The paper "The Congress and the Abolition of Zamindari in Uttar Pradesh" by Peter Reeves provides provides a rare genealogy of zamindari abolition as it was initially conceived and subsequently evolved within the Congress in the late colonial and post-independence period.

While initially the party had an ambitious stance on agrarian issues, this position started to become clear and take shape by the 1930s when it began aligning itself more with the interests of tenants and small zamindars. Leftist factions within Congress were instead pushing for clearer policies on economic and social matters which encompassed a near-total elimination of princes and collectivisation. These demands prompted studies in the rent, revenue and tenure arrangements across the subcontinent but the party could only really commit to more temperate measures like rent reform and revenue adjustments.

The governments that went into power in 1937 were fundamentally stifled by colonial laws to effect any major change within land-ownership worked within a reform consciousness and tenancy legislation that took effect in 1939 remained toothless.  

After the elections of 1945-46, zamindari abolition became a major electoral issue, but the new ministry initially hesitated to pursue abolition vigorously. However, internal pressure within Congress and the changing social climate eventually pushed the government to take action. This happened in the form of The Zamindari Abolition Committee, formed in 1946, which aimed to abolish the zamindari system while retaining individual property rights. The hissadari system introduced by the committee accepted peasant proprietorship, with cultivators retaining their entire area of land and paying revenue directly to the state. Charan Singh, who had been writing passionately on the issue laid out the fundamental tenets of this abolition in his seminal work Abolition of Zamindari thus: it wasn’t meant to be the nationalisation of land or the abolition of private property, but the removal of landlord-tenant system. The managerial aspects of land ownership became integral to the novel redefining of ownership rights which gave abolition as a practice a particular skew and foreclosed any possibility of real redistribution of land.

Charan Singh left an indelible mark on the legislation by broadening the ambit of tenancy rights by further granting it to tenants of sir and khudkasht as well as sub-tenants contrary to the erstwhile more limited hissadari scheme. The Zamindari Abolition Fund, which was long dubbed as Pant’s “master stroke” was in fact Singh’s idea as Reeves notes.

Despite criticisms and doubts, the Zamindari Abolition Fund played a significant role in facilitating this transition to peasant proprietorship and strengthening the principle of private property among independent land-owning peasants. However, a layer of ex-zamindars and taluqdar abided by careful hoodwinking and gaming the system which exposed the weaknesses of this paradigm.

The paper then sheds important light on the complexities and challenges faced during the process of zamindari abolition in UP, highlighting the evolution of Congress's agrarian policy, internal conflicts within the party, and the formulation of the Zamindari Abolition Committee's scheme. The scheme, while ambitious, couldn’t act as an insulant against future abuses in land ownership. It did effect broad change, but the victory was pyrrhic. This paper is a sobering account of these challenges and outcomes.