This refers to your cover story on farmers’ crisis (Middle Earth Moguls, July 03). I live in East Bardhaman district in West Bengal which is known for its ample rice production. Here, rice producers are forced to hold distress sales. In 2011, when Mamata Banerjee’s TMC came to power, the government announced building of ‘Krishak Mandis’ in every block in order to help farmers out by eliminating middlemen. Some mandis were indeed built, but they are lying vacant. There is no effort by the government to buy crops directly from the farmers. Middlemen or the mahajans still rule the roost.
Niamul Hossain Mallick, Bardhaman
Many things are responsible for the current farmer crisis India is facing. The situation got aggravated because the government broke its promise of fixing minimum support prices for farmers. Moreover, the much-hyped demonetisation drive of the PM resulted in the collapse of farm produce prices. At the time of demonetisation, many farmers were ready with their produce but found no buyers as everyone’s cash had been forcefully drained out. Two months ago, the government informed the Supreme Court that despite a multi-dimensional approach to improve income and social security of farmers, over 12,000 suicides were reported in the agricultural sector every year since 2013. Even in such an emergency situation, the government hasn’t adopted the Dr Swaminathan Committee report, which has made several recommendations to address the problems of poor farmers.
Bidyut Kumar Chatterjee, Faridabad
Are we to believe that the plight of Indian farmers remains unknown to the Prime Minister or the finance minister? Or is it that no one has any solution to offer! Today, farmers across the country seem to suffer from a similar kind of exploitation that the skilled labourer undergoes. In that case also, the middle men gobble up a huge chunk leaving the creator with mere pittance. We never tire of shouting ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’, but even as farmers die daily, hardly anything is done to address their plight. The situation is dire, the government needs to think quickly and creatively, otherwise more and more lives will be lost.
T. Santhanam, On E-Mail
It’s high time the government came out with a sensible policy to protect the interest of the suffering farmers. Simply giving loan waivers will not help. Waivers can can’t address the larger problems that plague the farm sector. Without a proper vision, the old story will recur.
Arthur Fernandes, Pune
I would like to comment that though India is recognised as an agriculture-based country, farming being the main contributor to the national GDP, Indian farmers are stricken by grave problems. The nature of farming involves taking of loans in order to expand business. While the relatively advanced farmers take loans from public and private banks, a large number of small-scale farmers have to take loans from money lenders at high interest rates. In addition to this, farmers also have to be at the mercy of nature, with calamities such as floods and drought hitting their crops. Finally, after battling all these odds, farmers have to sell their produce at minimal prices to middlemen.
Lt Col Ranjit Sinha (Retd), New Delhi
If each day multiple farmers commit suicide, how come it’s not a national emergency yet?
Anish Dutta, On E-Mail
Sometime ago, a reader wrote in this section that most letters to the Outlook editor come from a few regulars. Well, it’s the content that is important; not the sender’s name, right? If the matter is worthy, then the letter merits publication! In any case, two letters by the same writer in one edition appear with one carrying the full name and place; the other just his/her initials and saying it came over email. It’s a harmless practice with the copy desk.
It is true that there is a class who regularly write letters despite them seldom getting published. None does it for money; no letter-writer gets even a free copy of the newspaper or magazine. It is another matter the same letter sometimes gets printed in other publications, as the writer sends the mail to more than one media house. That is also legitimate: at the end of the day you are contributing to public opinion, which is essential in a democracy.
Letter writing can sometimes have dangerous consequences: one can get marked. I find it strange that some publications, after regularly publishing letters, suddenly stop the column.
Mahesh Kapasi, On E-Mail
The interview with Khudan Mullick, who, with a few of his comrades, had gone and met Mao Zedong in 1968 was illuminating (‘Mao said...India, China, June 26). Yes, the Naxalbari uprising was a lost chance—India would have changed had it succeeded. The wave radiating out of north Bengal had picked up momentum in distant Punjab, where it fell into the hands of the Akali feudals, who hijacked it to suit their purpose. The movement fizzled out, only to provide the Khalsas a religious pedestal as well as permanent political seats.
Mohan Singh, Amritsar
The BJP duo of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah fazed the Opposition on the ruling party’s presidential candidate to the extent that the Congress and others had to play the game on parochial terms, limiting their choice to a Dalit (Race beyond Raisina, July 3). All the same, Ram Nath Kovind would just be a ‘yes man’ at the Rashtrapati Bhavan like Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was in the mid-1970s, as the BJP has already succeeded in creating a fear psychosis like it was during the days of Emergency.
M.N. Bhartiya, Goa
Kovind’s name stunned the BJP circles more than it shook the Opposition. More than his anonymity, it is the nominee’s lack of saffron history that has dismayed sections in the party. That said, the BJP’s choice of a Muslim (Abdul Kalam) in 2002, and of a Dalit now for the President’s post, underlines the party’s realisation of the need for a reorientation of its outlook. It has been a case of tokenism from the Opposition, too, which is fielding Meira Kumar. The significant aspect of the ensuing battle is how caste has become the defining feature of present-day politics.
