Yogendra Yadav Speaks: Agnee Pareeksha for the Opposition

 

MSP Explained

 

Takeaways from BJP convention

 

Economic Update about The US and Europe

 

Half Truths about Farmers Demands

 

Modi's 10 Years Have Created Fragile 82 Crore Indians on Free Rations

 

The Milk Sector in India Explained

 

'Canada is a Safe Haven for Indian Fugitives': Shekar Gupta

 

Unemployed farmers have been denied MGNREGA payments for 18 months

 

Marketing vs Data - Who Wins? | NDA - No Data Available?

 

Are Delhi Resident Doctors the new Anti Nationals? Sabpe Laat Sabka Vinash?

 

Farmers, Economists & Indian Democracy

 

Corporate Hijack of Indian Farming Is the Problem - P Sainath

 

Victory for Farmers, failure of Media: P Sainath

 

Why Modi govt miserably failed in communicating impact of much-needed farm laws

 

Lakhimpur Kheri and Mann Ki Baat

 

Indian Farmers' Agitation has succeeded - Yogendra Yadav

 

Interpreting the Indian cabinet reshuffle

 

Bleeding from Shylock’s cut

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

SHYLOCK is the big business, Antonio, the political parties. Let’s throw in Portia, symbolising law and justice, but which mostly eludes Indians currently. The news is heart-warming in the interregnum though. A brilliant woman journalist won a tenacious legal battle with an alleged sex predator of a powerful social echelon. And octogenarian leftist poet Varavara Rao got bail too, albeit for six months.

But Rao’s comrades, India’s most brilliant and selfless souls, are cramming the jails. A battery of leftist intellectuals and lawyers along with a merrily self-effacing octogenarian Jesuit priest stand accused of plotting to murder the prime minister in a laughably bizarre plot. Others are facing sedition charges for orchestrating communal violence in Delhi, which their rivals actually waged under police protection.

An American newspaper has revealed how the dubious assassination plot was structured around hacked computers that were used to plant the “evidence” of the purported crime. So, the victories here and there are welcome aberrations — happy aberrations — in a system that stands entrenched against equal rights and dignity for women and which ambushes dissenting citizens at will.

It’s no secret that major political parties receive funds from big business, which becomes a fertile ground for quid pro quo. In fact, it’s a curious rule of thumb that the parties whose leaders are in jail or face charges for alleged graft, are precisely the ones that the corporate lobbies shunned, and, therefore, did not favour with their largesse. It is also likely that the leaders didn’t accept the implied quid pro quo and chose to suffer.

It’s a bit like the movie industry. If one didn’t pick the money from the usurious market the movie is likely never going to find a theatre to screen it. Mayawati and Lalu Yadav are a case in point of politicians who have been made an example of for seeking alternative routes of raising money, tainted money, to fight costly elections, and which they mostly won. Portia will have to be more innovative than leaning on her fabled court craft and throwing in a clever interpretation of law to tilt the argument. Today, she has to weigh the cases as presented.

Chara ghotala or fodder scam is up for public scrutiny and trial by media, a bail-less crime, but an opaque defence deal has to be decided for reasons of national security through sealed envelopes in highest court rooms. This, therefore, is a political battle and has to be fought politically. It is far-fetched to think of defeating a closet patriarchy or a renegade state in a court battle.

In this regard, a key component of Prime Minister Modi’s hare-brained demonetisation move had a clever edge. He mopped up 85 per cent of India’s cash on Nov 8, 2016. The Uttar Pradesh assembly polls began on Feb 11, 2017. By cancelling big currency notes on the eve of a huge election, which Uttar Pradesh always is, he sucked out a vital resource the rivals needed to give him a good fight.

Why don’t Indian parties crowd-fund as some, but only some, sections of the left do? Even in the heartland of capitalism in the United States, Bernie Sanders could come tantalisingly close to becoming president with crowd funding. Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party came to power with the help of this mostly shunned method of raising electoral funds. In the bargain, AAP inspired donors to see themselves as stakeholders in the great endeavour.

