26 SOCIAL SCIENTIST for 'permanent settlement', which meant different things to different Congressmen at different stages.2 The Congress repeatedly expressed its deep concern and alarm over the government's attempts to undo permanent settlements. The resolution on land revenue at the Lahore session (1893), moved by Peter Paul Pillai, a representative of the Madras Landholders' Association, stated: This Congress desires to call attention to the profound alarm which has been created by the action of government in interfering with the existing Permanent Settlement in Bengal and Bihar (in matters of survey a ~d other cases) and with the terms of the sanads of the permanently settled estates in Madras, and deeming such tampering with solemn public pledges, no matter under what pretences, a national calamity, hereby pledges itself to oppose, in all possible legitimate ways, any and all such reactionary attacks on Permanent Settlements and their holders.3 In its tenth session at Madras (1894) Congress regretted that the Indian government had failed to carry out the pledges for permanent settlement in the provinces where it did not exist. It requested the government to grant immunity from enhancement of land tax for a sufficiently long period of not less than sixty years so as to secure to landholders the full benefits of their own improvements.4 R.C. Dutt, the well-known economic historian and President of Congress in 1899, argued that in the settlement and survey operations, the real position of the cultivator was lost sight of and rules were introduced to secure an increase of land revenue without an adequate consideration of the rights of the cultivator. The cultivator was subjected to revenue enhancement at each recurring settlement, "and has been reduced to a state of poverty and indebtedness which makes him an easy prey to famines in years of bad harvests."5 Agricultural Indebtedness Regarding agricultural indebtedness the Congress felt that the indebted" nes' of the agriculturist classes arises partly from their ignorance and partly from the applic.ition of too rigid a system of fixed revenue assessments. The Congress at its eleventh session at Poona (1895), however, resolved that "any proposal to restrict the right to private alienation of lands by legislation as a remedy for the relief of agricultural indebtedness will be a most retrograde measure, and will, in its distant consequences, not only cheek improvement but reduce the agricultural population to a condition of still greater helplessness."6 It was on this basis that the Congress leaders opposed the Panjab Land Alienation Bill (1900) which was aimed at restricting the transfer of land from peasants to moneylenders. The Congress by 1911 made a change in the nature and content of its demand for permanent settlement. It stated that "a reasonable and