Description of the Module

Items Description of the Module

Subject Name Sociology Paper Name Agrarian Relations and Social Structure in

Module Name/Title Movement Objectives This module introduces you to the nature of the peasant mobilization through the case study of Telngana movement. It focuses on the agrarian structure of the region during the insurgency, and oulinesthe structural coordinates of feudal exploitation in Telangana. Key words Feudal Exploitation, Land Tenure System, Agrarian Economy.

Module Structure

TelanganaMovement Introduction,The Historical Setting,Types of Land Tenure, Feudal Exploitation, Economic and Caste Hierarchy, Agrarian Economy, The Andhra Conference, the Beginning and Growth of the insurrection, Salient Features of the movement, Decline of the Movement, Principal Participants, Causes for Withdrawal, Comments on the success and failure of the movement, Conclusion.

Role Name Affiliation Principal Invesigator Prof Sujata Patel Dept. of Sociology, University of Paper Coordinator Dr Manish K Thakur IIM Calcutta

Content Writer A Chandrashekar Dept. of Sociology,

Content Reviewer Manish Thakur IIM Calcutta Language Editor Manish Thakur IIM Calcutta

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Introduction:

Social movements have always been an inseparable part of social progress. Through collective action, organizedprotests and resisting the structures of domination,peasant movements have historically paved the way for new thoughts and actions that revitalizes the process of social change (Singha Roy, 2004). TelanganaMovement was one such movement in the 20th century India which had ended the feudalistic oppression of landlords and the autocratic Nizam rule in the Telangana.The of the mid-1940s and the early 1950s was unparalleled in the 20th century history of India for its intensity, participants’ militancy and the height of revolutionism they ascended. This radical peasant resistance has put forward the question of ‘agrarian revolution’ by which Indian Communists dreamt simultaneously of freeing agrarian society from the feudal stranglehold, and restoring and distributing land to the tenants and tillers. It had compelled the unwilling Congress party leaders to embark upon various agrarian reforms, however, half-hearted and pitiful they were. It was during the course of this struggle that the bhoodan utopia was conceived by VinobaBhave, the sarvodayaleader (Sundarayya, 1973). Another important contribution of this movement was bringing the idea of reorganizing the states on linguistic basis in the country, it was during this struggle that states reorganization on a linguistic basis had come up. It was one of the two post-war insurrectionary struggles of peasants in India. Launched by the [the then undivided/united CPI] after the shift from its earlier policy of collaboration (‘United Front’) with the congress to a strategy of encouraging or initiating insurrectionary partisan struggles in India, it began in the middle of 1946 [July] and lasted for over five years till it was called off in October 1951.

The Historical Setting:

The , which was formed by the Nizam after the death of the last Mughal Emperor, was one of the largest princely states in India before Independence. The Nizam who was the 7th in line was one of the wealthiest rulers in the world, he ruled the state from 1912.The Hyderabad State consisted of three linguistic areas; the eight Telugu-speaking districts with Hyderabad city, the capital of the State, constituting the Telangana area; the five Marathi-speaking districts in the north-west of the State constituting the Marathwada region; and the three Kannada-speaking districts in the south-western part. The Telangana region occupied 50 per cent of the area; as against 28 per cent occupied by the Marathwada region; and the remaining 22 per cent by the

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Kannada region. The Telugu-speaking population in 1951 was 9,000,000 (50 per cent); the Marathi-speaking population about 4,500,000 (25 per cent); the Kannada-speaking population 2,000,000 (11 per cent); and the -speaking population 2,100,000 (12 per cent). Since the Nizam was a Muslim, Urdu was made the language of the courts and the administration at all levels, and also the medium of instruction from the primary stage. The language and culture of the overwhelming majority of the people was suppressed by the rulers of the state. The fact that the was a Muslim and the vast majority of the people of Hyderabad State belonged to religion and its various sects, was reflected in the administrative set-up.

Types of land tenure:

The agrarian structure of the region was like a page from the medieval feudal history. The basic feature that dominated the socio-economic life of the people of Hyderabad and especially in Telangana was the unbridled feudal exploitation that persisted till the beginning of the Telangana armed peasant struggle.There were two kinds of land tenure system prevalent in the state (1)Khalsa or diwani. (2) Jagirdari.