We read in the morning paper that India’s main opposition Congress party has run out of money. Elections are due in key states where the party could do well, primarily Assam, with clever handling. It’s a wrong time not to have money. West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Kerala are also up for polls.

Being in penury, or near penury, is, however, a good sign for the Congress party and may not be such a bad idea for India’s democracy either. Remember the tycoons muscling their way through pliable media contacts to claim cabinet berths for their acolytes in the second innings of the Congress-led alliance of Manmohan Singh? The ministry of telecommunications was crucial to the quest. And with all the deals being done to monopolise data and e-commerce today, the stakes were bound to be high. The BJP has emerged as the monopoly beneficiary of corporate donations, not least by tweaking the law to make the transactions opaque. No surprise there.

A great reason for the Congress’s financial crunch is Rahul Gandhi’s decision to make a direct connection between India’s prevailing economic crisis and Mr Modi’s patronage of his crony capitalist friends. Protesting farmers, dissenting intellectuals and assorted environmentalists across the world have seen through the plot. (Whoever can see the plot is an enemy of the state.)

On the flip side of the Congress’s course correction under Gandhi, an interview was published of Punjab’s Congress Chief Minister Amarinder Singh. He is rowing back from the bold demands by the farmers for the repeal of pro-business farm laws. Singh favours suspending the laws for two years instead of annulling them. The India Today magazine did some fact-checking to show that Singh had not met Modi’s friend Mukesh Ambani, as claimed, a day ahead of the nationwide strike by the farmers. The cordial picture of the two was from 2017.

Amarinder’s challenger in Congress is cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Sidhu, a vocal critic of big business. Shylock is hemorrhaging India. Rahul Gandhi is losing his MLAs to corporate-political pelf, the latest casualty being his government in Pondicherry. It’s time he went to the people with the bowl, an agreeable way to involve them in his bold analysis of the country’s crisis. He can start to stitch the wounds, not as a grand leader for which he must win a mandate, but as a caring citizen like those languishing in jails. The Congress will be the richer for it. Good for Portia too.

Rural India can’t be dustbin of history. Three farm laws have shown farmers need a New Deal

Yogendra Yadav in The Print

A historic farmers’ movement is a moment to unveil a vision for the future. Not just for farmers or agriculture, but for rural India, and indeed for the future of India.

This movement has already created history. It has firmly brought back the farmers to the national imagination. You can’t pretend they don’t exist. It has put the fear of vote, more effective than the fear of God, in the mind of the political class. You don’t take panga with farmers. It has shut up market fundamentalists who whisper too-clever-by-half agri-reform recipes to the powers that be. No more corporate plugs masquerading as textbook economics pushing for “reform by stealth”. At least for some time. It has succeeded in pushing the envelope to where years of academic and political debates on agriculture could not.

Yet, it will be a pity if that is all this movement achieves in terms of imagination. It will be tragic if the successful halting of the “agri reform” onslaught becomes a pretext to perpetuate status quo. It will be sad if this pushback to corporate agri-business turns into a push for trade unionism of the better-off farmer. The imposition of the Narendra Modi government’s farm laws must serve to draw attention to the multiple crises faced by Indian farmers, farming and agriculture. These laws are not the starting point of the woes of the farmers. Nor is their repeal the panacea that the farmers need. This great movement must take forward the idea of India that places farmers at the heart of our future.

Indian agriculture faces three intertwined crises. While the current focus is, rightly so, on the economic crisis, we cannot afford to forget the ecological crisis that stares us in the face. Both these crises put together produce what the farmers experience as an existential crisis. Indian farmers need nothing short of a New Deal that addresses these three crises simultaneously. Ideas, policies and politics must come together to design this New Deal. 

