Gajendra Singh committed suicide today. Unlike scores of fellow farmers who commit suicide every day in some part of India or the other, Gajendra did not become a statistic to be debated upon. He could not be wished away as a suicide for non-farming reasons nor could his existence itself be questioned by bureaucrats cleaning up the stat book. He killed himself today in the power centre of the nation, in the midst of an AAP rally against the land acquisition bill.
Tears have started to flow all over the Internet. They will flow in copious quantities in Kolkata’s College Square and in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in days to come, shrouded in tired slogans and even-more-tired demands for justice and freedom and the usual. Even the mighty PM was ‘deeply shattered’. There will be more hollow noises in days to come, maybe a sudden spurt in the number of talks P Sainath is asked to give. Candles will be lit, quite an achievement in itself if it is for a farmer. Gajendra Singh will become a symbol. This is if the weeping continues and is not diverted to some tragedy in Europe tomorrow.
However, there are good reasons why you shouldn’t care at all about Gajendra Singh. And by ‘you’, I mean people of a number of different political persuasions who like to believe that they disagree with each other a lot. If you’re a conservative, which is a polite word for a Hindutvavaadi free market enthusiast, and an even politer word for a Modi bhakt, Gajendra Singh is just collateral damage in the process of transforming India into that picture of Gujarat you shared last year but which actually turns out to be Guangzhou. Just give Modi ten years and no more Gajendra Singhs. Right? Right?
If you are what is called a liberal, a progressive, a jholawallah and related euphemisms for teary-hearted, you’re in my broad camp. Of course, we don’t have a camp. Just as many little tents as there are numbers of us. If Yechury warms your heart, you’re probably waiting to see if it’s a neoliberal, neo-safhjsafgs, neo-sdnmasbdhasg American conspiracy. Liberation, you say? Maoist, you say? AAP? “Independent Left”? We all have our takes. Takes that fit into the theory we have taught ourselves governs the world and all that is wrong with it. So why should we not care at all about Gajendra Singh? Isn’t getting fiery and slogan-ny the last vestige of the Indian Left, an existential vocation? Indeed, it is. But in all the candles we burn, we won’t get out of our narrow (yes, I said it!) ideologies and ask why Gajendra Singhs should die at all. If we do ask, the answers we give ourselves will be the usual, predictable ones. Will we take a step back and think about the policies that we have pushed for in the past few decades and whether we are in any way responsible for Gajendra Singh’s death? We won’t because we are afraid of admitting we can be wrong. Everyone is, but especially us, because we claim an intellectual heritage that we probably don’t deserve to inherit. For decades now, we and our predecessors have railed against land acquisition laws that played into the hands of crony capitalists.
Will we take a step back and think about the policies that we have pushed for in the past few decades and whether we are in any way responsible for Gajendra Singh’s death? We won’t because we are afraid of admitting we can be wrong. Everyone is, but especially us, because we claim an intellectual heritage that we probably don’t deserve to inherit. For decades now, we and our predecessors have railed against land acquisition laws that played into the hands of crony capitalists. What we didn’t do, however, is propose an alternative model of industrialisation that doesn’t kill capitalist incentive while serving the interests of those being disowned of their land. We pushed for maintaining the status quo on labour reforms to safeguard the interests of the organised working class. All because that’s the class Marx and 1917 said would bring revolution. In the process, we failed to see that the organised working class had become a relatively well-off class compared to the millions that continued to slog on in the unorganised sector and as contract labour in industries. All because the labour laws were so out-of-sync with ground reality that all they did was create a minority of workers with gold class benefits and a vast majority that no non-stupid industrialist would hire except as contract labour, thereby denying them even basic social security benefits. We railed against an obsessive growth culture without specifying how the alternative – development – was to be achieved with land locked in unproductive, volatile agriculture and a workforce that had to work the fields because there were no industrial jobs to hire them.
Will we push for labour reforms tomorrow? Will we take a cut in the higher education budget if it is reallocated to primary education? And most importantly, will we reconcile with an India in which Euro-centric theories need to be modified, then applied if at all? If we are unwilling to accept that giving farmers the ‘right’ to live miserable lives tilling their ever-diminishing plots of land is not a valid development plan, we shouldn’t weep for Gajendra Singh. If we do not accept that “capitalist” interests have to be served if the social good is worth it, then we should worry about that Ph.D. thesis or academic conference on farmer suicides, let’s forget about Gajendra Singh otherwise. There’ll be a dozen like him tomorrow. They won’t even make the news.
carvaan 