The Fifth Son

"Suppose the owner of a farm has four sons and a fifth is born later, would he not have to make five shares of his property instead of four? I ask landowners to regard me as an additional heir born to them and to give me my share for the benefit of the poor."

The speaker is a short thin (91 lbs.) man with a straggling beard and yellow-rimmed spectacles who sits cross-legged in a loincloth. His voice is persuasive--and his daily average take for the poor is 300 acres.

A Walk. Four years after Gandhi's death, disciple Vinoba Bhave (rhymes with save), often called the "son of Gandhi" is leading a one-man 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."

In September, Prime Minister Nehru sent for Bhave. He set out from his ashram at Sewagram in Central India to walk the 795 miles to New Delhi. On the way, his 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.

A Stand. Last week Holy Man Bhave, 57, reached New Delhi, took up his stand before a small grass and bamboo hut on the edge of the square cement platform on which Gandhi was cremated. Here five members of the government's planning commission, introduced by Nehru listened as Bhave argued for 1) village wells, instead of huge irrigation projects, 2) village industries, instead of mass factories, 3) increased grain production from small farms. After attending a meeting, India's ascetic President Rajendra Prasad announced that he had given his Bihar estate to Bhave. In the United Provinces, where Bhave's next walk will take him, landowners, without waiting for his arrival, had already promised him 500,000 acres.

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