A
Bull Market For Sensex,
Fashion Models And Farmer Suicides
By P Sainath
03 April, 2006
The Hindu
Farm
suicides in Vidharbha crossed 400 this week. The Sensex share index
crossed the 11,000 mark. And Lakme Fashion Week issued over 500 media
passes to journalists. All three are firsts. All happened the same week.
And each captures in a brilliant if bizarre way a sense of where India's
Brave New World is headed. A powerful measure of a massive disconnect.
Of the gap between the haves and the have-mores on the one hand, and
the dispossessed and desperate, on the other.
Of the three events, the
suicide toll in Vidharbha found no mention in many newspapers and television
channels. Even though these have occurred since just June 2 last year.
Even though the most conservative figure (of Sakaal newspaper) places
the deaths at above 372. (The count since 2000-01 would run to thousands.)
Sure, there were rare exceptions in the media. But they were just that
- rare. It is hard to describe what those fighting this incredible human
tragedy on the ground feel about it. More so when faced with the silence
of a national media given to moralising on almost everything else.
In the 13 days during which
the suicide index hit 400, 40 farmers took their own lives. The Vidharbha
Jan Andolan Samiti points out that the suicides are now more than three
a day - and mounting. These deaths are not the result of natural disaster,
but of policies rammed through with heartless cynicism. They are driven
by several factors that include debt linked to a credit crunch, soaring
input costs, crashing prices, and a complete loss of hope. That loss
of faith and the rise in the numbers of deaths has been sharpest since
last October. That's when a government that came to power promising
a cotton price of Rs.2,700 a quintal ensured it fell to Rs.1,700. A
thousand rupees less.
When 322 of 413 suicides
have occurred since just November 1, you'd think that is newsworthy.
When the highest number, 77, take place in March alone, you'd believe
the same. You'd be wrong, though. The Great Depression of the Indian
countryside does not make news.
But the Sensex and Fashion
Week do. "There is nothing wrong," an irate reader wrote to
me, "in covering the Sensex or the Fashion Week." True. But
there is something horribly wrong with our sense of proportion while
doing so. Every pulse beat and flutter on the Sensex merits front-page
treatment. Even if less than two per cent of Indian households have
any kind of investments in the stock exchange here. This week's rise
does not just mark the highest ever. It makes the lead story on the
front page. That's because the "Sensex beats Dow in numbers game."
The strap below that headline in a leading daily reads: "Dalal
Street's 11,183 eclipses Wall Street." It's moved to 11,300 since
then.
On television, even non-business
channels carry that ticker at the right hand corner. Keeping viewers
alert to the main chance even as they draw in the number of deaths in
the latest bomb blasts. At one point, the mourning for President K.R.
Narayanan was juxtaposed to the joys of the Nifty and the Sensex. The
irony does get noticed but it persists.
The great news for Fashion
Week lovers is that this year will see two of them. There's a split
in the ranks of the Beautiful People. Which means we will now have 500
or more journalists covering two such events separately. This in a nation
where the industry's own study put the Indian designer market at 0.2
per cent of the total apparel market. Where journalists at such shows
each year outnumber buyers - often by three to one.
Contrast that with the negligible
number of reporters sent out to cover Vidharbha in the depths of its
great misery. At the LFW, journalists jostle for `exclusives' while
TV crews shove one another around for the best `camera space.' In Vidharbha
itself, the best reporters there push only the limits of their own sanity.
Faced with dailies that kill most of their stories, or with channels
that scorn such reports, they still persist. Trying desperately to draw
the nation's attention to what is happening. To touch its collective
conscience. So intense has been their tryst with misery, they drag themselves
to cover the next household against the instinct to switch off. Every
one of them knows the farm suicides are just the tip of the iceberg.
A symptom of a much wider distress.