1) The diwani or khalsa (Governmental land revenue system):Out of the 53 million acres in the whole of Hyderabad State, about 30 million, that is, about 60 per cent, were under the governmental land revenue system known as diwani system. This kind of system was known as the ‘raiyatwari’ system in other parts of the country, i.e. the peasant proprietary system. The land holders were not called ‘owners’ per se but they were treated as ‘pattadars’ (registered occupants). The actualoccupants within each patta were called shikmidars, who had full rights of occupancy but were not registered. As the pressure on land grew, the shikimidar, previously the cultivators of lands, began to lease out the lands to sub-tenants, these sub tenants were known as Asami-shikmis. The Asami-shikmis were tenants-at-will having neither legal rights in land nor any protection against eviction. On Khalsa lands deshmukhsand deshpandeswere the hereditary collectors of revenue for groups of villages. These intermediaries (&deshpandes) were granted vatans (annuities= the right to receive income) based on a percentage of the past collections. Very often the deshmukhlandlord himself became the newly appointed village revenue official or at least had access to land records.The influence of the office of deshmukhpermitted him to grab lands by fraud which, in countless instances, reduced the actual cultivator to

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the status of a tenant-at-will or a landless labourer.Thedeshmukhs and deshpandes who were earlier tax collectors for the Government, but who were, after direct collection by the state apparatus was introduced, granted vatans or mash (annuities), based on a percentage of past collections, in perpetuity. These deshmukhs and deshpandes, as collectors of taxes, grabbed thousands of acres of the most fertile cultivated land and made it their own property, reducing the peasants cultivating these lands to tenants-at-will. The scale of the acquisition of lands can be judged from the fact that the JannareddyPratap Reddy family had one and a half lakh acres of land, and had laid a mango grove on a plot of 750 acres. (Sundarayya, 1973).

These landlords were not only deshmukhs but also village chiefs (patel, patwari, malipatel) with hereditary rights. Each one of them had about five to ten villages under him as vatan. These vatan villages were controlled through clerks or agents (seridars) appointed by the . These seridars collected products from the peasants by force (Sundarayya, 1973). They did various other jobs for the deshmukh, including supplying information about the village. In Telangana, the vetti system was all-pervasive, affecting all classes of the people in varying degrees. There was the prevalence of keeping girls as 'slaves' in the houses of landlords. When landlords gave their daughters in marriage, they presented slave girls and sent them along with their married daughters, to serve them in their new homes. These slave girls were used by the landlords as concubines. The vetti system made the life of the Telangana people one of abject serfdom and utter degradation. It ruined man's self- respect completely. The movement for its abolition became widespread.The administrative report of 1950-51 showed that in the three districts of , Mahbubnagar and Warangal, the number of pattadars or landlords owning more than 500 acres each were about 550. They owned 60 to 70 per cent of the total cultivable land.

2) Jagir tenures: 2.1 Surf-e-khasJagir (Nizam’s personal estate):This was assigned to the Nizam himself as Crown lands. This was scattered in several parts of the State and covered a total area of 8,109 square miles (1,961 villages), and fetched revenues totaling about 20 million rupees which met the Nizam’s household, retinue and other expenses and

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partly met the cost of his army. 10 per cent of the total constituted the Nizam's direct estate the sarf-e-khas system. 2.2 Non-sarf-e-khasJagirdari (Land given as gifts to noblemen by the Nizam): About 15 million acres, that is, about 30 per cent, were under the jagirdarisystemt.The Jagirdari system of land administration was the most important feature of the political organization of Hyderabad.The Nizam created his own noblemen and bestowed on them one or the other distinguished rank and order—each with a large grant of land. In return the trusted noblemen undertook to maintain an army for the Nizam to rely on in time of need. The Jagirs were typically feudal tenures covering some 40,000 square kilometers in area but scattered in different parts of the State. Nearly 6,500 villages, i.e. about a third of the State’s total area, were under the Jagirdari system. [No. of Jagirdars: 1,167 in 1922; 1,500 in 1949.] The civil courts had no jurisdiction on Jagirlands and therefore the Jagirdars and their agents—or middlemen—were free to extort from the actual cultivators a variety of illegal taxes on them. The peasants in these areas were nothing but bond-slaves, or total serfs, under the Nizam. Whatever little rights existed in the diwani area, were denied to them.In the jagir areas, constituting 30 per cent of the State, paigas, samsthanams, jagirdars, ijardars, banjardars, maktedars, inamdars or agraharams, were the various kinds of feudal oppressors. Some of them used to impose and collect taxes through their own revenue officers. Some of them paid a small portion to the State, while others were not required to pay anything at all. In these areas, various kinds of illegal exactions and forced labour were common. In the jagir areas, the land taxes on irrigation were 10 times more than those collected in the diwani areas, amounting to Rs 150 per acre, or 20-30 maunds of paddy per acre.Some of these jagirs, paigas and samsthanams, especially the bigger ones, had their own separate police, revenue, civil and criminal systems.

