We killed Gajendra Singh for acche din
More than 2,00,000 peasants have committed suicide since 1997. This works out to more than 30 peasants killing themselves every day, and more than one peasant ending his life every hour for the past 18 years. The number of those who have chosen to die in this manner since May 2014, the time when our good days returned, is over 7,000. Those who have been shouting from the rooftops that India needs to liberalise, and open up its economy to world competition, refuse to see the link between this liberalisation and the constant spiral of peasant suicides.
From the time this economic liberalisation began to bite, the farmer suicides have seen no end. Originally, it was primarily the cotton belt where the suicides were happening, and for a long time our analysts and the corporate-owned media tried to pass them off as an effect of alcoholism, gambling debts, or the farmers' inability to pay off debts incurred at the time of a daughter's wedding, or on shradh. The link between the failure of the much touted genetically modified BT cotton and the suicides was only rarely alluded to.
Everything except the obvious was stated - the increasing disconnect between the cost of agricultural produce and the price at which it was being sold. Forget profits, the peasant was increasingly finding it difficult to recover basic costs. Among the host of problems were the introduction of expansive varieties of MNC-supplied seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, the spiralling prices of other inputs like water, the rising cost of electricity and the constantly shrinking returns that resulted from successive governments succumbing to pressure from the US and World Bank and exhibiting a reluctance to raise support prices for agricultural produce.
The net result was the destitution of the peasantry on an unprecedented scale. Faced with the emasculation and marginalisation of organised movements of farmers and workers, the peasant was now staring at a situation where his labour could no longer sustain him; there was no organisation that could effectively fight for his demands and the government that had, in the past, appeared to be sensitive to his hardships, now firmly turned its back on him.
No one wanted to talk of the despair of two thirds and more of this country's population. The urban middle class had bought the dream of "India Shining", of rising stocks, real estate and skyrocketing gold prices. The aspirational middle class, with its easy pickings of disposable incomes, was not going to be shaken out of its cocoon of comfort. Add to this a media, now focusing only in sensationalism, suddenly losing all interest in news like hundreds of thousands choosing to end their lives because they found themselves in a dead alley with no hope of escape. The media that was devoting prime time to the movement of share markets, something that engages less than two percent of this country's population. It was not going to talk of such depressing news, and the only news that came from the villages was about infants caught in borewell sumps or the fulminations of khap panchayat pradhans.
The peasant was caught in this hopeless situation where he had no one to turn to and so he turned upon himself - put a noose around his neck, drank pesticide. There was no cure to the disease that afflicted his agriculture, so set himself on fire, jumped in front of a train, chose anything that would put an end to his misery.
Ayesha Kidwai, professor, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, JNU, writing about suicide at Jantar Mantar, says that an organised movement that would speak for the farmers, is their only recourse: "The Dalits and women live in the worst conditions in this country, but one does not hear of so many suicides among them, primarily because there is a women's movement and because there are organisations that stand up against atrocities on Dalits. The only hope for the peasantry is an organised movement that speaks up for the peasantry and is sensitive to the needs of this single largest economic community in this country of more than a billion. It is only this movement that can arrest this large scale loot of the peasantry and pull the peasant out of the morass of depression in which he has sunk. The suicides are now not confined to the traditional pockets of faraway Maharashtra and Andhra. The deaths are now at our doorsteps, in Rajasthan, Punjab and in Gujarat."
So let us stop trying to fool ourselves. The dream that former prime minister Narasimha Rao began to sell has been pushed down our throats through an army of finance ministers doing the bidding of the World bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), beginning with Narsimha Rao and through successive tenures of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, HD Deve Gowda, IK Gujaral, and once again Vajpayee - followed by two rounds of Manmohan Singh and now Narendra Modi.
The likes of Gajendra will continue to hang themselves from the nearest available tree. He is the only one who died live on prime time TV. No one from the media was going to miss the opportunity of capturing a death live. Nobody tried to save him - the police, the politicians, the scores of camera teams, print journalists and the hundreds of bystanders. No one. But there is nothing new in this - no one in a position to do anything has moved a little finger over the last 18 years.
The only way to save the tens of thousands of Gajendras who have not yet made up their minds to choose this end to their miseries is to reverse the policies that unleashed this massacre almost two decades ago. The question is who is going to do it. These are only peasants, not the holy cow.