Shinzani Jain (LSE) - 2023-24 Students
s.jain89@lse.ac.uk

Land to the Tiller: A Performative Archive of Land Reforms in Jammu and Kashmir

In July 1950, the government of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) passed the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act (BLEAA) to turn the principle of ‘land to the tiller’ into reality. The BLEAA has been referred to as the ‘Magna Carta’ of peasants in J&K and has been instrumental in creating an egalitarian rural economy, benefitting even the most marginalised sections of the society. To protect the newly instituted land rights of the peasantry, a regime of land laws was enacted to regulate the alienation of land to non-permanent citizens and non-agricultural classes. In this project, I will conduct a historical case study of land reform laws in J&K, focussing in particular on the enactment and implementation of the BLEAA during the 1950s. To conduct this research, I will use a multidimensional approach combining archival research, interview methods, and statistical data analysis. This project assumes more significance in light of the fact that since August 2019, the Indian government has been making legislative changes to dilute the constitutional provisions and state laws protecting the land rights of people in the state. I will work with archivists in J&K to build an archive dedicated to the history of the reforms. As a community-driven project, this archive is oriented towards documenting the community experiences of the transformations brought about by the reforms. This may be the last opportunity to gather first-hand accounts of the beneficiaries of the reforms in the 1950s who may still be alive, making this research relevant and time-sensitive. Finally, this project contributes to the existing knowledge of legal and development history in South Asia and adds to the debates on the role of land reforms in enhancing productivity and reducing poverty in agrarian economies. 

Primary Supervisor: Dr Rajesh Venugopal

Secondary Supervisor: Professor James Putzel

Back to the top