Feudal exploitation in Telangana: Nowhere in Hyderabad State was feudal exploitation of the peasantry more intensethan it was in the Telangana districts. Some of the biggest landlords, whether Jagirdars or deshmukhs, owned

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several villages and thousands of acres of land each. Concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few landed magnates was more pronounced in Nalgonda, Mahabubnagar and Warangal districts than elsewhere.Significantly it was this region which was the locus of the peasant insurrection in1946-51. Jagirdars/deshmukhs, who were also called ‘Dora’ in local dialect of Telugu meaning ‘Sir’, ‘master’, or ‘lord of the village’, was often a combination of a landlord, money lender and the village official.

‘Vetti’ system ((forced labour and exactions) : Traditionally the ‘Doras’ enjoyed several privileges including the services of occupational castes free of cost and such exploitation was called ‘Vetti’. The landlord could force a family from among his customary retainers to cultivate his land and to do one job or the other—whether domestic, agricultural or official, as an obligation to the master.

Each Harijan family had to send one man from the family to do vetti. In a small hamlet (palle), each house had to send one man. The daily work of these people consisted of household work in the house of the patel, patwari, malipatel or deshmukh; carrying reports to police stations and taluk offices (tehsils); and keeping watch on the village chavadi (village center) and the poundage. They had to do extra work whenever an officer came to the village chavadi. Further, the harijans, who carried on the work of cobblers–tanning leather and stitching shoes, or preparing leather accessories for agricultural operations, for drawing water from wells or for yoke belts for plough cattle or for draught bullocks-were forced to supply these to the landlords free of cost, while the rest of the peasantry used to pay them fixed annuities in grain and other agricultural produce.

Certain other backward communities, like boyalu, bestalu(fisher men) andchakali (washermen) were forced to carry on their shoulders men and women ofthe landlords' families in specially made carriers (pallakis or menas) overlong distances from one village to another, whenever they wished to seetheir relatives or go to festivals. When members of the landlord familytravelled in their fast bullock carts, these people were forced to run beforethe carts as well as behind them, as path- clearers and escorts. Whenmembers of the landlord family rode horses, the horse servants wereforced to run beside them.

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The worst of all these feudal exactions was the prevalence of keeping girls as 'slaves' in the houses of landlords. When landlords gave their daughters in marriage, they presented slave girls and sent them along with their married daughters, to serve them in their new homes. These slave girls were used by the landlords as concubines.

The various forms of forced labour and exactions were extracted not only by the landlords, but by all the officials, petty or high, living in the villages or coming on tours and special visits. The vetti system made the life of the Telangana people one of abject serfdom and utter degradation. It ruined man's self-respect completely. The movement for its abolition became widespread(Sundarayya, 1973).

‘Bhagela’ serfdom:

Bhagelas, belonging mostly to the aboriginal tribes, were customary retainers tied to their masters by debt. Doing domestic or menial labour and deeply in debt, they had to work for their masters’ generation after generation on a subsistence wage (Dhanagare, 1983).

Of the landless poor, the worst-off wereno doubt the bhagelas, though all had to perform forced labor called vetti. The bhagelas were typically untouchables bonded to their masters through debt. Wages were low, interest rates high and records could be manipulated easily; when the bhagelas died they were almost always still in debt. This debt was inherited by the next generation and the landlord never had to worry about finding free labor for menial jobs (Akhil Gupta, 1984).