The papers that dislike such
stories do find space for the poor, though. As in this advertisement,
which strikes a new low in contempt for them. Two very poor women, probably
landless workers, are chatting: "That's one helluva designer tan,"
says the first to the other. "Yeah," replies the other. "My
skin just takes to the Monte Carlo sun." The copy that follows
then mocks them. "You'll agree," it says, "chances that
the ladies above rub shoulders with the glitterati of the French Riviera
are, well, a little remote." It throws in a disclaimer, of course.
"We don't mean to be disrespectful ... " But "this is
a mere reminder to marketers that a focus on customers with stronger
potential does help." That is an ad for the `Brand Equity,' supplement
of a leading newspaper group.
Nearly 5,000 shanties were
torn down in Mumbai in the same eventful week. But it drew little attention.
Their dwellers won't make it to the French Riviera either. Those in
media focus, though, might. Mumbai's planned Peddar Road flyover, seen
by some of the metro's mega rich as hurting their interests, grabbed
yards of newsprint and endless broadcast time. There was barely a word
seen or heard from those whose homes were razed to the ground. Meanwhile,
more and more people flee the countryside for urban India. Candidates
for future demolitions. In the village, we demolish their lives, in
the city their homes.
The smug indifference of
the elite is matched by the governments they do not vote in, but control.
When the National Commission for Farmers went to Vidharbha last October,
it brought out a serious report and vital recommendations. Many of these
have become demands of the farmers and their organisations. At its Nashik
meeting in January, the All-India Kisan Sabha (a body with 20 million
members) called for immediate implementation of the NCF report.
Instead, both the Centre
and the State Government have sent more and more `commissions' to the
region. To `study' what was well known and already documented. It's
a kind of distress tourism now. It just adds the sins of `commissions'
to those of omission.
Favouring corporates
The damage is not only in
Vidharbha but across the land. Why is the Indian state doing this to
its farmers? Isn't farming, after all, the biggest private sector in
India? Because being private isn't enough. Ruthlessly, each policy,
every budget moves us further towards a corporate takeover of agriculture.
Large companies were amongst the top gainers from distress sales of
cotton in Vidharbha this season. The small private owners called farmers
must be sacrificed at the altar of big corporate profit. The clearest
admission of this came in the McKinsey-authored Vision 2020 of Chandrababu
Naidu in Andhra Pradesh. It set out the removal of millions of people
from the land as one of its objectives. Successive governments at the
Centre and in many States seem to have latched on to that vision with
much zeal. In some ways, the present United Progressive Alliance takes
up where Mr. Naidu left off.
Where are those being thrown
off the land to go? To the cities and towns with their shutdown mills.
With closed factories and very little employment. The great Indian miracle
is based on near jobless growth. We are witnessing the biggest human
displacement in our history and not even acknowledging it. The desperation
for any work at all is clear in the rush for it at just the start of
the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme. Within a week of
its launch, it saw 2.7 million applicants in just 13 districts of Andhra
Pradesh. And close to a million in 12 districts of Maharashtra. Note
that the Rs.60 wage is below the minimum of several States. Know, too,
that many in the lines of applicants are landed farmers. Some of them
with six acres or more. In the Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh,
a farmer who owned eight acres of paddy fields was a person of some
status 10 years ago. Today, he or she, with a family of five, would
be below the poverty line. (If that's the case with landowners, imagine
the state of landless labourers.)
If the State Government's
role in Vidharbha is sick, that of the Centre is appalling. Making sad
noises is about as far as it will go. As the NCF report shows, much
can be done to save hundreds of more lives that will surely otherwise
be lost. But it avoids that path.
Its vision of farming serves
corporates, not communities. And the media elite? Why not a Vidharbha
week? To report the lives and deaths of those whose cotton creates the
textiles and fabrics that they do cover. If just a fourth of the journalists
sent to the Fashion Week were assigned to cover Vidharbha, they'd all
have many more stories to tell.
P. Sainath is the rural affairs
editor of The Hindu (where these two pieces initially ran) and the author
of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He can be reached at: [email protected].