70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
mum reasonable standard of living to each agricultural household cannot be provided and that this only provides some relief. To be able to realise full employment and a reasonable standard of life, a significant part of the rural households would have to be drawn into industrial and other non-agricultural spheres of activity.
The Explanatory Note is indeed a great contribution in clarifying many points, particularly on tenancy-related questions. The Note also brings into focus the relative importance of various struggles in the agrarian revolution. The struggles have to be organized mainly on the demands of agricultural workers and poor peasants, relating to wage, land, etc. the demands of the middle and rich peasants for fair prices for their produce, should also be taken up.
The Land Question was indeed one of P.S.' significant contributions. This work is an important methodological study which enables us to identify clearly various social classes in the rural areas, which is by no means an easy task as the economic activities of various social classes often overlap. P. S.-was able to discern clearly the complexities involved and arrive at meaningful and operational categories of various social classes engaged in agriculture, and to define the political attitude to be adopted towards each of these social classes. The Land Question contained case studies of two villages, Anantavaram in Tenali taluka (a wet village) and Kaza in Guntur taluka (a wet cum dry village), both in Guntur district. While the agrarian situation varies somewhat across the different regions within the country, possessing different histories of land tenure, different magnitudes of tenancy and different levels of development of capitalism in agriculture. The Land Question, nevertheless, lays down the basic methodological framework for studying any region even if the categories require some modification before they can be adopted for study and political work. With painstaking detail, comprehensive economic information was collected on the two villages, making the work a landmark in studies on agriculture in the country and a classic. The Land Question, brings to mind Mao Tse Tung's (
It is not enough, that there be distribution of surplus lands of the landlords among the agricultural labour and poor peasantry, but that all the lands of the landlords, including holdings below the ceiling, need to be confiscated and distributed. The Naxalitc solution to the land question is also inadequate and naive, as immediate armed struggle can neither materialize on a large scale nor realize anything. People take to armed struggle only in self-defence and when their democratic rights and movements are suppressed by the government with violence. Only through years of patient work among the people, taking up their day to day economic and social problems, can the required consciousness be brought about and the organization built. In the absence of this, they end up organizing anarchic and adventurist actions, the result of which is that their forces get split and atomised.