Padmini Raghavendra, Secunderabad
Except on two points, I agree with the forthright leader comment (Our Opposition, Jul 3). It’s true that politics of the Dalit votebank pushed Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi out of the presidential race. To even consider Meira Kumar or Prakash Ambedkar—people born with silver spoons in their mouths—as Dalit candidates smacks of political, intellectual and moral bankruptcy. I disagree with your contention that parties that can’t even define their ideology coalesce only when they are probed by the investigative agencies. No, their primary concern is acquiring power, after which they get everything—immunity, prestige and pelf. I also disagree with your opinion that Capt Lakshmi Sahgal was better choice for a president than A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. If elected, Capt Sahgal would just have been one of our presidents. But Kalam, the scientist and the visionary, is the only ‘people’s president’ the country ever had.
M.C. Joshi, Lucknow
Politicians come together to protect only their existence; nothing else matters. The editor rightly states that their primary concern is immunity from prosecution. It seems that the politics of Opposition is just a game of ‘friends with benefits’. Actually they’ve already surrendered before the shrewd politics of the BJP. Meira Kumar’s appeal to heed “the inner voice of conscience” will have no effect. Conscience is rarely found here.
Amrit Prem, Delhi
Apropos Terror Singed Chinar Cops (July 3), it’s unfortunate that tempers run high in Kashmir. With the known hostility Pakistan nurtures all along, the Centre and the state government could not adopt suitable strategy. The mutual trust between people and the administration vanished in thin air. The BJP visibly failed to smell the scent of the soil and its needs. Frequent anti-Muslim sound bites from the RSS and others escalated the situation. The opportunistic PDP failed to mend fences with the disgruntled youth, who were attracted by pro-Pakistan terrorists.
C. Chandrasekaran, Madurai
Dilip Simeon’s Remember Your Humanity, Rebel (May 15), from your ‘50 years of Naxalbari’ series, made for interesting reading, coming from a former Naxal cadre involved in the movement’s first phase. Simeon exudes intellectual honesty and moral courage as he writes “ideological thinking destroys individuality” and “ideology became the methodology for the destruction of conscience”. There can be no stronger, more effective and candid rejection of a logic that justified violence for securing justice. What is equally striking in the emotive rebel, though, is the sublime subsistence of a deep, but inflamed sense of injustice, which had made him a Naxal and now impels him to assert that injustice (and not poverty) engenders violence. That renders the write-up just and balanced.
Even as Simeon quotes the slogan ‘Remember your humanity and rebel’, he earnestly concludes that it cuts both ways. In sharp contrast, entrenched apathy makes people like me conveniently choose not to remember our humanity at all. How else can we readily endorse the establishment’s scorn for Naxals and Maoists, deeming them anti-social and anti-national? We are all elite to that extent and we are the ones issuing prescriptions for remedying the evil of violence, oblivious to the obvious fact that violence against fellow human beings is inherent in an economic order that lacks any viable means to enable sharing of resources.
The standard prescription suggested for ‘treating’ the violence of the underclass is inclusive growth. This involves the idea that the underclass, including adivasis, are left out in the race and marginalised, and therefore have to be given an opportunity to participate in the process of development and enjoy its fruits. But ‘development’ itself works on rapid exploitation, particularly of natural resources in regions where the most marginalised people live, and even inclusive growth results in ecological imbalance, resource depletion and displacement. Even if growth by extractive exploitation of finite resources is made accessible to all, including adivasis, it would still be ecologically destructive. ‘Inclusive growth’ is an inherently anomalous idea—mere lip service paid to the notion of equity—and therefore just a hollow slogan. The proponents of development insist that the ‘crime’ of poverty breeds violence (and therefore project economic development as a panacea). But if that were the case, the richer or the powerful ones represented by the State that shields the existing order should have been more at the receiving end of that violence. But in reality, lawful violence is more dominant, as can be discerned from the overall preservation of the status quo, protecting the interests of the powerful and resource-controlling class. In this equation, the underclass is inherently at the receiving end of violence. Bear in mind that State violence need not consist in actual exertion of physical violence; the fear of force that the power of the State generates is all that matters. To quote George Orwell, “People sleep peacefully in the night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
It used to be vaguely presented that we have to go to the roots of Naxal violence, implying we could then root out violence. Why not go to the roots of State violence instead, to track on whose behalf it is enacted? We may then realise that the core beneficiaries are the resource-owning class and power-holders, whose interest gets protected by ‘law and order’.
And violence, be it of the State or the rebels, cannot sustain anything beyond establishing fear reinforcing the need for more violence. If we are forthright, we may also realise that distinguishing between lawful and unlawful violence can only perpetuate violence. Moral defensibility becomes irrelevant in either course.
On September 21, 2014, exactly 10 years after the CPI (Maoist) was formed, The Hindu carried a story headlined ‘Former Maoist Joins Police Ranks’, a statement that can be quite telling for those who read between the lines. The report detailed it thus: carrying an AK-47 rifle is nothing new for 27-year-old Badru, who was with Maoists in Bastar for eight years before surrendering a few months ago. Badru says the police received him well, gave him a job, place to stay and security. Kolka, another 27-year-old former Maoist, is presently a secret soldier for Dantewada police. The report by itself would be enough commentary on the two faces of violence. But conditioned and groomed as we are by ideas of legality and order, we conduct ourselves as though we have ceased to remember our humanity.
A.R.M. Ramesh, Madurai
