The populist land reform package announced by Nepal's prime minister is preoccupied with the politics of setting new reduced ceilings on agricultural land holdings. Economic considerations targeted towards boosting agricultural productivity are largely ignored. What is required is not a "revolutionary" perspective on determining the maximum amount of agricultural land that one person can own but instead a genuine revolution in the way we approach the justification for and the design of land reform.
Land reform is back in the public policy spotlight in Nepal after many decades. This time it comes with a "revolutionary" tag. But alas, there is hardly anything new, much less revolutionary, in the objectives and basic design of the land reform programme that has been outlined so far. The central focus is a significant lowering of the ceilings on the maximum amount of agricultural land an individual or family can own, with the excess land to be acquired by the government and distributed to those whom it sees as worthy recipients among Nepal's rural poor.
Perhaps the "revolutionary" tag is only a political ruse. The new land reform programme, announced in August this year, is a key plank in the eight-point Special Programme announced by the recently installed Sher Bahadur Deuba government of the Nepali Congress party, which is now in the midst of delicate negotiations with the Maoist rebels in search of a political resolution to the latter's six-year-old "people's war".
Land reform may be a populist platform through which the "revolutionaries" of the present Congress government seek to win the hearts and minds of Nepal's rural poor from the armed Maoist revolutionaries. Any Nepali Congress government must also cope with the legacy of another group of "revolutionaries"-the parliamentary -opposition of the Nepal Communist Party (United Marxist-Leninist), also called the UML. When the UML formed a minority government in 1994, it created a Land Reform Commission whose report (referred to as the Badal Commission Report) is now treated as the holy book on land reform in Nepal by most left political parties. While the coverage of the Badal Commission report is quite wide-ranging on land ownership and tenure issues, its main focus is on setting drastically reduced ownership ceilings on agricultural land that were first enacted in the initial phase of Nepal's land reform programme by King Mahendra in 1964.