#dnaEdit: Suicidal politics

Politicians often — and inexplicably so — appear indifferent to public anger. But even in that context, it is indeed surprising that the political class as a whole has failed to gauge the extent of people’s disgust at their statements and actions that ensued in the wake of the suicide committed by a Rajasthani farmer at the Aam Aadmi Party’s rally on Wednesday. The rally, was to protest the Land Acquisition Ordinance that the Narendra Modi government is trying to ram through Parliament. Following the terrible tragedy, the Congress, BJP and AAP have clumsily tried to outflank each other in appropriating political capital — and equally — apportioning blame for the incident. Despite such a disturbing incident unfolding at their rally, none of the AAP leaders thought it fit to cut short their speeches, personally appeal to the farmer, Gajendra Singh, calm him down, or proceed to RML Hospital where the farmer was later transported. Of course, Arvind Kejriwal did visit RML Hospital, but not before he completed his speech. Rahul Gandhi and Sitaram Yechury also rushed to the hospital while BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra took the opportunity to blame AAP for its callousness. Expectedly, the AAP blamed the Delhi Police for not saving the man. But then, even the sizeable media contingent was made up of mute onlookers.

That was not all. The protests spilled over to the next day with Congress activists protesting outside Kejriwal’s residence and the BJP outside the Delhi Police headquarters. A farmer committing suicide in Central Delhi at the iconic Jantar Mantar should have ideally focused the attention of political parties to the grave crisis afflicting the agrarian sector; the massive crop failure after the recent erratic rains and hailstorms across the country.

Instead, the political discourse only hinged on the immediate circumstances of Gajendra Singh’s suicide. Fortunately, some sanity returned in Parliament when some MPs actually talked of solutions to the crisis. Quickly doling out compensation in the short-term and improvements in rural credit facilities and a credible crop insurance scheme were proposed in the discussion. However, the BJP and Congress leaders straining themselves to score brownie points over their respective government policies for farmers and trading charges over the statistics of farmer suicides, once again revealed the relentlessness of this cynical game. For nearly 20 years now, farmer suicides have shown an upward graph. But, never has agriculture received the kind of focus it now has following the Modi government’s amendments to the land acquisition bill.

What has happened in recent weeks is that farmer anger over crop failures has coalesced with the politics over the land acquisition issue. Most farmers who turned up for the Congress rally on April 19 had no clue about the land acquisition debate but were distressed about their crop losses. This is a worrying scenario for the NDA government. Rather than indulging in a blame-game and seek to extract political capital, the central and state governments, irrespective of party affiliations, must work together to provide relief to farmers. No doubt, reducing the threshold for crop damage from 50 to 33 per cent and a 50 per cent increase in compensation is a positive intervention by the Centre. However, the Centre will compensate only 80,000 hectares of damaged crop against its own assessment that 1.8 lakh hectares were affected. Then there is also criticism about delayed and inadequate compensations. With questions raised about the efficacy of debt waivers, especially in constraining credit flow to farmers by wary banks, the Centre must now consider the feasibility of rescheduling loan repayments. However, the competitive politics playing out in and outside Parliament does not reflect any real concern for the farmer. Rather, the unseemly brinkmanship over the plight of a community in distress only reveals the practice of soulless politics sans compassion.