Rahul Gandhi was jolted out of an interaction with a group of youth by a farmer in Sheoni Rasulapur village when he had just begun to enquire what Vidarbha’s young brains aspire to be.
He told them that while difficult times come, they have to be overcome together
Jaideep Hardikar. Wardha, Amravati and Yavatmal
AICC general secretary and Amethi MP, Rahul Gandhi, was jolted out of an interaction with a group of youth by a farmer in Sheoni Rasulapur village when he had just begun to enquire what Vidarbha’s young brains aspire to be.
When he asked a boy what he wanted to become when he grew up, the boy replied: ‘Doctor’. Another teenagers said, ‘engineer’. That was when the old farmer had butted in: “Don’t show them dreams...”
To that, Rahul said, “I did not like the idea that one should not see big dreams. One must dream big, and stand up to realise them. Difficult times come, but they have to be overcome together.”
It was a day of surprises for villagers as the Gandhi scion dropped in unannounced to speak with them and understand their problems. Rahul looked at ease with himself as he listened with attention to the people, who were visibly overwhelmed by his unannounced and sudden presence and simplicity. He visited six villages in a whirlwind tour of 500 km sans the usual media and party humdrum. The party in-charge, Maharashtra, Margaret Alva was the only party leader to accompany him on the tour, which he said, was a “great learning experience.”
“ I thought of coming to Vidarbha first, because I was aware that farmers here are passing through difficult times,” Rahul said. “We had no wind that he was coming here,” remarked a farmer. At Dorli, his first stop, Rahul enquired about their decision to put itself up for sale in 2005 as a mark of the protest of falling cotton prices and rising indebtedness. Rahul asked “Why did you think of putting your village up for sale?”
“It was rooted in our falling income, rising indebtedness and overall apathetic condition,” said Dharmapal Jarunde, ex-sarpanch of the village. This year, he told Rahul, there have been no rains, and “we are doomed again.” There is no way the farmers could stand the growing pressures in agriculture and living.
In Yavatmal’s Bothbodan village, where 18 farmers have committed suicide in a span of three years, Rahul met the widows and sought views of farmers on the issues from loan waiver to prices to local political apathy.
At the next stop, Dhamni Pardhi-beda, he met a community that was denotified as a criminal tribe during the Raj and continues to have the same status. It’s a village of farm labourers that won a government award for cleanliness last year.
In his last stop, Jalka in Maregaon tehsil of Yavatmal, Rahul met Kalawatibai and learnt of her struggle after her husband’s death. Kalawatibai married off four daughters after the death of her husband and is educating her younger sons. “It’s a daily grind,” she told him. “Agriculture is not women friendly. I face huge problems tending to my farm, and family,” she said.
Rahul Gandhi has been on a Discover India tour that has taken him to Orissa and
Uttar Pradesh.
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