Back to feudalism

Elections to the 15th Lok Sabha will be different this time. It will be hyenas and wild dogs fighting over the same game. Morality will turn into a negative point of reference, and ‘ethics’ talkers will be laughed off. General elections this time will be the Panchayat elections fought nationally. The day light bribing of voters will come into fashion. Parties will compete in ‘righting’ blindness for the nation called India.

Look at our problems and intellectual reflexes of the political players. India’s loses about 25 million tonnes of food grains post-harvesting — roughly the same as the total wheat and rice Pakistan produces annually. Wheat and rice are stored in open fields to rot under rain. The nation has no money to build storage facility.

Prices of potatoes fall below a rupee during cropping seasons in Uttar Pradesh to rise above Rs15 kg in rest of the year. Many times, farmers dump their products on roads after being told that the cold storage has no space left. So is the case with most vegetables. The governments have no money to build storages.

What a pity that 60 per cent Indians living on agriculture contribute to a mere 17.2 per cent in national GDP. In other words, majority of Indians are engaged in the loss-making enterprise called agriculture.
Self consciously, India is a krishi pradhan — a nation of agriculturalists. The Indian farmers thus by definition must be experts on farming. Ironical as it is, per hectare yield of wheat and rice is 02.63 and 02.99 tonnes respectively. In China on the other hand, per hectare yield of wheat and rice is at 04.50 and 06.30 tonnes respectively. So underused is India’s agriculture, but no political player has a word of promise in reengineering India’s agriculture. The farmers, whom all political players claim to be in love with, suffer endlessly.

India’s economics has fallen prey to bad politics, and the bad politics has fallen prey to greed — of power and plunder. The poor suffer the most. First, instead of raising yield of the farm produce, government fixes Minimum Support Price (MSP) of the farm produce thus raising food prices artificially. The food becomes inaccessible to the poor. Government procures food grains from farmers on enhanced prices, allows the food to rot, and the same is pumped into poor man’s stomachs through the Public Distribution System (PDS).

In India’s vote market, subsidy is the great weapon of the strong against the poor. The aged and obese Congress will airdrop wheat at Rs3 in all homes of the poor. Best suited to the Stone Age, the BJP might play ‘Rice Card’ on the poor. Even after six decades of Independence, the poor remains so disenfranchised that it has to stand before PDS shops for food. The red card has become a black cross on the dignity of the poor.

This election is a mirror showing India in its self-doubt. The doubt is on two fronts. One, whether or not India’s farm sector is to be industrialised! Two, whether or not, the poor are made self-sufficient! With a growing population and underutilised agricultural land, India may face a severe food shortage in less than decade.
With growing market presence and the subsequent rise in aspirations, India’s poor will soon demand emancipation from the humiliating PDS regime. What’s the solution our political parties have?

Man is a keen learner and constant improver. It was settled long ago that the earth is not flat; we do not debate that any more. Likewise, it is settled that the State cannot feed its people forever. People have to earn their own food. That’s the lesson we all learnt from socialism. One of the big mistakes socialism made was to dismiss man’s innate abilities of creating wealth. So disastrous the socialism turned that all erstwhile socialist republics of the East Europe and Russia are now largest exporters of female bodies. West Bengal comes only next to them.

If that has been the experience of socialism, why is India reverting back to an experiment which so badly failed?

Well, the greed has no rational. Because the two main national parties Congress and BJP failed India, the threat of regional parties has become real. Rooted into their agrarianism with a loss-making economy, the regional parties want their backwardness to be retained and funded by the State. Not knowing as how to deal with India’s backwardness, instead of fighting politics of provincialism anchored by regional outfits, Congress and BJP both are tuning into regional parties intellectually.

Where will the regime of subsidies — loan waver, free food, under-priced fertilisers and farm equipments — lead us? One of the greatest tasks industrialisation has accomplished globally is to end feudalism. Ironically, India’s industrialisation is being asked to fund the wellbeing of feudalism — economically loss making, and socially hellish.

The writer is a Dalit scholar