industries for the benefit of ‘400 million Indians and not a few industri-
alists and capitalists’, even as he called for workers to refrain from strikes.^26
Some of his rhetoric was beginning to sound dangerously as if drawn
from Gandhi’s ‘trusteeship’ theory, which Nehru and the left had once
so ridiculed. In March 1947, an Industrial Disputes Act was passed, which
called for the setting up of tribunals for the prevention and settlement
of disputes. The Act cast the government as mediator – a paternalist, or
at least avuncular, presence in industrial disputes. Industrialists and
trade unions were both suspicious of the government. The trade union
movement by this time had split – the old All-India Trade Union
Congress (AITUC), now more or less dominated by the CPI, refused to
accept the validity of government mediation; the Indian National Trade
Union Congress (INTUC), a Congress-sponsored body, accepted the
paternalist claims of government. The socialists, who also opposed
government mediation, stood at the time outside both the AITUC and the
INTUC.
Nehru knew that getting even mildly radical legislation through
parliament or state assemblies was a difficult route to take towards social
change. A case in point was that of land reforms. The first step towards
this, the abolition of zamindari, or the rights of superior landlords who had
controlled the land and paid taxes directly to the British government,
had been initiated by legislatures both in the 1937–9 period and in the
1940s and 1950s, only to be blocked by vested interests – often by
zamindars– who were strongly represented within Congress. Zamindari
abolition was the only stage of land reforms to be properly carried through,
but this was not particularly radical. Already in the late 1930s, British
government reports had called for the abolition of zamindari, though
not for reasons of social justice: land revenue, fixed ‘in perpetuity’ for the
permanent settlement areas, no longer yielded adequate returns for
the government. Post-independence land reform was a relatively mild
form of social engineering, given that the principle of private property
was resolutely observed and that compensation payments were made
to dispossessed zamindars. The legislation lacked bite, however. Overall,
there was to some extent a shift of power in the direction of better-off
‘caste peasants’. Partially dispossessed landlords were allowed to keep the
best of their lands, joined the ranks of the rich peasantry, and circum-
vented the laws against sub-letting land by employing sharecroppers;
a landowner could also avoid the ceiling on the amount of land he was
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 189