Economic hierarchy & Caste hierarchy: Brahmins were oncepredominant among the substantial landowners and pattadars in the Telangana districts. With the rise of the Reddis and Velamas—the two notable castes of peasant proprietors—the influence of the Brahmins as a landowning caste declined. The Komtis, a caste of traders and money-lenders, had considerable influence on the economic life in the countryside. From the turn of the century, Marwadisahukars gradually penetrated rural Telangana and established their ascendancy as money-lenders although the Komtis still remained on the scene as

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traders, shopkeepers and merchants. The bulk of the rural masses—the poor peasants, uprooted tenants, share-croppers and agricultural labourers—came either from the lower castes, or from the tribal groups like the Hill Reddis, Chenchus, Koyas, Lambadas and Banjaras.The tribal communities had long standing grievances against the government on account of its taxes and levies, against money-lenders and revenue officials who usurped their lands, and also against private contractors who exploited the tribal labourers in the forests, on construction sites, or in mines and collieries.

Agrarian Economy: In a predominantly rural economy, land and labor were the principal means of production. But the countryside was not a self-contained rural utopia; it was connected both to the industrial and merchant economy of the towns, and more importantly, to the world capitalist system (Akhil Gupta, 1984).

The development of irrigation facilities and cultivation of commercial crops had taken place since the late nineteenth century.The main commercial crops of Telangana—ground-nuts, tobacco and castor-seeds—were grown in Nalgonda, Mahbubnagar, Karimnagar and Warangal districts.The development in commercial farming was not matched by any correspondinggrowth of towns, of industrial enterprise, and markets, nor even of transport andcommunication facilities.Cultivators had to depend almost entirely on urban money-lenders, traders, merchantsand businessmen who controlled the few and highly centralized markets in Telanganafor the sale of their produce.Local retailers, agents, and village sahukarshelped urban commercial interests insecuring the produce from the cultivators, and thus managed to have a share in theprofits of the marketing enterprise.Land alienation increased considerably between 1910 and 1940, particularly duringthe depression, when many lands previously owned by tribal peasants passed into thehands of non- cultivating urban interests, mostly Brahmins, Marwadis, Komtis andMuslims.As a result of growing land alienation many actual occupants or cultivators werebeing reduced to tenants-at-will, share-croppers or landless labourers. After 1930s, the proportion of non-cultivating occupants and of cultivators of land—wholly or mainly unowned—began to decline. On the contrary, owner- cultivators and agricultural labourers steadily increased in number in Hyderabad State as a whole. The rise of the ‘rich peasant’ sector did not supplant the ‘landlord-tenant’ sector of the rural

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economy completely; absentee landlords were very much there though their number was declining after 1930.

However, a large proportion of the rural population consisted of landless agricultural laborers and poor peasants, who worked mainly as laborers but who owned a small piece of land, then according to the 1951 census, the two groups made up about 40% of the rural population. Agricultural laborers made up about 32% of the rural population dependent on agriculture for a livelihood. Employment was uncertain, the seasonal high being harvest time, and total duration being at most five to six months per year. Wages, paid in kind, were pitiful. For example, in Huzurnagartaluka in the district of Nalgonda, wages for a 9-14 hour working day amounted to 1.5kg. of paddy during the slack season and 2.25kg. during the busy one.

Production relations internal to the countryside are but one side of the story; the other is the incorporation of this rural economy into the world capitalist system. Here cash crops like peanut, castor, linseed, sesamum, sugarcane and tobacco were the vital links, Hyderabad, with more than 30percent of sown area under non-food crops, was significantly more involved in the primary commodity cash economy than the rest of India (Akihl Gupta, 1984).

Politics and the Telangana peasantry: 1936-46 The despotic rule of the Nizam permitted neither political freedom nor any representative institutions. Harassment of suspected political activists, detention of leaders and potential agitators were such common forms of repression that a straightforward political movement was almost ruled out in the State till 1930 or so. [However] after 1920 several members of the intelligentia and liberal professional classes in Hyderabad, inspired by the Indian national movement, formed three different cultural-literary forums, one each for the three linguistic regions of the State (Telangana, Marathwada, Kanara).Andhra Mahasabhawas for the Telangana region.

