Shifted land relations eroded the Congress Party’s rural base and political standing.

Evidence

And thus the Congress Party itself has been gradually undermined. The tenants, realizing that the landlords depend on them just as much as they depend on the landlords, have come to resist a party which has always been doubly offensive to them, a party whose practice is patrimonial and yet whose rhetoric, at least by the end of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, was becoming increasingly socialist. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1613

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramscian hegemony and to the reader’s interest in how material power relations underwrite political loyalties.