Although ex facie they are modest, humble souls, India’s rural politicians possess a native cunning and smarts difficult to emulate. True, in the early years after independence, lordly zamindars — beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement negotiated with grandees of the British Raj under which in consideration for annuities the former were granted zamindaris, the right to levy and extract taxes from peasants toiling in large swathes of real estate — lost this privilege as land rights were transferred to tenants. Since then these very tenants mainly from OBCs (other backward castes/classes), have morphed into an equally exploitative peasants elite which has cornered all the gains of rural development. Despite a plethora of affirmative action (reservations) legislation the new rural elite has successfully prevented socio-economic upward mobility of SCs & STs (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes).

One of the provisions of the Karnataka Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1974, which abolished tenancy farming and transferred land to the tiller, was that agricultural land could be sold only to bona fide agriculturists (s.79). The grassroots impact of this provision was that the rural elite increased its landholdings by purchasing farmland at below market price, particularly since discretionary power was vested in government to make exceptions to s.79 “in the public interest”. This exception enabled rural elites to buy cheap and sell dear to industrialists and businessmen. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms which tracks the wealth of politicians, the value of assets of H.D. Kumaraswamy, the humble farmer former chief minister of Karnataka, multiplied 10x between two general elections.

In 2020, the BJP government of the state amended s.79 permitting non-agriculturists to purchase farmland enabling farmer politicians to sell their landholdings to industrialists and businessmen at true market price. Now the incumbent Congress government of the state has mooted a proposal to amend the Land Reforms Act to again restrict the sale of farmland to agriculturists, to protect poor farmers from exploitation. This will again facilitate the accumulation of farmland by the rural elite. That’s socialist smartness difficult to surpass.