Bihar Election: Why Does No Party Address Land Reforms During Campaigning?

Land has always been at the heart of Bihar’s politics, but land reforms rarely appear to make it to the political stage.

A 2012 study called it “an agenda without a political champion”, and little has changed since. As Bihar heads into the November 2025 general elections, the state remains among the most land-stressed in India and the silence around land reforms continues.

Back in 2008, a state-appointed commission said Bihar’s economy could not grow without land reforms. The government rejected its report a year later, and the issue faded soon after. Nearly every major party, ruling or the Opposition, has since steered clear of it in their campaigns.

Evidently, land remains a subject most parties prefer to avoid, even after an October 2025 report by the National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Organisations (NACDAOR) called landlessness the “single biggest cause of Dalit poverty in Bihar”. Dalits make up about a fifth of the state’s population, yet most remain without land of their own.

“If we’re part of the new government, we’ll push for land distribution as per the recommendations of the Debabrata Bandyopadhyay commission,” says Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of CPI(ML)(Liberation), one of the crucial components of the Opposition alliance called Mahagathbandhan. His party has promised redistribution of around 21 lakh acres of land by implementing the 2008 recommendations of the Debabrata Bandyopadhyay Commission. The party, which currently has 12 MLAs in the 243-seat Bihar assembly, is contesting in 20 seats this time.

The promise, however, does not find a place in the Mahagathbandhan’s common manifesto, which limits itself to offering small plots of three decimals in towns and five decimals in villages to the homeless. The CPI(ML)(Liberation) had pushed for including land distribution to the landless, but the proposal ran into resistance from other alliance partners, particularly the Congress, which was wary of upsetting landowners. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), leading the alliance, showed little enthusiasm for it either.

This issue could have cornered Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United). It was a Kumar-appointed committee that had recommended thorough land reforms, recommendations that Kumar later rejected. However, the same reason that prompted Kumar to step back on land reforms seems to have influenced his rivals as well.

“Land distribution is a sharply polarising issue and there is no guarantee it will not backfire,” a Bihar Congress leader told Outlook, requesting anonymity. The leader argued that such a promise could prompt the numerically small, but powerful landed class votes to consolidate behind the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners JDU and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

According to a 2022 National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) report, Bihar’s rural population density was the highest in the country at 981 per sq. km, which is 280 people more than the second-ranked West Bengal (701). While higher population density reduces land availability, the highly skewed land ownership pattern has resulted in a large number of farmers remaining landless.

From the Communist Party of India (CPI)-led land grab movements of the 1940s, the Vinoba Bhave-led Bhoodan (land donation) movement of the 1950s and 60s and government legislations in between, to the Naxalite-backed armed struggles for land capture, Bihar has seen several efforts to address the unequal distribution of land.

The CPI’s movement freed hundreds of acres of land from large estates but not without bloodshed. The Bhoodan movement received six lakh acres of land from zamindars in donation, but nearly 3.5 lakh acres were found unfit for distribution, as some landlords donated mountains, forests and other uncultivable tracts. Even many of the distributable plots remained undistributed or were reoccupied, making little difference to the landless in the end.

The Naxalite movement from the late 1970s to the early 2000s also captured and distributed several thousand acres of land, but it was among the bloodiest periods in Bihar’s history, marked by massacres in armed clashes between upper-caste landlords’ private armies and lower-caste peasant guerrilla groups.

Therefore, when Chief Minister Nitish Kumar announced the setting up of a Land Reforms Commission on December 15, 2006, less than a month after assuming office by dethroning Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, many saw a ray of hope for a relatively peaceful solution to one of the state’s most difficult conundrums. The Commission’s objective was to distribute surplus government land among the landless and identify plots available for such distribution.

The Commission was soon constituted under the chairmanship of Debabrata Bandyopadhyay, a retired civil servant who had played an instrumental role in West Bengal’s Left Front government’s well-known land distribution programme, Operation Barga, launched in the late 1970s. The Bandyopadhyay Commission submitted its report to the Bihar government in April 2008.

Controversies erupted as soon as its contents became public. The report called for the identification and takeover of ceiling-surplus land illegally possessed by the landed class and estates. The landowning groups threatened violent protests if the government tried to implement the recommendations. Even the RJD and the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), which were in Opposition, sided with the landed class.

