misunderstanding of the ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ of the village
community; when this idea entered the nationalist imagination (it found
a place, notably, in Gandhian thinking), it evoked schemes to revive this
ancient and glorious tradition of ‘local self-government’ of an authentic
and indigenous kind. But the harmonious and self-regulating idyllic
village, ruled by the village panchayat, its own council of five village elders,
was a myth. The reality of local inequalities, class and caste stratification
did not lend themselves to the ‘restoration’ of a mythical idyll: the village
was, in the words of B.R. Ambedkar, ‘a sink of localism, a den of
ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’.^30
The First Plan had envisaged land reforms and panchayats as the
economic and political prerequisites for Community Development
programmes. But as the Nehruvian state was unable – or unwilling – to
challenge the social order in the countryside, progress in this direction
was slow at best. In 1956, Malcolm Darling, who as a pioneer of rural
reconstruction and the cooperative movement in colonial Punjab had been
considered a sympathetic colonial official, was invited back to India to
report on the progress of the cooperative movement in India under
Community Development; his progress report was far from encouraging.
It could be said in its defence that the remarkable survival of Indian
traditions of craftsmanship and the development of handicrafts in inde-
pendent India owed much to the Gandhian defence of small-scale industry
that was strengthened by Community Development. It also provided, in
the longer term, a language of legitimacy in which rural communities
could make claims on their own behalf, demanding the right to take
developmental initiatives of their own – as envisaged by the ideologues of
‘self-help’. But this was a long time coming.
Against the backdrop of the stalling of land reform measures, there
appeared what seemed to be a striking victory for the Gandhians: Acharya
Vinoba Bhave’s bhoodan(land donations) and gramdan(village donations)
movement. The bhoodanmovement, dubbed a ‘revolution through love’,
involved the ascetic figure of Vinoba Bhave roaming the countryside in
search of alms in the form of land, and receiving large tracts as voluntary
donations from landlords whom the force of law had not managed to
dispossess. In the religious tradition of giving alms or donations to holy
men, some had been encouraged to give of their plenty. Much publicity
was given to this movement, especially among Cold War-motivated
observers, who encouraged this non-confrontationist and non-communist
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 195