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“He is the original live suicider. Do you know how big this is?” That’s how a hysterical TV reporter announces the planned suicide of a nameless farmer in a remote village in the 2010 film Peepli [Live], a richly black film about farmers’ suicides in India. These stark lines were replayed in all their awfulness last month when a farmer from Rajasthan hanged himself from a tree in front of dozens of TV cameras in Jantar Mantar, the designated piazza of lost causes in New Delhi.
Farmer Gajendra Singh’s suicide was, inevitably, breaking news for the hordes of TV channels that had gathered to cover a political rally, each of them replaying shots of the bearded and turbaned farmer as he dallied in the tree for half an hour before killing himself. That was the decent part; endless clips were also shown of his limp body dangling from the tree as the media frenzy touched a nadir. The next day, a crusading newspaper from which one would have expected better set the seal on media callousness with a headline that screamed: “A farmer dies, live”.
Since 1995, close to 300,000 farmers have taken their own lives — this is the tally till 2013 since the official data for the last year is yet to be released by the National Crime Records Bureau. The backdrop to the problem is that almost 60pc of the population still depends on agriculture although its contribution to GDP has dipped to just 13pc and is still declining. It’s a problem that has defeated economists who say millions of people need to be shifted from agriculture to jobs in the manufacturing sector. Is this happening? Not at all. Jobs in manufacturing have declined sharply at a time when a million young people are entering the workforce every month and will do so for the next decade on account of the demographic profile of the population.
Since 1995, close to 300,000 farmers in India have taken their own lives.
The actual reasons for farmer suicides are hard to pin down although one can say with certainty that from time immemorial Indian farmers have been heavily indebted, a burden that has grown in spite of priority credit from banks. Farmers growing cash crops are the most vulnerable and have been the group most prone to ending their lives. The sharp rise in cost of inputs has added to the burden especially after government ended the subsidy on fertilisers and micronutrients. At the same time, commodity prices have slumped globally, leaving farmers little room for manoeuvrability.
For the past 10 years, the UPA government, steered by Manmohan Singh, did not have much time to address the underlying problems of Indian agriculture, sucked as it was into a number of corruption scandals and a policy stasis. It was not surprising, therefore, that farmers voted with their feet for a regime change when BJP’s Narendra Modi promised to accord highest priority to agricultural growth and raising farmers’ incomes.
Ironically, Gajendra Singh’s suicide took place at a rally called by the Aam Aadmi Party, which rules the National Capital Territory of Delhi, to protest against what it called the anti-farmer policies of the BJP. The provocation was an ordinance passed by the BJP that would allow industry and commercial developers to acquire agricultural land without due process.
The ironies have been piling up thick and fast. One is the Congress’s newly found concern for the farmer. Party vice-president Rahul Gandhi has not only rushed to visit the family of Gajendra Singh but has set off on a walking tour of the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra which has seen the largest number of suicides in recent years. In the cynical posturing over the tragedy, the BJP has mounted a counter campaign which raises predictable accusations against its rival.
In all this, it is hard to detect even the silhouette of the farmer.
Peepli [Live], made by former journalists Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui had taken flak for what critics said was its trivialisation of farmer suicides. That had a lot to do with the ironic tone of the film which showed deadpan the machinations of politicians, bureaucrats and the village establishment as they dealt with the crisis of the countryside. The other crib was that it showed too much of the media and not enough of rural poverty and the issues of farmers. Whatever the charge against the film, real life has trounced it thoroughly.
Instead of dwelling on the unfortunate farmer and understanding what forced him to take the extreme step, the shrill reportage was focused almost entirely on the AAP, making it the prime accused. The charge against AAP president and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is that he continued to speak even after the suicide.
Since then it’s been pure nautanki. It was bad enough that TV anchor-turned-AAP politician Ashutosh showed scant regard for decorum by saying that the next time around the chief minister himself would bring down any bodies. To make amends, the AAP spokesman cried copiously on TV to show his remorse, an embarrassing performance that only recalled the original sin.
As an Indian watching other Indians react to a tragedy it has been a far from edifying experience. If most people were washing their hands of any responsibility, others were equally determined to find someone else to blame for the mess. In the case of the police, the charge is that they did nothing while Gajendra Singh was up in the tree and not even after he hanged himself. Their defence, pathetically, is that they were busy keeping an eye on a noisy group of teachers who were there on a mission of their own — a rally to demand wages from the Kejriwal government — and were distracted. So it was left to a handful of AAP members to climb the tree and bring down the body of Gajendra Singh at some risk to themselves.
Insensitivity of a worse kind came from a BJP minister of agriculture in the neighbouring state of Haryana. Farmers who commit suicide he said were ‘cowards’ and ‘criminals’, and did not deserve any sympathy. That at least seemed an honest opinion.
Ultimately what has happened is that the farmer has once again become a formless entity that neither the political class, the media nor the middle class consumers of breaking news are able to empathise with much less understand.
The nearly 300,000 who committed suicide have become a mere statistic. A live suicide has fared no better — a spectacle that had its 15 seconds of fame.
The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi.
Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2015
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