The Earth is the Lord's
By HALLAM TENNYSON T 4 a.m. while the central Indian plains are still relaxing from their struggle with the heat, a band of men and women break camp, roll their simple kit into bundles and set off from the sleeping village where they have spent the night. The road is empty and starlit. At first their voices are lifted in a murmured prayer or hymn. Then they fall silent. Only as dawn breaks do they start talking quietly to each other. The people of the villages gather by the roadside to watch them pass. Then they stop for a fifteen-minute breakfast, before going forward another six or eight miles to the village where they are to spend the day. Pilgrims ? Religious mendi- cants ? In India one wouldn't be surprised. But these are neither. They are the Land Gifts Mission, who are walking from village to village appealing to the landowners to share property with the poor. In its first two years' work the Mission has collected 800,000 acres, an area twice as large as Surrey. Since Gandhi's fast for the Untouchables in 1934 nothing has so stirred the social conscience of India.
How did it all start ? Vinoba Bhave, the man who had the idea, is an austere bearded follower of Gandhi. For twenty years he worked quietly in a remote village. Then in the spring of 1951 he walked from his village to Hyderabad, where the Communists still had cqntrol of certain areas., He wanted to see for himself the nature of the Communist appeal to the peasants. Everywhere he heard the same story : land- hunger, oppression by the landlords and the peasants roused by Communist leadership to try to redress their grievances by violence. When he started on his tour, Vinoba Bhave had no plan. He merely talked with the people and listened to their woes. Then on April 18th he was met by a group of low-caste Hindus from a village where he was staying. They pleaded for land in order to be able to support themselves. Vinoba Bhave assembled the villagers and appealed to them for generosity to their landless neighbours. The land was given. That after- noon, by a process of social combustion, a spark was kindled. From then on Vinoba made the same appeal to every village audience.
" If you had four sons and a fifth was born." he said, " you would give him his share of land. Treat me as your fifth son. Give me my share. Give freely and willingly for the sake of `Daridra-Narayan'—God revealed in the poor." The audiences responded. Within two months Vinoba had received 12,000 acres in trust for the landless poor.
In September of 1951 Vinoba was invited to Delhi by the Prime Minister Nehru to put his views on land-reform before the National Planning Commission. As he does not use money, Vinoba walked from his village to the capital. The distance is over 600 miles. It took him two months. A waste of time ? Hardly. For he collected 18,000 acres on the way. The Govern- ment was impressed. Arrangements were made to legalise the new land-gifts, and Vinoba, armed with a simple document which any landowner could sign, left the capital to try his luck with the wealthy landlords of the North.
Once more his appeal met with a good response—so good, in fact, that a comprehensive scheme of land-gifts throughout the country was drawn up, and workers trained by Vinoba in his method and impelled by his religious fervour for social justice have started walking through- a dozen other provinces. The target they have set themselves for the next two years is 2,500,000 acres, with 50,000,000 acres—or one for every six of India's cultivated land—as their ultimate goal. At their present rate of progress it is perhaps not too fantastic to hope that they may succeed. In March of this year, for the first time, land has been given in areas where Vinoba himself has not yet been. What is the secret of Vinoba's appeal ? Like Gandhi he identifies himself with the poor. His walking is a symbol of this identification. Hundreds of people are ready to put their cars at his disposal. Yet he knows better than to accept them. For India is the one country where renunciation still counts, and where to be voluntarily poor is still considered holy. Yet Vinoba does not only go to the hearts of the poor; he touches the conscience of the rich as well. It is they, after all, who give the land. Unlike the Hebrew prophets—whom he resembles in so much else—he does not cry " woe " on the human instruments of injustice. He is not for or against this or that class. The earth is the Lord's, he says, not the prole- tarians' or the capitalists'. All of us hold it in trust for Him. And, that being so, `•` even the big landowners are our brethren. We cannot ignore their interests."
His job, he says, is to create the atmosphere for an equitable redistribution, and this can only come about when there is a change of heart between men and their neighbours. Vinoba is a revolutionary—but a revolutionary who knows that in a democracy revolutions must begin in the souls of men. The result of his work in the villages is more than the mere- sharing of land. A new sj$rit is lit. A village council chooses the recipients for the gifts, and applies to the government for seeds, bullocks and implements. A fresh interest is stirred in agricultural problems and a realisation that they can only be tackled in co-operation.
It is just this revolution in her villages of which India stands in desperate want. Only when her 300,000,000 peasants are filled with a new spirit will the crying need for increased agricultural production be met. For the Indian villager requires more than tractors, irrigation, fertilisers—important as these things are. He needs the :heart and will to use them rightly. The Government must know better than anybody the penalty it will pay if it fails to inspire the people so as to make this revolu- tion possible. That is why Vinoba's work is so urgent. That is why in the centre of every Indian city a barometer should be erected—like those which recorded British savings-campaigns during the war. On it each week the latest acreage reached by the Land Gifts Mission could be marked up. It is as important as that.*
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