The state has the sole authority to decide ownership and usage of land. This inherited neo-feudalism of the colonial era is the cause of today's problems
Land use change is a problem as old as the establishment of British rule in India. It was the emergence of colonial ruling practices that altered the relationship with land in most of India. The creation of a state structure that governed everything, from categorising birth to registering death, completely changed the ownership of land and how it could be used. Most of India, until then, lived with land largely as a collective, community-owned, asset. The continuation of that colonial state structure lies at the root of the problem in which Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa finds himself in today.
The people of a particular village owned most of the land as 'commons'. It was further classified in terms of usage — tilling or grazing. Another equally large quantity of land, much of the time, was owned by a temple, a deity, or simply left aside for grazing in perpetuity. There would never be an individual who could determine the fate of such land. But that was until the colonial state emerged. And once it did, land became amongst the most commonly violated of Indian liberties.
The intrusiveness of the state was most apparent in the proliferation of military cantonments, police camps, various district secretariats, and such other institutions of Government that sprung up across the country. Facilities for the ruler, so as to govern this mass of people, came up on lands that were once commonly owned by the local inhabitants. That was how, after all, the British were able to get the land on which to raise these bases. The type of land, and its tenure rights, were changed at the whims of an imperial bureaucracy. The largest individually owned lands were of course of the agricultural type, and almost always as part of feudal inheritance.
Come 1947 and the birth of the Nehruvian state structure, this relationship with land as a tool of the state came to be perpetuated. The first to face the axe were, of course, the feudals. The Government came down on them with the various Land Ceiling Acts, and the state entered into the business of distributing appropriated lands of the feudals. While the feudally owned lands in excess of permissible limits were distributed amongst the landless, the 'commons' that remained came into the purview of a bureaucracy that replicated a continuity of imperial administrative practices. And this land came to be parcelled out for peanuts, or a premium, over the decades as a demonstration of the ultimate authority of the state. Favours sought, and favours given, have largely revolved around the authority to sign away land or even change its use.
It is impossible for an Indian owning land to change its use, its type. Which means its categorisation cannot be changed by an individual, but for a price. If the revenue records declare that land to be agricultural, it shall remain that way come what may. The owner can have that land type changed provided money changes hands. Which may, and most likely not, be legal. Despite petitions and payments it still depends on the whims and fancies of those sitting in the district headquarter, and all the way up to the State capital, to authorise that change in land use. No individual has the authority to do so unilaterally — that power rests with the state, exactly as it did with the imperial authority.
This is where the problem begins. And it is even worse when it comes to changing the land use of 'commons', or inappropriately called 'Government land' now. For what is owned by the Government was with the people as a community asset. Changing the land use of 'Government land' requires the intervention of the Chief Minister and the concurrence of the Revenue Department simultaneously. Which is what various Chief Ministers have been doing in every State of the Union of India.
Even as the Governor of Karnataka is batting, bowling and umpiring for the political party that has elevated him from the district courts to a Raj Bhavan, it is worth noting as lessons to be learnt. His permission to prosecute the Chief Minister is politics by every means possible and an attempt to foist on the BJP what is has been doing to the Congress-led Union Government. Without recourse to colloquialism, such politically-motivated responses rarely get to see the light at the end of the long legal tunnel. And they definitely don't take away from the issues that have got the Government of India into hot water. But neither does it take away from the Chief Minister's problems. There is a problem that the Opposition in the State, led by the Governor, is doing its best to make merry with.
Notwithstanding the fact that this does not detract from the telecom or Commonwealth Games scandals that have shamed India in global perceptions, the Karnataka issue was always avoidable. So the president of the BJP has been correct and astute in his analysis by declaring the Karnataka imbroglio as something that is "immoral but not illegal". It is immoral because it has benefitted the son of the Chief Minister, but it is not illegal, for it is within the purview of the State Government to have done so. This is where the dilemma currently lies.
There is a valuable lesson to be learnt in this, most of all for the BJP as it represents the principal opposition to the Nehruvian vision of the country. The post-independence state raised by the Nehru–Patel duo was a continuation of the imperial administrative structure based on taking away native authority and rights from the people of India. In the 21st century, and with the country having traversed much distance, there is a lot that can, and must be, returned to the people of India. Empowering the people means giving them the ownership of all that has always belonged to them. Nothing reflects this contest between the imperial and the Indian more than the power to take land away from people and to change its use from being community-based to the commercial.
The BJP would do well to institute a re-look at the Nehruvian neo-imperial state, for there are many aspects of life in the district that can quite easily be tackled by the people themselves. But nothing will have a greater impact than a re-think on land. The BJP can stamp its difference through how the state respects land rather than disregard its ownership and use. And it will prevent anybody being tempted in the future.