The Andhra Conference and the Andhra Mahasabha: It was set up in 1928 and began to mobilize public opinion on issues likeadministrative and constitutional reforms, schools, civil liberties, recruitment toservices, etc., reflecting partly the regional economic and political aspirations andpartly the urban middle class and elitist character

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of the new political activity.During the Second World War, the Andhra Conference expanded its network in theTelangana villages by taking an active interest in agrarian problems such as vettilabour.Just across the Telangana border, i.e., in the ‘Andhra delta’ districts of MadrasPresidency, a political movement for unification of all Telugu-speaking regions into aseparate ‘Visalandhra’ was launched by the Andhra Mahasabha.Following the Satyagraha, the Congress was banned in 1938, and so was the CPI. Withthe result that the Andhra Conference and Mahasabha had the entire field of politicswide open for their activities.Communists who had been active in the delta districts since 1934, arrived on theTelangana scene only during the later half of the war.The young radical elements within the Andhra Conference turned to Communism andconverted the cultural forum into a mass militant organization—a united front of theyouth, peasants, middle classes and workers—against the Nizam’s government.Through the Andhra Conference young communists voiced the peasant’s grievances,paid more and more attention to agrarian problems in Telangana and mobilizedopinion in favour of abolition of landlordism and the oppressive Vettisystem.The agrarian slogans and demands of the communists included abolition of vetti,prevention of rack-rending and eviction of tenants, reduction in taxes, revenues and rents, confirmation of occupancy (patta) rights cultivating tenants and so on, whichnaturally attracted the poor peasants, tenants and labourers to the Andhra Conference. Class position of the Communist leaders: By and large,communist leaders were wealthy landholders, pattadars of substantial holdings, and men of somehereditary standing. They had shown some generosity toward the poorer sections of the peasantry whom, in fact, they hired either as tenants on temporary leases (share-croppers) or as agricultural labourers. The class interests of the leading Communists lay in promoting a class alliance between the rich and small holders, tenant cultivators and landless labourers, against those isolated landlords and rich landholders who were either inconsiderate to their tenant cultivators or paid poor wages to these labourers. The class interests and alliance were evident in their demands: ‘abolition of vetti’, ‘prevention of eviction’, ‘confirmation of occupancy rights of tenants’, ‘increase in wages’. The government’s bid to resolve the food crisis in 1946 by means of compulsory levy affected mainly the rich and middle peasants while several landlords and deshmukhsevaded the compulsory levy, hoarded food grains and profited from the rising prices.

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The Beginning and Growth of the Telangana Insurrection: Between 1942 and 1946, the influence of communists over poor peasants, tenantcultivatorsand landless labourers grew steadily.In certain parts of Nalgondaand Warangal districts, the Nizam’swrit hadvirtually ceased to run at the beginning of 1946.Officials as well as landlords who did not pay ‘protection money’ were afraid of visiting those areas of their jurisdictions or estates where the communists hadestablished strongholds.The presence of a number of landlords owning large estates extending over thousandsof acres of land had facilitated the expansion of communism in this area.In the post-war [mid-1945] crisis, local branches of the Andhra Conference, calledsanghams, launched village level struggles for better wages for labourers and againstvettilabour, illegal exactions, evictions and also newly imposed grain levy.The landlords either fled to safety, resorted to litigation, or summoned their owngoondas and the police to deal with the rebellious peasants.

First major incident: In July 1946, when over a thousand peasants armed with lathis (sticks) and slings,took out a procession in a village that formed part of VisunurDeshmukh’s estate,the landlord’s hired goondas fired at the procession and killed DoddiKomarayya, thevillage sanghamleader and injured a few others.The procession turned into an angry crowd, went to the landlords’ house which wasabout to be set on fire when the police arrived and dispersed it.Komrayya’s martyrdom sparked off the conflagration, the large and destructive fire, andmarked the beginning of Telangana insurrection.By the end of July 1946, the peasant resistance and militant action against landlords,deshmukhs and village officials, spread to some 300 to 400 villages in Nalgonda,Warangal and Khammam.Nizam’s government banned Andhra Conference in October 1946, arrested severalhundreds of CPI workers and sent more police reinforcements to the troubled areas. So determined was the resistance that the landlords and deshmukhs found it difficult to get the villagers to perform vetti; small-holders did not hand over a part of theirpaddy crop as required under the procurement levy regulation and foiled all thecoercive attempts of villages officials; and the landless labourers and evicted tenantssat tight on the lands they had seized.

