Did Nehru fail to understand that the land reforms he imposed in India were not a success?

PM Nehru failed to implement land reform needed to improve agriculture output due to powerful zamindar (landlord) lobby. Nehru and his team were seemingly innocent of the basics of economics that without a prosperous agriculture, you can’t have agricultural surplus, and without that, you can’t feed the growing urban population and sustain industrialisation. Yet, they neglected agriculture. Agriculture was so neglected that by 1957 India’s agricultural output fell below that of 1953!

Most countries like Japan and others who rapidly progressed and joined the first-world, first concentrated on agriculture and universal education. Nehru neglected both. Nehru copied the Soviets, without realising that all communist countries faced famines thanks to their stress on heavy industries at the expense of agriculture.

Nehru went socialistic where he should not have—in industrialisation; and did not go socialistic where he should have—in agriculture and land reforms. The renowned economist Jagdish Bhagwati had suggested that probably India needed capitalism in industry and socialism in land. But, Nehru did the reverse—besides wrong notions, the main factor was votes: Why annoy the powerful landlords and landed class? Wrote journalist Kuldip Nayar.

A report on land reforms by Wolf Ladejinsky vehemently criticized the government for having reforms on paper but doing very little on the ground. Surprisingly, it was Nehru who had stopped the report from being made public... Nehru abandoned the proposal to initiate drastic land reforms when he found that the states were opposed to the measure. This sent a wrong message to the country and proved yet again that he hated to join issue when vested interests were involved.

I had quarrelled with Nehru regarding his neglect of the village economy, especially agriculture, and protested to him about his almost total neglect of irrigation which was the key to Indian agriculture... Nehru told me disparagingly, ‘You are a villager, you know nothing.’ I retorted, ‘If you had one-tenth of my regard for the village, the Indian economy would have been different.’...I am not sure if he had any convictions, except for aping the Soviet/Russian model. This was stated by S. Nijalingappa, ex-CM of Karnataka in his book, ‘My Life and Politics: An Autobiography’.

Nehru playing with his Red Panda pet

India faced severe shortages in food-items, became dependent on the US PL-480 food-aid, and became an international beggar. But PM Nehru maintained his glamorous global trips for the sake of global peace and prosperity and displayed his diplomatic skills to the international audience while the country suffered acute hunger. The food crisis continued in 1950s and 1960s. After Nehru's death, Lal Bahadur Shastri became PM in 1964. PM Shastri used to fast one day in a week as a symbolic measure to conserve food grains.

Wolf Ladejinsky - Wikipedia

American agricultural reformer and economist (1899–1975) Wolf Isaac Ladejinsky (March 15, 1899 – July 3, 1975) was an American Georgist [ 1 ] agricultural economist and researcher, serving first in the United States Department of Agriculture , then the Ford Foundation and later the World Bank . [ 2 ] He was a key adviser on land reform to the governments of several Asian countries, including Japan from 1945 to 1954 (during the Occupation ) as well as Mainland China and later Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek , South Vietnam from 1955 to 1961 under Ngo Dinh Diem , and countries in Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent . His efforts in Japan and Taiwan were a striking success, but his later efforts were frustrated by political persecution due to his socialist political opinions that were misled with communism during McCarthysm . Improving the welfare of Asian farmers through agrarian reform was his goal throughout his long career, earning him praise as "no typical bureaucrat, but an avid and impassioned reformer". [ 3 ] Born into a poor and precarious Jewish Ashkenazi family in Katerynopil , Ukraine in 1899, Ladejinsky fled Soviet Ukraine in 1921 as a refugee from the Russian Revolution ( Green 1980 :438). He arrived in the US in 1922 and graduated from Columbia University six years later, in 1928. In 1933 one of his professors at Columbia, Rexford Tugwell , helped him obtain a post in the Department of Agriculture. Two years later he joined the department's Foreign Agricultural Service , specializing in Asian problems. In 1945 he was assigned to General Douglas MacArthur 's SCAP staff in occupied Japan ( Book Notes 1978 :836), where he played a major role in developing and introducing the land reform program that socialised land ownership and dismantled a vertical power structure dominated by wealthy landlords and landowners. His considerable influence with Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan is widely credited with aiding the Taiwan economic miracle . In December 1954, during the period of McCarthyism in the United States, Ladejinsky was the central figure in a highly public incident which aroused furor among liberals in Congress and was resolved by the intervention of the White House ( Schrecker 1998 :293–94). Ladejinsky, an anti-Communist New Deal Democrat , was blacklisted by several conservative groups ( Manchester 1978 :508). While working as an agricultural attaché in Tokyo, his position was transferred from the Department of State to the Department of Agriculture's jurisdiction. Soon thereafter, his security clearance was revoked, and he was fired by Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson , who considered Ladejinsky a "security risk" despite admitting a lack of hard evidence against him ( Sachar 1992 :639). A public statement charged that Ladejinsky "required clearance from the Communist Party " to work for Amtorg Trading Corporation , for whom he served briefly as a translator in 1930. At that time, he also had three sisters still living in Sovi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Ladejinsky

https://charansingh.org/sites/default/files/1972%20Feb%20EPW%20Land%20Ceilings%20and%20Land%20Reform%2C%20W%20Ladejinsky.pdf