The Farmer Will Live Only by Dying, The Maoist Will Live Only by Killing
Since June 2005, according to official records, 1,045 farmers have
committed suicide across various provinces of India. Yes—this tragedy unfolded
in the very era when we, the middle class and the affluent, were chanting
paeans to “Brand India.” It happened at that precise moment when we were told
that foreign investment was pouring in like a flood, that our foreign exchange
reserves were overflowing, that within ten years India would be so “developed”
that every middle-class household would flaunt Tata’s one-lakh car. We were
drunk on this dream. We were told: India is self-sufficient in food, India is
an agrarian giant. And yet, in that other India, a rope brings down the
lifeless body of one farmer, while another starving, debt-stricken farmer
prepares to take his place. This is no parable—it is fact.
For the India that is supposed to become the world’s leading developed nation by 2020 (a fable relentlessly sold to the masses by domestic and foreign capitalists, by media, and by Indian political leaders alike) is also the India where more than half the population still survives below the poverty line. Leave aside for now the matters of education or health. Forget even employment. Sixty years after independence, the majority cannot secure the bare minimum of food. And yet our leaders and our “intellectual” classes never tired of weaving mythologies of how great this freedom has been. They have, after six decades, bequeathed to us an India where even the corpse of a farmer becomes a commodity for television channels to broadcast and profit from.
And what of the families of those proletarian farmers—the widows, the children—or the fellow tillers who inch closer every day to the same noose? In this fraudulent theatre of survival, these disenchanted farmers can easily take up the gun. For man is driven to his most extreme actions when he sees that he has been deceived according to a premeditated plan. A small cabal of sharks has cheated the people of this land continuously for sixty years. Politicians, in state after state, take turns to defraud. Sixty years ago, the half-naked multitudes listened at Congress rallies to the chant of Garibi Hatao (remove poverty). Today, they listen still—to the same broken record, wearing the same rags. Meanwhile, politicians accumulate crores in property, while farmers cannot fill their stomachs twice a day.
And those Leftist parties that once rose to power by promising social transformation? They too have abandoned farmer and laborer alike, orbiting instead around industrialists. Is there any escape from this darkness? Can it be through the democratic path?
How prophetic Churchill was. On the eve of India’s independence, he foresaw: Power will fall into the hands of some rogues, rascals, and freebooters. Not a bottle of water or a loaf of bread will escape taxation. All Indian leaders will be of low caliber, men of straw, lacking in courage. They will squabble among themselves for power, and India will die in political squabbles and petty quarrels. Cruel as history is, sometimes it proves the harshest prophecies true.
For Independent India deliberately chose an economic path that nurtures only the multinational corporation and its servile politicians. Ruthless regulations are imposed that can destroy the small trader, the worker, the farmer. The underlying logic is cold and mercenary: when production is scattered among millions of farmers and artisans, extracting bribes and commissions is difficult. Far easier to concentrate it in the hands of a few industrialists—then profit can be siphoned smoothly. This is how our political class thinks. And with the advent of a compliant media, even the pretence of explaining it to the people is unnecessary.
Thus in this scorched land, in this time, what we reap is not crops but corpses; not harvest but insurgents. Is this revelation new? If manure enriches the field, grain will grow. But if the same soil is fed with blood, it will sprout Maoists. As the blood of hanged farmers drips from the rafters of mud huts down into the earth, the number of young men taking up rifles multiplies. And all this unfolds in the reign of those very parties who call themselves Leftists, Socialists, Marxists.
Perhaps India is living through another kind of freedom struggle. And if so, the day may come when the Maoist Khudiram of our age will hurl his bomb not at colonial sahibs, but at the Marxist-Communist, the Socialist-Babu of the middle class, who rides comfortably in his one-lakh car. May such a day of civil war not dawn upon this land—but the soil already trembles with that possibility.
For the India that is supposed to become the world’s leading developed nation by 2020 (a fable relentlessly sold to the masses by domestic and foreign capitalists, by media, and by Indian political leaders alike) is also the India where more than half the population still survives below the poverty line. Leave aside for now the matters of education or health. Forget even employment. Sixty years after independence, the majority cannot secure the bare minimum of food. And yet our leaders and our “intellectual” classes never tired of weaving mythologies of how great this freedom has been. They have, after six decades, bequeathed to us an India where even the corpse of a farmer becomes a commodity for television channels to broadcast and profit from.
And what of the families of those proletarian farmers—the widows, the children—or the fellow tillers who inch closer every day to the same noose? In this fraudulent theatre of survival, these disenchanted farmers can easily take up the gun. For man is driven to his most extreme actions when he sees that he has been deceived according to a premeditated plan. A small cabal of sharks has cheated the people of this land continuously for sixty years. Politicians, in state after state, take turns to defraud. Sixty years ago, the half-naked multitudes listened at Congress rallies to the chant of Garibi Hatao (remove poverty). Today, they listen still—to the same broken record, wearing the same rags. Meanwhile, politicians accumulate crores in property, while farmers cannot fill their stomachs twice a day.
And those Leftist parties that once rose to power by promising social transformation? They too have abandoned farmer and laborer alike, orbiting instead around industrialists. Is there any escape from this darkness? Can it be through the democratic path?
How prophetic Churchill was. On the eve of India’s independence, he foresaw: Power will fall into the hands of some rogues, rascals, and freebooters. Not a bottle of water or a loaf of bread will escape taxation. All Indian leaders will be of low caliber, men of straw, lacking in courage. They will squabble among themselves for power, and India will die in political squabbles and petty quarrels. Cruel as history is, sometimes it proves the harshest prophecies true.
For Independent India deliberately chose an economic path that nurtures only the multinational corporation and its servile politicians. Ruthless regulations are imposed that can destroy the small trader, the worker, the farmer. The underlying logic is cold and mercenary: when production is scattered among millions of farmers and artisans, extracting bribes and commissions is difficult. Far easier to concentrate it in the hands of a few industrialists—then profit can be siphoned smoothly. This is how our political class thinks. And with the advent of a compliant media, even the pretence of explaining it to the people is unnecessary.
Thus in this scorched land, in this time, what we reap is not crops but corpses; not harvest but insurgents. Is this revelation new? If manure enriches the field, grain will grow. But if the same soil is fed with blood, it will sprout Maoists. As the blood of hanged farmers drips from the rafters of mud huts down into the earth, the number of young men taking up rifles multiplies. And all this unfolds in the reign of those very parties who call themselves Leftists, Socialists, Marxists.
Perhaps India is living through another kind of freedom struggle. And if so, the day may come when the Maoist Khudiram of our age will hurl his bomb not at colonial sahibs, but at the Marxist-Communist, the Socialist-Babu of the middle class, who rides comfortably in his one-lakh car. May such a day of civil war not dawn upon this land—but the soil already trembles with that possibility.
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