“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans,
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
Stolid and stunned, a brother of ox ….…..’
WHEN in the 19th century farmers and agriculture workers were facing distressing times in America and Europe, Edwin Markham, who was later described as “democracy’s greatest poet” penned these immortal lines in a poem “The Man with the Hoe”.
The poet had himself worked at a ranch as a labourer and had personal experience about the turmoil through which farmers and farm workers were passing through.
The poem was a cry for justice and it portrayed the hoeman as a victim of oppression and exploitation. The poem ignited an extensive debate across America. Edwin held the rulers of the time responsible for the wretched state of farmers.
Regrettably, no poet has described the pitiable state of the debt-ridden farm community of India with such passion and pain. There is a striking resemblance in the conditions faced by the American farmers then and their Indian counterparts now. First, the British rulers denied them respect and dignity. Later our own “brown sahibs” did not give them their due.
The rulers woke up to realise the depth of the agrarian crisis only when the farmers in desperation started taking their own lives. In fact, for years, the states of Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra tried their best to hide the facts about such suicides. However, as the media’s reach expanded to the countryside, reports about farmers committing suicide began making to the front pages of newspapers.
The suicides began on a big scale following the failure of the cotton crop, because of the American bollworm menace in the Malwa region of Punjab and Southern states in the eighties. This resulted in heavy indebtedness of the farmers concerned. Earlier, water logging had rendered vast tracts of land barren in most parts of the Sangrur-Bathinda belt.
However, the governments concerned remained in denial mode and did not accept that farmers had committed suicide because of the crisis in agrarian sector.
The National Farmers Commission in its recent report has revealed that farmers had been committing suicide for the past several years. Their number is in thousands in Punjab and 31 districts identified as the “suicide zone” in Maharashtra and adjoining states.
As no social reality can be kept under wraps for long, the SAD-BJP Government was the first to concede the problem in the late 90s. In fact, the government would never have accepted the truth regarding suicides if Mr Inderjeet Singh Jaijee, a person devoted to the cause of farmers, had not documented such suicides by moving from one village to another. He brought the issue to the center stage to make the rulers break their slumber.
There is still a lobby of politicians, bureaucrats and social scientists that calls reports regarding debt-related farmer suicides as hogwash. Had they met hundreds of widows, who gathered a few weeks ago at Bathinda, they would have realised the truth. Efforts to give any relief to the farming community are opposed by the lobby, either directly or indirectly.
For the lobby, foodgrain being produced to millions of hungry people is not creation of wealth but a duty assigned to farmers by a divine order. The failure to comprehend the fact that farmers are the largest generators of employment and producer of real wealth is the root cause of the farmers’ suicide.
Small and marginal farmers do not wear safari suits and neckties and they are, therefore, quickly shooed away by the bureaucrats and politicians, who stand up to greet wealthy businessmen and industrialists. For survival, food comes first and not wealth. An attitude of disdain against farmers has remained, by and large, part and parcel of the establishment. As politicians need votes from farmers, they lose no opportunity to shed a tear or two of sympathy at public platforms and to pretend as guardians of interest of farmers.
If the rulers had the interest of farmers in their mind, they would not have allowed the crisis in the agrarian sector to turn so grave that even after the visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, at least three farmers commit suicide in Vidarbha everyday. The announcement of a special relief package for the four affected states failed to make any impact. In any case, piecemeal solutions will not serve any purpose.
In Punjab, the issue of relief for farmers, who are under the burden of debt worth Rs 24,000 crore, has become a contentious issue between the state government and the Centre. Any attempt to frame a legal mechanism to regulate lending of money at exploitative interest rates is foiled by the vested interests. Private loans the farmers have availed of are worth Rs 12,000 crore.
Tension in the relations between farmers and commission agents can prove highly dangerous, socially and financially for Punjab. There is a need to set up a legal mechanism to avoid social strife. All the commission agents, who lend money, are not bloodsuckers. Nor are all the farmers defaulters. A mechanism that meets the needs of both is the crying need of the state.