Village for Sale: Agrarian Crisis Taking Grotesque Turn

/N. TALWAR
Indian news agencies report that, six entire villages in the Punjab state (Bhutal Kalan and Bhutal Khor in Sangrur district, Malsinghwala in Mansa district, Harkishanpura, Mandikhurd and Ramanwas in Bhatinda district) and one full village in Maharashtra state (Dorli in Wardha district) have been put up for sale. This is the latest development in a series that began with thousands of farmers committing suicide or selling kidneys and blood plasma. It highlights the desperation in India's countryside that has resulted from the economic liberalization and privatization policies running amuck. It comes at a time when the National sample Survey data reveal that more than 40% of agriculturists are keen to quit farming altogether.

When an entire village is put up for sale, it is not merely an uprooting of families from a place they had called their ancestral home. It is a fundamental break with the "immutable village community" that has been the backbone of India’s social-economic structure for millennia. Historically, India’s villages had reproduced themselves exactly as before and perpetuated India's social system through most of history. A change came under the British rule; village communities started to break up as colonial policy forced land ownership to pass from communal ownership to British-created feudal ownership and later to private capitalist ownership. This latest development of an entire village being put up for sale may appear to be land merely changing hands, from private ownership of the members of the village to another form of private ownership, possibly by agribusiness. But in the final analysis, it is a negation of the small proprietor land ownership, a deep-going alienation of land from the tiller. It is the start of a form of capitalist land ownership dictated by finance capital. It heralds the supremacy of financial capital (read parasitic forces) over the countryside in India for which the economic liberalization and privatization policies have prepared the conditions.

An entire village is put up for sale when the majority of its inhabitants are in extreme indebtedness and no single villager is in a position to emerge as the "super farmer" and buy up the land of the distressed farmers. The anarchist transformation of farming from sustenance production to market driven production in the past decades created this indebtedness. The costs for such farming (tractors, fertilizers, special seeds, water, pesticides etc.) rose alongside concurrent cutbacks in subsidies for these inputs; this forced the farmers to borrow money from banks using their land as collateral. With falling procurement prices regulated by the state that favored agribusinesses, farmers could not repay their debts and were driven to destitution. Many are committing suicide and, now, entire collective of villagers en mass are declaring bankruptcy and putting up their entire villages for sale. This is a dream come true for the agribusiness sector which is eagerly waiting to move in to consolidate the small parcels to large holdings and make a fresh start to set up cash crop farms. The evicted villagers, with little money, no land, no house and no skills for employment in modern industry are “free” to fend for themselves. It is a tragedy that did not have to happen and should not be allowed to grow since it will materially affect a majority of India’s people and cause hardship of unseen proportions.

This “villages for sale” phenomenon highlights the displacement of farmers from agriculture without providing alternate means of employment. It also points to an awakening of the peasants and farmers to the awareness that this requires a common solution. After embracing the chemical intensive production method in agriculture, people have realized how the fertility of the land as well as the quality of water and air are being severely compromised from pesticides and fertilizer usage. Not only is people’s material wellbeing under attack, but also the natural environment under threat. A man-made catastrophe is in the making. Conditions to organize the people to fight this anti-people development path and an attack on their social and natural environment are ripening.

full article...

56th Anniversary of the Indian Republic: DEVELOPED NATION IT IS NOT, BUT IT WILL BE!

/RAJ MISHRA
On the eve of the 57th Republic Day on January 25, 2006, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, President of India, delivered a televised address where he asserted:

"We are well on our way on the path of development and transforming India into a developed nation before 2020."

With this assertion, he elaborated on his next mission:

"To protect our progress and further sustain the earning capacity of individuals and people" we need "to promote ethical values in all walks of life which will enable creation of synergy between establishments for realizing our dream of seeing the smiles on the billion faces".

But for the tragic situation faced by hundreds of millions of Indians who continue to live below poverty line and the hundreds more urban and rural masses who are being forced into destitution as the privatization and liberalization agenda of India takes its toll, the above assertion and the agenda would be comical. Any assertion that India is well on its way to a developed nation flies in the face of any and every accepted social-economic index by which the world community measures development.

If this is in deed the verdict of the Indian government and the State, it is not only cruel and inhumane for the deprived and the oppressed but an affront to the sensibilities of the thinking men and women of India. It is a declaration that the big business houses and their government and State fully intend to build their imperial dreams by turning their back on the poor and the oppressed of India. It is a clarion call to all the conscientious women and men of India, all those dissatisfied with the status quo and fighting for progress of India that they must rise to the occasion and block the juggernaut of this imperial India.

