A member: You need not accept it. The treasury will be happy to keep it warm for you.
Begum Abida Khan: And even that bond-weakened pittance is on a graduated scale so that the larger landlords many of whom have establishments on which hundreds of people depend – managers, relatives, retainers, musicians –
A member: Wrestlers, bullies, courtesans, wastrels –
Begum Abida Khan: – will not be paid in proportion to the land that is rightfully theirs. What will these poor people do? Where will they go? The Government does not care. It thinks that this bill will be popular with the people and it has an eye on the General Elections that will be taking place in just a few months. That is the truth of the matter. That is the real truth and I do not accept any denials from the Minister of Revenue or his Parliamentary Secretary or the Chief Minister or anyone. They were afraid that the High Court of Brahmpur would strike down their graduated scale of payment. So what did they do at a late stage of the proceedings yesterday – at the very end of the second reading? Something that was so deceitful, so shameful, yet so transparent, that even a child would be able to see through it. They split up the compensation into two parts – a non-graduated so-called compensation – and a graduated so-called Rehabilitation Grant for zamindars and passed an amendment late in the day to validate this new scheme of payment. Do they really think the court will accept that the compensation is ‘equal treatment’ for all – when by mere jugglery the Revenue Minister and his Parliamentary Secretary have transferred three-quarters of the compensation money into another category with a long and pious name – a category where there is blatantly unequal treatment of the larger landlords? You may be assured that we will fight this injustice while there is breath in our bodies –
A member: Or voice in our lungs.
The Hon’ble the Speaker: I would request members not to interrupt needlessly the speeches of other members.
Begum Abida Khan: But what is the use of my raising my voice for justice in a House where all we meet with is mockery and boorishness? We are called degenerates and wastrels but it is the sons of Ministers, believe me, who are the true proficients of dissipation. The class of people who preserved the culture, the music, the etiquette of this province is to be dispossessed, is to be driven through the lanes to beg its bread. But we will bear our vicissitudes with the dignity that is the inheritance of the aristocracy. This chamber may rubber-stamp this bill. The Upper Chamber may give it another cursory reading and rubber-stamp it. The President may sign it blindly. But the courts will vindicate us. As in our fellow-state of Bihar, this pernicious legislation will be struck down. And we will fight for justice, yes, before the bench and in the press and at the hustings – as long as there is breath in our bodies – and, yes, as long as there is voice in our lungs.
Shri Devakinandan Rai (Socialist Party): It has been very enlightening to be lectured to by the honourable member. I must confess that I see no likelihood of her begging for her bread through the lanes of Brahmpur. Perhaps for cake, but I doubt that too. If I had my way she would not beg for her bread, but she and those of her class would certainly have to work for it. This is what simple justice requires, and this is what is required also by the economic health of this province. I, and the members of the Socialist Party, agree with the honourable member who has just spoken that this bill is an election gimmick by the Congress Party and the government. But our belief is based on the grounds that this is a toothless bill, ineffectual and compromised. It does not go anywhere near what is needed for a thorough overhaul of agricultural relations in this province.
Compensation for the landlords! What? Compensation for the blood that they have already sucked from the limbs of a helpless and oppressed peasantry? Or compensation for their God-given right – I notice that the honourable member is in the habit of invoking God whenever His assistance is required to strengthen her weak arguments – their God-given right to continue to gorge themselves and their useless train of unemployed relations on the ghee of this state when the poor farmer, the poor tenant, the poor landless labourer, the poor worker can hardly afford half a sip of milk for his hungry children? Why is the treasury being depleted? Why are we writing ourselves and our children into debt with these promised bonds when this idle and vicious class of zamindars and taluqdars and landlords of all kinds should be summarily dispossessed without any thought of compensation – of the lands that they are sitting on and have been sitting on for generations for the sole reason that they betrayed their country at the time of the Mutiny and were richly rewarded for their treason by the British? Is it just, Sir – is it reasonable that they should be awarded this compensation? The money that this government in its culpable so-called generosity is pouring into the laps of these hereditary oppressors should go into roads and schools, into housing for the landless and land reclamation, into clinics and agricultural research centres, not into the luxurious expenditure which is all that the aristocracy is accustomed to or capable of.