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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

In the Name of the Greater Good-Gopalkrishna Gandhi
-The Telegraph


A village awaits doomsday By Jaideep Hardikar, Penguin, Rs 299

Why is the year, 2011, important? It is important for some states like West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, for it marked a change of government. But it is important, nationally, for the reason that 2011 was a census year. The data for Census 2011 has come, recently, into the public domain - which shows that our farmer population is shrinking. To the phenomenon of ‘India's missing women' which Amartya Sen brought sharply into focus, we can now add ‘India's missing farmers'.

Coinciding with the startling data released by Census 2011 are statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau. These show that suicides among Indian farmers in 2011 were as much as 47 per cent higher than they were for the rest of India's population.

Over the last decade and more, every half an hour, a farmer commits suicide in India.

This does not ‘have to be' a world record in self-killing. It is one.

And we continue to sing, "Sujalam, suphalam..." as if our land is as fecund as it was when Bankim wrote, and as fruitful, flowerful and "sashya shyamalam", with bees swarming around bounteous usufruct.

This does not have to be a record in self-deceptive optimism. It is one.

Persons of academic eminence and veracity like Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh, Jean Drèze, Amit Bhaduri, Nandini Sundar and Palagummi Sainath have been educating the country about our agrarian crisis, the loss of land suffered by those working on it, displacement and the farming populations' tragic lurchings in search of alternative means of livelihood. The works and words of Aruna Roy, Arundhati Roy and Medha Patkar have been amazingly bold and moving. All of them carry conviction, but for just about everyone except policy-formulators.

To the energies and perseverance of these educators is now joined the insightful book, A Village Awaits Doomsday, by Jaideep Hardikar. Its 217 pages instruct even as they grip the reader's attention.

Hardikar travelled the country extensively over the last decade and more to see what was happening to people who had been, or were being, displaced by one ‘project' or the other. The ‘issue' he faced was this: The ‘greater good' and ‘public interest' are cited as the lofty reasons by someone or something taking over not just land or the livelihood but the whole duniya of specific persons, say, A, B and C. Now, A, B and C are told that they must move out, move on, move away, with some cash thrust into their hands, start a new life, not here, not anywhere near either, but somewhere ‘there' - never mind that they do not know where to lay their heads that night or the next.

"This, therefore", Hardikar writes in his introduction, "is their story."

And how it flows!

From the experience of 70-year-old Vinayak Khushalrao Dhude of Talegaon, Wardha, who drank pesticide and died in the SDO's office after he lost in one stroke 50 acres of fertile land for the Wardha dam, to that of 25-year-old Mushtaq Mirkar, who miraculously survived a bullet-hit on his scalp when police opened fire on protesters at the site of the Jaitapur nuclear power park, the book takes us through several such stories of the ‘larger good'.

Dhude had told Hardikar that he would fight the acquisition, and if unheeded, would either kill the collector or kill himself. He chose to do the latter. This was not in the Midnapore of the early 20th century, but in the heart of ‘rich' Maharashtra in the 21st century. Mirkar, dizzy and heavy in the head still, is back fishing on the sea. But only for now. Although the "largest nuclear power park in the world" seems to have been put on hold, it is bound to be revived. "It will change the face of coastal areas", the minister, Narayan Rane, has said. Hardikar tells us how the area's fisherfolk are determined to oppose the project. They fish, worried like hell and woebegone, far away from the land of the cherry blossom. But they have heard of and know every detail of Fukushima. Tsunami is not the only Japanese reference word in their registers. "This is not about livelihood", they tell Hardikar, "It is about life."

Hardikar acknowledges that he has been inspired by P. Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts. That landmark book, like Sunil Janah's photographs of the 1943 Bengal famine and Somnath Hore's woodcuts of the Tebhaga agitations, has become a benchmark document, in real time, of a corrosive and chronic national trauma overlaid by illusions of the ‘larger good'. A Village Awaits Doomsday is more than a companion volume to Sainath's landmark work. It is its inspired and inspiring successor.