nothing, works for a wage, and is very often in debt to the person he works for. He is the largest of the three groups and the one to whom the least of the law's protection has reached.