ABSTRACT
Pakistan's rural problems, at least initially, were if anything worse than India's. Pakistan in 1947 inherited a country split into two parts with 1500 km of India in between: a geographical anomaly destined to last only twenty years. East Pakistan had three-quarters of its cultivated land under the Permanent Settlement, and so resembled zamindari tenure in Indian West Bengal. Ceylon gained independence in 1948, tagging along, like Pakistan, in the great slipstream of Indian emancipation. At independence in 1947, most of the east wing was under Permanent Settlement, the government's revenue from the land being fixed in perpetuity. The main effects of land reform were the elimination of the zamindar as a force in rural society and an increase in the government's land revenue. Lack of government zeal and landowners' subversive attitudes stimulated many peasants, often in peasant organisations affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party, to direct action.