The assertion that "developed India is on the rise" and strengthening certain "ethical values" are the need of the hour to put "smile on the billion faces" is not a mere slip on the part of the Head of the State. Facts suggest that it is a conscious act, a continuation of the now discredited “Shining India” slogan. Indian government has been working overtime to present itself as a major power in the world stage.

Using the multiparty parliamentary system and nuclear-armed military as the foundation of this pretension, it has embarked upon a reckless economic privatization program of handing out vast amounts of public resources to private hands to build a thoroughly capitalist economy, including the agrarian sector that even the World Bank is reluctant to embrace. It is on a mission to overhaul many of the anachronistic colonial institutions to inject modernity to its state apparatus. Even communal violence, the bullwork of Indian state terrorism for past six decades, is being given a facelift by firing a central mister following Nannavati commission report on Delhi massacre of Sikhs in 1984. Even an attempt is being made to provide 100 days of work to the unemployed rural families as if a year has only 100 days!

The long line of foreign bankers and investors lining up to open shop in India and the increasing number of foreign acquisitions by Indian businesses are the backdrop to the assertion that India's "Vision 2020" is already a fait accompli. Opinion makers in India must believe that repeating a lie many times over could make it the truth!

India needs development and Indian people will make that development happen. But that development will be social and human development in the first place. Such development will follow empowerment of the people. What the President of India calls development is nothing but capitalist growth. Its essence is the GROWTH OF PRIVATE PROFITS which is taking place on the basis of strengthening the ownership of all productive property in private hands under state supervision. It is the opposite of what constitutes HUMAN AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT.

At a time when all aspects of life are becoming more and more social, when production and distribution of all goods and services are becoming more and more social, the use of the state machine and state institutions to facilitate the growth of private profits and simultaneously cut back social services is the very anti-thesis of human development. Yet this is the process that has been let loose in India and worldwide. Time and again, global statistics is showing human indices of development and social indices of development to be declining across the globe in the post cold war period and the poverty index for India and South Asia remaining at the top the list. Yet the Indian government and Indian businesses have embraced wholeheartedly the discredited theory of “growth” and "trickle down".

Proliferation of cell phones, combat aircrafts and bottled water are not the barometers of development but a sign of uneven development of capitalist growth. Privatizing healthcare, education, water supply and so on, scaling back social services and making everyone look after oneself etc. do not point to a society that is lifting itself up. To confuse these features of India with human development where goods and services are produced and circulated to meet the rising needs of a cultured population and where all for one and one for all is the motto is to practice deception and public fraud. When this is done by those holding positions of power, it violates every ethical norm - ancient Indian or modern.

How can it be said that the need of the hour is to promote ethical values such as "lead an honest life free from all corruption", "truth in thinking and action" and "honesty, sincerity and tolerance in our day-to-day living" to maintain the momentum for developed India before 2020? How can it be concluded that compulsory NCC training will usher in "disciplined politics, business, judiciary, bureaucracy, scientific pursuits and sports and games" in India and propel India to developed nation status? Is not this a fact that ancient Indians had all these ethics and even a bulk of the society subscribed to them at one point of time? What happened? Why did those values fail the Indian people when foreign invaders and colonialism deployed overwhelming force, introduced wholesale public corruption and extolled capitalist greed? If it would have ever been the case that Indian people lacked ethics and values and one billion Indian faces will smile if those ethics are brought to the forefront, Indian society would have become the paradise. No. such is not the case. Putting smiles on one billion faces will not be the result of the "developed India" of "Vision 2020". Nor administering ethical "oaths" to the youth to "lead an honest life free from corruption" will create the "developed India" which has little to offer to the majority of India's 540 million youth. Developed India will be created by hard work of two billion hands and one billion minds when one single mission to affirm the human dignity of all Indians will become the goal. The requirements for that developed India are to put back more into the economy than what is taken out, to expand social sectors and stop handing out public wealth to private profiteers; not preaching ethical values to the masses while stuffing money in the pockets of millionairs and billionairs.

The State of India, whose raison d'etre is to perpetuate the colonial and pre-colonial arrangements in the economic, political and social spheres and nurture them within the conditions of market economy and militarism can only dream of a developed India with modern weapons, modern entertainment and modern amenities at the service of the wealthy minority. People of India also have a vision for development and in that vision, human development and social development take center stage. The precondition for that development is for the people to become their own masters, own decision makers in a way fundamentally different from the existing corrupt parliamentary system where wealth makes decisions. Wealth has an upper hand today but people are not out. History is on their side to build a developed India. How soon that will happen now depends on how soon the billion minds converge on a conscious program to affirm their right to govern themselves.

full article...