AGRARIAN UNREST IN WEST BENGAL 77 ceiling was also held up by legal complexities. It was in such a situation that the first non-Congress Government was voted to power, and electoral support increasingly shifted in favour of CPI(M) in 1967 and 1969. Despite impatience in Naxalbari and a few other pockets, CPI(M) took its own time in preparing the poor peasants for its programme of land seizure and crop protection movement. It was in 1969 that its programme began to be implemented in a big way by the rural poor, with the Government conniving to act as an instrument of their struggles. This, according to the author, ^captured the imagination of the rural poor" (p 44). This also led to the dismissal of the GPI (M)-led Government. With the ousting of the United Font Government from power in March 1970, a reign of terror was let loose by the Congress regime on the CPI(M)'s expanded rural bases, and the 1972 election was turned into a mockery to engineer the Party's electoral defeat. )The Party however continued to work amongst the peasantry under imposed semi' legal conditions. The movement nevertheless was able to achieve some of its objectives. Two of Hare Krishna Konar's proposed pieces of legislation were subsequently put into the statute book by the Congress Government ^with minor alterations" (p 47), giving the share-croppers thereby substantial legal rights (at least on paper) over their lands and crops, and also limited opportunities of getting back their alienated lands. The major achievements were however ^politicisation of the poor peasantry on militant lines" and the expansion of the CPI (M) bases amongst them. "While the movement successfully crushed the power of the big landowners", the author concludes, ^it also brought into focus a new antagonism among the different strata of the peasantry, sharecroppers and the landless labourers'^? 76). But were the big landowners (jotdars) really crushed? Or, was it that such a prospect was only just opened up? The CPI (M) and the Agrarian Issue ^Viable'(?) sharecroppers and 'middle peasants5 are interchangeable terms for the author (p 61). An interesting finding of the author is that, in the course of the movement, the CPI (M) found itself in the rural areas largely identified and/or aligned with the interests of the agricultural workers and poor peasants; and the CPI, with the sharecropper middle peasant interests. The point however appears to be over-stretched when the author further argues: ...the share croppers found it easier to identify their class interest with the ideology and programme of CPI, which proclaimed the present stage of revolution as primarily a national democratic revolution. In the context of agriculture, it meant in particular demanding occupancy rights for the share croppers. CPI (M) was reluctant to take such a step for fear of creating a solidified, middle