Three crises of Indian agriculture

The economic crisis is easy to describe. Although nearly half of our working population (58 per cent of rural households) is mainly engaged in agriculture, farming is not economically viable. Landholdings are small: 86 per cent of farmers own less than 2 acres, based on the agriculture census 2015-16. Average yield is low and highly uncertain. Prices are low too and are kept systematically so. According to my calculations, this yields a meagre monthly income of less than Rs 8,000, including all sources of income. The number of agricultural wage labourers has kept swelling, though farm wages have remained stagnant. No wonder, average monthly consumption is higher than income. More than half of farm families are in debt.

Now, the lazy economists’ formula is to say reduce the population dependent on agriculture. Except they forget to mention the continent where this additional population should be transported. Or to specify sectors of our economy waiting to offer millions of additional jobs, notwithstanding the overall state of joblessness. The challenge is to find decent income for hard-working small farmers.

The ecological crisis is less easily noticed and is even more pressing. Green revolution has come to a dead-end. Superstitious belief in the magic of chemical agriculture and overexploitation of water has left us exposed to degradation of soil health and groundwater depletion at a frightening scale. Add to this loss of biodiversity, shrinkage in seed variety, decline in nutria-crops like millets, loss in livestock economy and deforestation, and you begin to see why ecological crisis is not a hobby horse of some fringe environmentalists.

And now think of the looming challenge of climate change. Soaring temperatures and uncertain monsoon is a recipe for disaster for Indian agriculture, especially for farmers dependent on rains. Incomes of these ‘dryland’ farmers are predicted to fall by as much as a quarter due to climate change. Ecologically sustainable agriculture is a material and pressing concern that we should have addressed yesterday.

Finally, there is the existential crisis that the farmers feel and react to. The oft-repeated story of farmer suicides, over 3 lakh in the last two decades. As agriculture shrinks in the national economy, farmers experience a diminution in their status and a loss of dignity. As the self-respecting cultivator, the farmer is forced to become a labourer, and soon, a migrant labourer. Farmers do not want their next generation to take to farming.

A new architecture

The challenge and the opportunity of the farmers’ movement today is not just to ward off the impending threat of the three laws or to secure some enduring economic gains for the farmers, but to come up with a way forward on the economic, ecological and existential crises that Indian agriculture faces.

It requires, above all, an imaginative leap. Indian leaders, policymakers and thinkers must be able to stand up and say: India is not condemned to relive European history. Indian agriculture will follow an Indian path. Indian farmers are not vestiges of the past. They are here to stay. Agriculture can and will provide dignified livelihood to a substantial population, many times more than it does in Europe or North America. Indian farmers are a repository of relevant knowledge and technology. Village India is not a dustbin of history. Rural India is a land of opportunities, and key to our national future.

This resolve, an article of faith if you will, can open the path for new policy architecture. This will have to be led by the government and backed by a substantially bigger budget. Some of this State support must take the form of higher and more efficient subsidies to the farmers, as our net subsidy so far has been low, if not negative. Some of these resources must be spent on a truly universal and comprehensive crop insurance as well as debt relief and reconstruction. But much of State support must go towards building agricultural and rural infrastructure that facilitates private entrepreneurship, agro-processing, farmers’ cooperatives, animal husbandry, forestry, and so on. Flourishing private initiative in agriculture needs more, not less, State support and initiative.

The design of this new architecture will be around a combination of income support with ecologically appropriate agriculture. The current focus of government procurement on wheat and paddy creates perverse incentives for farmers. Instead, farmers need to be offered price support for a wide range of produce on the condition that they adopt the crops that are suitable for local ecological conditions. Crop loan and crop insurance could be added to this mega scheme. A small top-up component of income support for small farmers, women farmers and other vulnerable farmers could be included in this package. And this will have to be linked to a boost for pastoralists, rural industry and handicrafts, etc. The future of agriculture must be integrated with a big push for decentralised reinvigoration of rural economy.

Will this cost a lot of money? Yes, at current price, we should be looking to spend additional Rs 3-4 lakh crore, around 10 per cent of the Union budget, for this New Deal for rural India.

Can the country afford it? Should this be our national focus? Well, that is a question of political will. The real measure of the success of the current farmers’ movement would be the extent to which it succeeds in creating this much-needed political will.