SINHAS Vol 30 No 1 Jacob Rinck
“Failed” Not Futile: Reassessing Nepal’s 1964 Land Reform
Jacob Rinck
Abstract
Nepal’s 1964 land reform, passed into law and implemented following King Mahendra’s 1960 coup, is usually considered to have failed. In terms of most of the reform’s explicit aims, this is certainly true: minimal amounts of land were actually redistributed, and the reform did little to improve the lives of those at the bottom of the agrarian political economy. Yet, based on a combination of local land records from Dhanusha, national land statistics, and oral history accounts by farmers and district- and national-level bureaucrats, this article argues that the reform did have significant and lasting effects both within and beyond its explicit policy objectives: 1) it radically reasserted central government control over landowning elites, 2) it rendered the erstwhile aspirational category of the landlord problematic, and 3) thereby started a long-term process of divestment by many large landowners mainly to the benefit of middle-peasants. The 1964 land reform thus crucially reshaped political and economic dynamics in ways that continue to reverberate until today.
Keywords: Land reform, Panchayat politics, Tarai-Madhesh, oral history, feudalism
“Failed” Not Futile: Reassessing Nepal’s 1964 Land Reform
Jacob Rinck
Abstract
Nepal’s 1964 land reform, passed into law and implemented following King Mahendra’s 1960 coup, is usually considered to have failed. In terms of most of the reform’s explicit aims, this is certainly true: minimal amounts of land were actually redistributed, and the reform did little to improve the lives of those at the bottom of the agrarian political economy. Yet, based on a combination of local land records from Dhanusha, national land statistics, and oral history accounts by farmers and district- and national-level bureaucrats, this article argues that the reform did have significant and lasting effects both within and beyond its explicit policy objectives: 1) it radically reasserted central government control over landowning elites, 2) it rendered the erstwhile aspirational category of the landlord problematic, and 3) thereby started a long-term process of divestment by many large landowners mainly to the benefit of middle-peasants. The 1964 land reform thus crucially reshaped political and economic dynamics in ways that continue to reverberate until today.
Keywords: Land reform, Panchayat politics, Tarai-Madhesh, oral history, feudalism