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Salient features of Insurrection in its initial phase: Large masses of peasants spontaneously participated in the struggles directed against the government, landlords and deshmukhs and their agents. The insurgents had neither firearms nor the training required to use them. A few volunteer corps had come into existence, which were not so much well organized guerilla squads, as ad hoc formations in response to the situation. The communist or Andhra Conference sanghams and dalams (squads) acted as morale boosters for the peasant action but there is little evidence to suggest that they had succeeded in channeling the spontaneous upsurge into systematically planned offensives. The emphasis in the slogans being on a variety of agrarian matters already referred to,was on the unity of various peasant classes, whether of rich or small pattadars, cultivating tenants or landless labourers. As the peasant insurrection spread in rural Telangana, the Nizam’s government sent batches of [a paramilitary voluntary force of MajlisIttehad] sometimes with but often without the police or army, in order to deal with the rebels and to protect landlords and officials. Razakars raided and plundered the troubled villages, arrested or killed suspected and potential agitators, terrorized the innocent, and also abducted women as part of the campaign of punitive measures against the turbulent and agitating villages where the peasant masses were coming under communist influence. Communists set up village republics (Soviets) which functioned as parallel government in the areas under their control.In about 4,000 villages, a parallel administration was established by the communists.The Andhra ‘delta’ (a nearly flat plain of alluvial deposit between divergingbranches of the mouth of a river) had become the supply base of the peasant strugglein Telangana.Gram-rajyams(village Soviets) set up by the rebels, functioned very efficiently; thelands, seized forcibly, were distributed among the land-hungry agricultural labourersand also among evicted tenants.The guerilla squads protected the villages under their control while the village Samitis(committees) settled disputes and coordinated activities at the local level.

The Decline of the Insurrection: In September 1948, the Indian Army marched into the Hyderabad State territory, and within less than a week,the Nizam’s army, police and the razakars surrendered with hardly anyresistance. The Nizamordered his troops to ‘cease-fire’, outlawed and banned the razakars, andlifted the ban on the State Congress.The Government of India called its military invasion of Telangana ‘Police Action’. The Indian Government’s concern over the undemocratic and feudal regime of the Nizam

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whopatronized razakars’sterrorism was really secondary to their fears of the TelanganaPeasant Insurrection and of a possibility of the Communist capture of power right in theheart of Indian Territory.Once the razakars were over-powered, and a military administration set up under thecommand of General J.N. Chaudhary, the offensive was immediately directed at thepeasant rebels.According to Sundarayya’s report, 3 lakhs people were tortured, about 50,000 werearrested and kept in detention camps for a few days to a few months, more than 5,000were imprisoned for years, over 2,000 peasants and party workers were killed. In less than a year after the Indian Army took over the administration of Hyderabad, it issued the JagirAbolition Regulation (August 1949) and appointed an Agrarian Enquiry Committee to recommend comprehensive land-reform legislature in order to neutralize the Communist influence among the rural masses.

Principal participants: The Telangana revolt was not staged by peasants of a single agrarian stratum. Itsadherents had a mixed class character.The leading Communists of the Andhra delta and Telangana were rich and well-to-dopeasants and came from either the Kammaor the Reddy caste of peasant proprietors.It was crucial for the interests of rich peasants who dominated the party that all other subordinate agrarian classes, such as the small holders (middle peasants), and thetenants and share-croppers (poor peasants) quite as much as the landless labourers,formed an alliance and launched a combined offensive against the handful of bigabsentee landlords, Jagirdars and Deshmukhs, whose power and dominance could notbe threatened otherwise. The multiple grievances of all sections of the peasantry during the post war economiccrisis had opened up the possibility of such an alliance. Three-pronged attack by the communists: Communists wanted first to put an end to vettiand demanded wage increases. Secondly, they condemned the large-scale eviction of tenants and demanded bothabortion of landlordism and a moratorium on all debts.Thirdly, the Communists adopted a dual policy on the question of the ‘procurement ofgrain through compulsory levy’. On the one hand, they deplored the landlord’s anddeshmukhs’ evasion of the levy regulation and their hoarding and profiteering. On the other hand, rich peasants, well-to-do landholders and small-holders, who supportedthe party, were encouraged to withhold the grain levy.

