• Do you feel that the Indian farmer is feeling good today or is it feel-good for the higher classes only?

Shailendra Kumar

Any generalised statement about India’s farmers ‘feeling good’ or ‘feeling bad’ would be misleading. Indian farmers are a diverse community that shows different set-ups from region to region and crop to crop. There are farmers who are committing suicides in some states. Even in Vidarbha — where there is a general sense of buoyancy since after years, both the production and the prices have been good of cotton, soybean tur etc — there are a few cases of farmers committing suicides. The suicides are mainly related to the farmers’ inability to repay loans and interest accumulated over long years. Suicides are a result of cumulative ‘feel bad’ of the farmers over the entire period of ‘negative subsidies’ imposed systematically by successive governments on the farmers.

The major change that has taken place in the last five years is about the mindset and the expectations of farmers. For over five decades, the farmers lived under an apprehension that things will go worse forever. Now, they are preparing to meet the challenges of world-class agriculture. This is true not only for a small community of progressive farmers but for the farming community as a whole. They are aware that there are serious handicaps they suffer in comparison with their competitors in the United States, European Union, Japan, Australia etc.

Some of the old restrictive structures like the Essential Commodities Act, APMC marketing, Food Corporation of India will have to be scrapped. Networks of grading-testing, laboratories will have to be created. The digital divide will need to be removed to provide access at village level to the international market intelligence. The infrastructure of roads, electricity and water will have to be improved. These are formidable handicaps that have developed over decades of Nehruvian socialism. The general feeling amongst the farming community is that the government of the last five years, if given more time, has greater chances of removing these handicaps and liberating the farmers from the pre-WTO shackles imposed by the governments in India.

• Don’t you think there is something radically wrong in Shetkari Sanghatana? Why was there no emphasis on changing the social system in rural areas, like family planning, women’s rights etc?

Balaji Birajdar

With this question I realise that the Shetkari Sanghatana has to be faulted, at least, on its PR work. Shetkari Sanghatana was the first in the field to present ‘India-Bharat’ contradiction. It brought that the cause of penury and misery in the countryside was not a product of contradictions within the rural community like landlords-peasants or moneylenders-farmers. The anti-landlord sentiment in urban intellectuals that had found good response in the backward class rural communities, was essentially motivated by the desire of the urban community to suck in the agricultural surplus accumulated by the landlords and the moneylenders that, for all cruelty, remained largely in villages.

The rural communities suffer from a number of maladies including high demographic rate, low hygiene, illiteracy, poor economic infrastructure and so on. All efforts by a large array of social reformer celebrities have produced little improvement because the reforms introduced by the well-meaning activists could not be sustained by the rural economy. The early experience of the Shetkari Sanghatana was that this reformist gentry working in isolated spots for water marshaling soak-pits, gober gas, health services, literacy etc. as panacea for rural problems vehemently opposed Shetkari Sanghatana’s one-point programme of kick-starting economic development through remunerative prices of agricultural commodities.

Shetkari Sanghatana has prepared road-maps for the kind of developments it would favour in rural socio-economic systems that would become relevant once the rural economy becomes viable.

Shetkari Sanghatana, in fact, did pioneering work in organising rural women and securing for them political as also property rights. It was the Shetkari Mahila Aghadi, which launched the campaign for all women candidates in panchayat raj elections that later on produced the 33 per cent reservation formula. The Laxmi Mukti programme of the Shetkari Mahila Aghadi is acknowledged the world over as the most daring and successful experiment in transfer of movable and immovable property to house-wives. This was the seed that forced the governments to include the names of spouses in the property documents in several kinds of property dealings.

• Do you think this alliance (with BJP) negates a lot of principles that Shetkari Sanghatana was fighting over the last five years?

Sanjeev Kumar

Shetkari Sanghatana has always stood for secularism, democracy and liberalism. The economic programme of the farmers’ movement brought about the collapse of invidious societies, cooperative structures in the countryside and helped bring about the fall of Nehruvian socialism. Unfortunately, the fall of socialism also brought about an eclipse of the economic agenda for the country as a whole. If the then government had publicly disowned the socialist misadventure and turned to economic reforms and liberalisation at the same time as China did the nation would have an alternative economic agenda.

The Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi governments wasted valuable time since they could not gather the courage to disown the past and waited helplessly while the forces of communalism, casteism, corruption and gangsterism engulfed both the economy and the polity.