Land Reforms or a Tragedy of the Commons? Kanjhawala Cluster in Delhi and the Punjab

Abstract

"Time stood still for a cluster of villages in North West Delhi in September 1978. A modern government - Delhi Administration had ignored the customary authority of the malikan-deh (the proprietory body of the village) in the rural political economy of Union Territory of Delhi and had leased 123 acres out of the village commons in Kanjhawala, the leader or tika village of the Bisagama (twenty villages) cluster, to a similar number of Harijans(untouchables) in the village. The circumstance came to light when the villagers of the cluster, ignoring the ban on public processions, agitated in front of Parliament House and courted arrest. The incident evidenced the resilience of the 'village republic' like the Bisagama cluster in large tracts of northern India or for that matter in the south as well. Such survival of a grassroots self-governing system of collective action is a reality despite erosion from two long term processes in operation in northern India over a matter of two centuries: the first, being the ever- intruding tendency of political centralisation and institutions of statutory control by a nation-state and the second, was the increasing market orientation in the political economy owing to growing demand pressures.

"The paper will focus on the outcome of the underlying tension between the institutions of a modern state which supported and encouraged market orientation and individual decision making against those of customary law of the community. Elsewhere in my book an attempt has been made to analyse these trends in northern India at the two levels of the region and the eco-system within it i.e. Greater Punjab and the Cis-Sutlej. Here we will go down to the third level, the micro terrain - the Bisagama or the Kanjhawala cluster- from 1858 to 1996."