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Conflicting interests among the participant-classes: The demand for increased wages was bound to affect the well-to-do peasants whoseprimary interests lay in keeping the wage level down and in avoiding the grain levy.Those rich peasants who were with the party and had sympathetically met thedemands of their share-croppers or labourers were treated as ‘neutralized’ and theirlands and paddy stocks were unscathed and untouched.As the insurrection developed, the poor peasants (particularly tenants and sharecroppers)and the landless labourers began to seize lands from the landlords anddeshmukhs and to occupy waste lands which later they distributed among themselves.In deciding which surplus land to seize, sanghamleaders made liberal concessions tothe rich peasants who sided with the rebels.The land ceiling question and the way it was settled finally in favour of the richpeasant reflected a reformist understanding of the agrarian problem of Telangana onthe part of the communist leaders.

Desertion of the alliance by the Rich peasants: After the military action (September 1948), the rich peasants increasingly deserted thealliance in which the agricultural labourers and tenants (poor peasants) together withsome small-holders (middle peasants) were left to carry on the insurrection.Most of the recruits to the dalams came from the untouchable castes (Malas andMadigas) and from among the tribals.The role of the rich peasants was anything but revolutionary. As the grip of the military administration tightened and troops began to suppress the dalams ruthlessly, some rich peasants while continuing to display loyalty to the party, providing food and shelter to squad leaders and guerillas, also acted as informers to the Army and the police. Research sources suggest that the middle peasants do not constitute a significant social category in Telangana either numerically or politically. The poor peasants and the landless labourers provided the backbone of the resistance from the beginning till the end.

Causes for withdrawal: The general political instability and rapidly developing crisis of authority and legitimacy were the most immediate circumstances that facilitated a revolutionary mobilization of peasant masses in Telanganabutorganization, which plays a vital part in sustaining revolutionary élan and intensity, such as land seizure and establishment of gram-rajyams, and in making the masses politically

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effective, did not exist. The village committees which ran the parallel governments were isolated from each other and lacked proper coordination. Although they distributed land to the landless and to evicted tenants for cultivation they had no access to the market, not to speak of control of it. For trade and essential supplies, the rebels had to depend on the urban merchants and traders whose agents at the village level had to be bribed by the Samitis to market the product of the rebel villages. Disunity in the class alliance thus crept in.Intra-party differences over ideological issues and over the broad objectives of therevolutionary struggle was another factor. The Indian Army’s presence enabled the landlords and deshmukhs to recapture someof their lands.Very few tenants actually registered themselves and claimed occupancy rights; amajority of them were either evicted from lands before the actual enforcement of the new statutes or had surrendered their lands voluntarily.

Comments on the success and failure of the Movement: The success or failure of a revolutionary movement depends largely on the importance we attach to certain goals. If ‘seizure of power for a considerable period’ is seen as a goal, no other peasant revolution in India was more successful than Telangana. If lasting change in agrarian structure and living conditions is seen as a goal, it was no more successful than other peasant movements in India.

Conclusion: Telangana movement was one of the most important peasant movements in the country. It was successfully fought against the feudal oppression of the ruling classes of the region and questioned their domination. After the movement,the region was merged with Telugu speaking region of the Madras presidency, thereby becoming the first linguistically organized state of . In Telangana, the issues of inequality and underdevelopmentcropped up time and again(1968–72 and 2002–14) against the stateand propertied classes outside the region, thus culminating in a separatestate in 2014 (Purendra Prasad, 2015). If one were to find the similarities among the initial peasant armed struggle and the movements for separate statehood, we will find that the agrarian crisis was the backdrop to all three of them.

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Map of Telangana Rebellion 1946-51.

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Image of the statue of DoddiKomaraiah who lost his life in the Movement

Image ChakaliIlemma.

Some more images on Telangana Movement

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Rare Image of operation polo.

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Image of Rajakars Marching.

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