The report not only blamed “iniquitous, in-egalitarian and exploitative agrarian asset holdings” for the continuing cycle of rural violence in Bihar, but also for the stagnation in agricultural growth. It showed that medium and large farmers, who made up only 3.5 per cent of landowners, owned about 33 per cent of the total land. Instead of land distribution, the state had actually witnessed a further concentration of ownership since the 1990s.

It observed that since two-thirds of the state’s cultivable land was under sharecroppers and tenants, there was little incentive for cultivators to increase productivity through technology, as the benefits of their investment would also go to the landowner.

“It is evident that there is a structural bottleneck in Bihar agriculture due to the very queer pattern of land ownership and very extortionate system of tenancy-at-will, which are causing great impediment to (the) accelerated rate of agricultural growth,” the report said.

It recommended allotting between one acre and 0.66 acre of ceiling-surplus land to 16.68 lakh households of landless agricultural labourers. It also suggested giving at least 10 decimals of land each to 5.84 lakh homeless non-farm rural workers. The report detailed how large estates and landlords had retained ceiling-surplus land by transferring it to others’ names, fictitious trusts and temples. It also urged the abolition of the distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural land to close a major loophole used by the landed class.

This angered the landed gentry, as many had been bypassing laws to hold on to land beyond the ceiling limits. The Commission pointed out that the Bihar Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling Area and Acquisition of Surplus Land) Act, 1961, fixed the ceiling for a family of five or more at 15 acres, and this limit needed to be upheld. The report also drew criticism from religious leaders, as it recommended that religious institutions existing since 1950 should be subject to the same ceiling. The Commission’s proposal for a new law to protect the interests of bataidars (sharecroppers), who make up about 15-20 per cent of the state’s cultivators, further added to the controversy.

Amid the growing uproar, Bandyopadhyay told journalists that Bihar could easily provide land to 5.48 lakh landless farmers by acquiring surplus land still held by big landlords in others’ names. However, facing strong resistance from the landed class, Kumar stepped back. He declared that the Commission’s recommendations were not binding on the government. He also assured that there would be no new law to protect sharecroppers.

Following Kumar’s refusal to implement the recommendations, Bandyopadhyay, in an article published in the Economic and Political Weekly, described Bihar’s landownership pattern as “acutely skewed even now”. He wrote that a “fearsome desire to possess land” had “permeated the psyche of the entire landowning class of Bihar,” as they were aware of the illegitimacy and illegality of their acquired holdings.

“In absolute terms, 0.1 per cent of the large owners owned a little over eight lakh hectares (4.63 per cent of total land) or 19.76 lakh acres of land, a colossal amount by Indian standards,” Bandyopadhyay wrote. He pointed out that despite the Bengal Left Front government’s failure to “deepen and widen land reforms,” Bengal’s agricultural growth stood above the national trend.

He concluded that Bihar had lost yet another opportunity to reorder production relations in agriculture through legal means. “Perhaps, land reforms in Bihar will have to wait for a violent and massive social upheaval in future,” he wrote.

In Bihar, landownership is directly linked to caste hierarchy. The October 2025 NACDAOR report showed that of the state’s 16.4 million cultivable units, Dalits own only 1.91 million. This means one-fifth of the state’s population owns 11.67 per cent of cultivable units. However, these units are smaller in size. Therefore, when it comes to land area, Dalits have only 0.57 million hectares or 8.83 per cent of the state’s 6.45 million hectares of farmland. The report said that 84 per cent of Dalit households are landless and the average size of Dalit-owned farmland was less than half an acre.

In the 2010 Bihar assembly elections, all major Bihar-based parties—the JD(U), the RJD and the Ram Vilas Paswan-led LJP—remained silent on the question of land. The Congress and the BJP were already averse to the proposition. While three Left parties, the CPI(ML)(Liberation), the CPI and the CPI(M), formed an alliance that put land reforms as one of their top agendas, their electoral performance cut a very sorry figure. The same was the case in the 2015 and 2020 assembly elections, when all parties but the Left remained silent on the land question. The 2025 Bihar election campaign showed no break from that tradition.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist, author and researcher