Gajendra's suicide is more about Delhi, less about India's farmers

Let's face it. Delhi is not where the farmers watch over their fields and then die in despair when their crops don't get enough rains or command enough price. The farmers that kill themselves are in the hinterlands of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and even Gujarat.

We, however, don't have a name to remember the more than 60,000 farmers that have killed themselves in the last two decades by. We now know Gajendra Singh Rathore. Because he, unlike his comrades from the cotton fields of Vidarbha or paddy fields of Telangana, chose the heart of the capital to kill himself.

Worse, he chose to die in full public view as the ruling party in Delhi held a rally, ironically, to protest against a law on land acquisition that the current government at the Centre desperately wants.

What followed Gajendra's death was surreal. TV reporters, anchors and even politicians, who until now were oblivious to the thousands of farmer deaths, were suddenly all over Dausa, Jantar Mantar, Parliament, and even Arvind Kejriwal's residence. Television froze, playing visuals of a turbaned Gajendra sitting precariously on the neem tree and blurred images of him hanging from it later on a loop. Newspapers this morning screamed with a rare headline and the humble farmer made a humble appearance.

The only reason it became the talking point was because Gajendra hung himself from a tree in central Delhi, not at his obscure village, which is not even a glitch on the map of Rajasthan, forget India. Pretty much like the rape of the 23-year-old medical intern - now remembered as "Nirbhaya" - when hundreds of rapes and other forms of sexual violence occur every day across the country.

What can also not be denied is that Gajendra's death became a talking point because it happened during an Aam Aadmi Party rally, giving the trigger-happy journalists a juicy political scandal to whip the leaders of all persuasions with. Why were there politicians on all TV channels enjoying an ugly blame-game on anchor-moderated discussions? Why wasn't it a story about India's skewed "reforms" that force farmers to kill themselves? Why wasn't somebody like P Sainath hopping from one channel to another on Wednesday evening, explaining what is wrong with us?

It is also in the brutal irony of a farmer committing suicide in the hallowed backyard of India's Parliament lies the tale of India's humongous divide, exacerbated by the dreams of a liberalised-globalised country that is now a nightmare for those who are not a part of the bandwagon. But then, the surround sound notwithstanding, nobody is willing to step on the tail of that sleeping monster.

It will be erroneous to call Delhi the centre. The city-state acts more like the indulgent bully that always wants the pie of the national attention to itself. Is this how the capital of a country must be imagined? Is Delhi a microcosm or a megalopolis with its whole larger than the sum of its parts?

That Delhi captures a major chunk of the national imagination is in itself a failure of the idea of a nation. The Delhi that was supposed to assimilate the aspirations and the agony of the remotest and the wretched, has instead turned into a self-seeking monster than refuses to stand up to anything unless it is affected by it.

It is in this context that the idea of a national media must be revisited. The geographical reach of a nation's media does not make it national, its ability to accommodate what is out of its immediate field of vision does. The comfort zone must be shunned, the hands must be dirtied in the grime and dust that the real India is.

It is perhaps because of this tendency of the national media that a Union minister's "presstitute" barb which should otherwise have found no audience in a functioning democracy found so many enthusiastic takers and backers on the social media. The visceral delight with which most media - especially TV - is mocked at and rejected by a large section of Indians speaks volumes (pun intended) on the state of affairs.

Hope Gajendra didn't kill himself in vain. Hope the neem tree at Jantar Mantar from which he hung himself reminds the journalists in Delhi of an India outside Delhi, more deserving of its attention than the mostly-privileged capital dwellers.