IF Bihar has such a prolonged history of peasant struggles, it has also been a witness to a sustained and concerted counter-insurgency move, right from the days of Gandhi, spearheaded as much by the dealers in state violence as by the champions of Gandhian non-violence. After Gandhi, it was first Vinoba's turn, who entered Bihar in September 1952 with his slogan of Bhoodan. The idea was to persuade the landlords to part with their excess land and share it with landless and poor peasants and Vinoba resolved to test the efficacy of his idea in Bihar. It was his declared strategy to concentrate the campaign in Bihar, and he vowed not to leave Bihar till he and his followers had collected and distributed the targeted amount of 32,00,000 acres of land. But when in June 1956 Bhave finally left Bihar, the figure of total collection was put at 21,47,842 acres only to get depleted to 21,32,787 acres by March 1966. Moreover, of this as much as 11,82,000 acres were found to be unfit for cultivation and of the rest, a considerable part consisted of legally contested land. As for distribution, the less said the better. The organisers themselves claimed to have distributed only 3,11,032 acres till March 1966 where after the campaign clearly fizzled out. Visualised as the most successful testing ground of Bhoodan by its protagonist, Bihar actually proved to be its graveyard.

Bhoodan later gave way to Gramdan, and with Vinoba beating a spiritual retreat to Wardha it was now JP’s turn. JP concentrated his activities in Musahari and later in Bhojpur. Interestingly enough, the entire Musahari block was claimed to have been gifted away in the Gramdan movement. Overtly or covertly, the Sarvodayites have all along collaborated with the government to stem the tide of agrarian conflicts. Right from Vinoba’s role in Telangana and Bihar to JP’s move at Musahari and Bhojpur, from the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini’s trips to Sahar in Bhojpur during 1977-78 to Kuldip Nayar's recent padayatra along with Sachchidanand under the auspices of PRAYAS — all their activities are nothing but part of a wider counter-insurgency move to stamp out armed peasant struggle from the face of Bihar. As Badri Narain Sinha, DIG (Naxalite), disclosed in his article “From Naxalbari to Ekwari” (The Searchlight, June 11-13, 1975), ‘putting in zealous and dedicated social reformers drawn from all shades to bring about transforma­tion on the socio-cultural planes’ is as much a part of ‘the counter-insurgency measures as ‘concentrated police operations or operations by the special task forces, may be from the supreme armed formation, the army itself’.