ABSTRACT
Years after they began their struggle against the landlords and government, the sharecroppers and landless peasants in Assam were under the impression that they would win. The communists' entry into electoral politics, however, had limited impact on the peasants' struggle. A shift from the nationalist orientation of the Assamese peasant question to tenancy rights and landlessness now forced re-arrangement of the already enacted legal measures. Granting tenancy rights to the Muslim sharecroppers also meant a perceptible shift in the agrarian relations in Assam. While the relation between Hindu landlords and Muslim tenants was the dominant form of agrarian relation in pre-Partition Bengal, the Hindu Assamese landlords and Muslim tenants came to symbolize the agrarian relation in the Brahmaputra valley too. The tenancy law secured tenancy rights for the Muslim tenants of Assamese landlords. The Assam government led by Bishnuram Medhi carried out a programme of land settlement for the immigrants of refugees from East Pakistan after 1951.
