Government doing no favour to farmers by offering to talk!

In the early 1990s, while I was on a scholarship in France, I was stunned one Sunday to see farmers converging on Paris with truckloads of apples, cherries, potatoes, tomatoes and other crops with which they flooded the streets of the city. It was a unique protest against France signing the World Trade Agreement which French farmers believed would be detrimental to their interests.

The US was demanding withdrawal of subsidies to farmers by all signatories and across Europe the community feared they would be run out of business. For the US even then was paying its farmers not to produce more crops than they could store and even as conglomerates ran farming activities, elsewhere farmers feared that the emphasis on withdrawing subsidies was aimed at bankrupting them and importing US produce into their markets.

Years later, as globalisation wreaked havoc with our own farmers in India, I was not surprised to see them dumping crops of onion, tomato, bananas etc. by the roadside. But our farmers did it out of an instinctive despair and had no political articulation like those in Paris I had spoken to at the time.

Over at least the past two decades, I have seen time and again farmers either burning their lush fields or dumping their crops. They do it out of economic necessity, not understanding what has brought about their penury – they simply cannot sustain their fields or take their crops to the market when prices are sinking so low as to not even break even on their production and transportation costs. The farmer is at the bottom of the food chain in India and simply cannot survive without subsidies and minimum support prices. Survival is an instinct with him and when the going gets both rough and tough, he has no alternative but to end his life.

So, I am not surprised that farmers from the north took to the streets last week to protest against the Modi government's agricultural policies. But what shocked even a confirmed cynic like me was to see the government dig up its own roads to prevent their march on the capital. The protest by French farmers in the 1990s had been unique and highly embarrassing to the then French president François Mitterand. Perhaps also political, led as it was by his predecessor Valerie Giscard D'Estaing.

But far from digging up the roads or preventing the trucks from rolling in, the French authorities heeded the anguish of the farmers and subsequently there were tighter negotiations with the US over the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. French farmers survived. But now Indian farmers might not. And what appalls me is that this particular regime simply does not care.

I have heard critics say that those who oppose the farmers' protest do not realise they will one day go hungry when the farmer will not be able to produce any food for us at all. I beg to differ. The farmer will die but not the wearers of Gucci and Armani because if the Indian granaries run empty, they will simply bow to pressure and import food from the US or elsewhere.

Holding a vast country like India – or even China – to ransom over food has been the stated plan of many western powers, particularly the US (they could never overcome China) and there has been a sinister conspiracy in this regard ever since at least the 1960s.

I recall one of my professors once telling us that the main reason why then US president Richard Nixon and Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi hated each other so much was because Mrs Gandhi had caught on to the US plan to bankrupt India and Nixon was hopping mad to have his plans thwarted. We were suffering a great shortage of food and the wheat imports from the US were little short of grass and weed, destroying the soil in which the seeds were planted and the grains fit for not even animals. That is when Mrs Gandhi launched the green revolution in a determined bid to make India self-sufficient in food and we have succeeded enormously over the decades.

But now this government is hell-bent on driving us all back to hunger with its new agricultural policies that will cut out the small and marginal farmer and aid only conglomerates to thrive in the business of farming.

Any government which sees farmers as a threat and dig up its own roads to prevent their progress is not just anti-farmers but so out of touch with reality that it does not deserve to be in government. Somehow thinking of the French farmers in the context of the Indian government's attitude towards their own, brings to mind the famed Marie Antoinette who said of the commoners - if they do not have bread, let them eat cake!

Indeed, that is exactly what the Indian government seems determined to do – feed us mushrooms and cheese while our farmers die gasping for breath. Even a pro-capitalist government like Mitterand's listened to its farmers and eased their livelihood, perhaps conscious of what had ultimately happened to Marie Antoinette.

But there is no such fear in India. So long as Muslims are lynched and Hindu girls in love with Muslim boys prevented from marrying each other, the nation can starve for all that the bigots of this country care.

But they will never starve – the government will make provisions for onions from Iran, pulses from Mozambique, rice from the Far East, sugar from Pakistan and tea from China and, of course, wheat and cotton from the US and elsewhere.

As soon as the farmers give up their profession, the land will be acquired by conglomerates and the capitalist cronies of the government for their own businesses. This, after all, is the Gujarat model of development - do check out how 42 villages in south Gujarat were sold to foreign and Indian friends of the reigning chieftain in 2014 just before the Lok Sabha polls. Thirty-nine villages were returned to farmers after they brought out all their tractors on the highway and blocked traffic for hours. Three villages were already redeveloped and lost to their farmers forever by then. Some died, some moved to the cities, all were rendered impoverished.

I am not surprised that the model is being reinforced throughout India. What the hell – if there is no bread, let them eat cake. Likewise, if there is no rice, let them eat dhoklas and if there are no farmers, let us rejoice, we at least have our capitalist cronies.

Neither was Marie Antionette nor is Narendra Modi capable of understanding that without the basic ingredients of bread, you cannot have a cake and without a farmer, you cannot have an industry. Marie Antoinette was a confirmed nitwit. No wonder, she lost her head - literally. But I did not expect Narendra Modi to be such a dingbat in this modern century.

(The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist and columnist. Views are personal)