The Hindu Business Line : Vidarbha farmers miss making election statement

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Vidarbha farmers miss making election statement

Sharad Joshi

Farmers re-electing ruling party members in the by-election will only lead the Congress to believe it is on the right track.

There have been over 1,500 suicides this year alone by farmers in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. In all these cases, the farmers were landholders, not landless labourers. They were all cotton producers. They were all heavily indebted and on the threshold of the humiliating experience of coercive recovery.

They were enraged about the prices they were getting from the government's Cotton Monopoly Procurement Scheme.

The ruling party had promised them, in the last election manifesto, Rs 2,700 per quintal but is offering them only Rs 1,700 this season.

The farmers expressed their resentment by virtually boycotting the monopoly procurement centres. They were also furious about the piling electricity dues; the ruling party manifesto had promised free power for the farmers.

To make matters worse, some of them had daughters for whose wedding they could not garner enough money; others were affected by health problems and they had no money for treatment.

The farmers had a chance to express their resentment in the Maharashtra Assembly by-elections held on December 4.

The Opposition parties had come together against the Congress party, which appeared to have no solution to meet the situation.

It appeared that the farmers were also against the Congress, though the outcome of the elections suggests quite to the contrary. Curiously enough, the Congress candidates in both the by-elections were former Shiv Sena MLAs who had quit the party.

The Congress party had fielded the erstwhile Shiv Sena MLAs in both the Chimur and Daryapur constituencies, causing resentment among the loyalist Congressmen who fielded rebel candidates.

Nevertheless, both the official Congress candidates won by an overwhelming majority.

An analysis of the election results is of relevance at least to the local economic situation. But the exercise becomes a little complicated because on the eve of the elections, there was a massacre of the Dalits in Khairlanji in Bhandara district of Vidarbha that set off a Maharashtra-wide conflagration following the desecration of a statues of Dr B. R. Ambedkar in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh.

It is another matter that none of the traditional Dalit parties in Maharashtra could draw any advantage from the polarisation of votes of the Dalits.

Only the Bahujan Samaj Party managed to score enough votes to save the deposit.

The election result offers a few hypothesis: One, that when it comes to the hustings, Maharashtra's farmers forget all their woes and give undue importance to caste, pomp and enticing handouts rather than objective electoral merit.

Two, the landholding farmers — who are affected by the artificially-depressed cotton prices and the heavy burden of loans — form a small part of the voters, not enough to influence the outcome of an election.

The landless labourer, on the other hand, appears not concerned about the depressed prices or the crushing burden of debt. In fact, they are often moneylenders to the farmers. Further, they constitute a more organised constituency while farmers continue to be the proverbial "sack of potatoes".

Three, the farmers have buried their dead and cast their vote by their own assessment of the overall political situation.

Four, the farmers continue to follow their traditional parochial caste leadership.

Whatever the motivation behind the peasantry's preference for their representatives it is all but shooting oneself in the foot.

For, the ruling party, forgetting that it has failed to contain the spate of suicides and that its successive packages have only resulted in increasing the rate of suicides, will not only become complacent, but even arrogant and continue to follow policies that can be detrimental to the interests of the farmers.

The larger possibility is that the farmers go to the polling booth, unmindful of their woes, and get infected with the death-wish that appears to have seized the nation as a whole.

(The author is founder, Shetkari Sanghatana and a Member of Rajya Sabha. He can be reached at sharad.mah@nic.in)

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