Word: landless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...promptly set free his father's political prisoners, and announced that he would break up his father's vast estates into small parcels for sale to the landless. He told an interviewer that dictatorships are dangerous "because no one man can always make the proper decision; democracy permits the pooling of ideas for checks and balances." Unfortunately, he was checked more often than he balanced; he was never forceful enough in advocating his own good ideas...
...tells his audiences that it is more blessed to give than to receive. To those who have land he says: "I have come to loot you with love. If you have four sons, consider me as the fifth, and accordingly give me my share." To impoverished tenants and landless laborers he says: "We are all members of a single human family...
Then Vinoba Bhave thought of asking landowners to give land to the landless, saying (or at least politely implying) that if they did not, the Communists or the government might take it away. Thus Bhoomidan-yagna was born, in bloody Telingana. Even the Nizam of Hyderabad, reputed one of the richest and most miserly men in the world, gave some land, though neither the Nizam nor Bhave would say how much (the merit acquired by giving is lost by boasting of it). Some 35,000 acres were collected and reassigned to the most destitute. Gradually the revolt and the terror...
...land reform crusade. His crusade which began with remarkable success in Communist-terrorized Telingana province (TIME, June 4), now promises to sweep through India. Bhave's target: the redistribution of 50 million acres-one-sixth of the cultivated land-among India's millions of landless peasants. His argument: "In India the ideal of Ahimsa (nonviolence) has deeply influenced people's minds. We can successfully bring about peaceful social revolution by gentle persuasion. If we adopt violent means as has been done in China and Russia the whole world will face calamity...
...soft words won him 25,000 acres from 3,000 donors, mostly small landowners having less than five acres. One aged woman, after hearing Bhave, gave him half of her two-acre plot. Another gave him her entire 500-acre estate. The land is distributed to the landless on the basis of one acre for each member of the family. Bhave asks cash donors to buy land for him, present him with a pair of bullocks or bear the expense of digging a well...