EMS on the Agrarian Question: Ground Rent and its Implications 63 high enough rent to get land on lease. EMS saw a striking similarity between the rent paid by tenants in India today and that paid by the rack-rented Irish tenants in the last century to their English landowners, even while recognising the important differences between an independent India and a colonially subjugated Ireland of that time. Thus he says: "The tenancy reforms carried out by the British rulers in their day and the more "radical" agrarian reforms carried out by the Congress rulers... helped in bringing about a state of agrarian relations in India similar to what Marx pointed out as the specific feature of Ireland. In present day India as in Ireland of Marx's times , 'landed property in the capitalist mode of production formally exists without the existence of the capitalist mode of production itself; the landlord rent 'absorbs not merely a profit or surplus labour of the labourer but also a part of his normal wage'... Landlord's rent in India is thus capitalist Ground Rent in form but continues to retain in its essence the characteristics of its pre-capitalist predecessors." (pp 79-80). We thus find that E M S' s ideas retained a logical unity over the half-century separating the Minute of Dissent, and the Marxist Theory of Ground-Rent. In the former he had stressed the need for land reform which represented an essential part of the bourgeois-democratic programme, which the bourgeoisie itself was incapable of carrying out but without which the condition of the masses could not improve. In the latter article EMS again showed how this task still remained incomplete despite four decades of legislative reforms because land monopoly remained, and Ground-Rent retained its precapitalist essence. Today, six decades after these true words were first written by EMS, there is continuing prevalence of high levels of poverty and illiteracy in the rural areas of the majority of states in this country, the narrowness of the mass rural market for manufactures has slowed down growth and forced Indian industry to seek export markets even as our own population remains inadequately fed, housed, and clothed. All this is the outcome of the failure to carry out land reforms, a failure embodying the historic compromise that the Indian bourgeoisie has made with the landed interest. What we have had is landlord capitalism, but not land to the tiller. The agrarian question that EMS had explicated still remains before us ; the solutions are still as clear.