dated August 10, 1951: Ill-Considered Report

From the Editorials: ``The report of the Land Reforms Committee is provoking widespread opposition. The bare summary of recommendations could not bring home to the public the extremely flimsy and often unsound reasoning on which proposals are made. The Committee remarks that its recommendations aim `at the immediate rather than the ultimate, the practical than the ideal, the expedient than the doctrinaire'. This claim is hardly sustained. The Committee deems it `inevitable in a report like this that compromise is more visible than inflexible logic'. That is a masterpiece of understatement. Recommendations, often seriously contradictory, have been so light-heartedly made that no responsible government can propose legislation based on them.... The Committee begins by admitting the absence of any worth while statistics, though the Raghavendra Rao Report was made available, and it also had the benefit of the wisdom of the Agrarian Reforms Committee. But this Committee made no independent enquiries; it did not even examine all those who submitted memoranda. In formulating its recommendations, it has proceeded, according to its own admission, on `general impressions'. It declares oracularly that `peasant proprietorship is the pattern best-suited to the genius and traditions of our people'. Its second assumption is that, if the ideal of peasant proprietorship is to be realised, `the aim should be to make cultivation and ownership increasingly coincide'. Assumption three is that the point at which cultivation and ownership could best coincide with maximum advantage is represented by a holding with a land revenue assessment of Rs. 250 a year. For none of these assumptions does the Committee produce a title of evidence..... All in all, the Committee's proposals are bound to depress land values and frighten capital away from agriculture, enabling neither good husbandry nor prosperous rural economy''.

The Menon Ticket

The late Sardar Patel's right-hand man V. P. Menon told pressmen in Hyderabad that, after retiring from Government service shortly, he would stand as a candidate for election to Parliament. Asked if he would stand on a Congress ticket, redoubtably he replied, ``Not on a Congress ticket. I will stand on Menon's ticket''.

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