Amid the several contradictions plaguing Hindu India, perhaps the most glaring is the widening urban-rural gap. The best brains among the ruling class live in cities and towns. That is why it has all the comforts of life. The countryside, where the producers of wealth live, is languishing. Urbanites are given all comforts, luxuries. Petted, pampered. Even the poor in cities lead a much better life than the poor in villages. Hence, the lure of the cities. Once in a while some farm leaders like Narayanaswamy Naidu of Tamil Nadu, Sharad Joshi of Maharashtra and M. D. Nanjundaswamy of Karnataka realise this and kick up an agitation. And after being dubbed as kulaks, beaten up by the police denigrated in the press, maligned in the public, they get exasperated and sink into oblivion. This is what happened to Sharad Joshi.
Right now a part of Karnataka is in the grip of a farmers agitation. Unlike China, which after the 1949 Revolution was able to build a healthy, powerful socialist society, caring more for villages than cities, the ruling class of India, which is yet to have a revolution, went on pampering industry as against agriculture and cities as against villages. The ruling class comprising industrialists, intelligentsia, administrators, journalists, film actors, judiciary, professionals, political, religious and trade union leaders in all about 10% of the country’s population either lives in cities or owns properties in cities. All those who matter in India educate their children in cities. All those who decide the country’s fate live in cities. Even the much-publicized “rural development” is done by those who know nothing rural. Even governemnt doctors are managing to cancel their postings to villages. All fruits of economic development ever since independence is swallowed up by the urban affluent. President Sanjiva Reddy deploring the widening urban rural gap said the farmer is the most neglected. “They had no good sanitation, no clean water supply, no medi-care, no educational facilities and yet they are supposed to be very comfortable”. (Statesman, 6-04-80). Not only the farmers have no facilities, but also the respect. Farmers’ children are refusing to take their fathers’ profession. There is a steady migration to urban areas not only of the children of farmers but the Untouchables and tribals fleeing from the threat to their life, property and the honor of their women.
There is no hope in the countryside. The conditions of farmers and farm laborers are deteriorating. About 85% of the country’s population lives in villages and a small minority of 15% in urban areas. While the per capita income of the farmer has risen from Rs. 198 to just . Rs. 200 from 1960 to 1976 that of the urbanized sector has gone up from Rs. 391 to over Rs. 813 for the period. The organized sector of the urban working class through the bullying tactics adopted by its trade union leadership was able to wrest lot of concessions but the ignorant farmers and dumb-driven farm laborers are languishing in the countryside. Not even trade union leaders are interested in them. The ruling class has no interest in the dull, drab villages except for an occasional seminar — the fashion of the day on “rural development” and some crocodile tears. How could the ruling class undertake rural uplift when it hardly has any knowledge of villages ? All farm policies are made in cities and executed by those in cities. Journalists are urban born and urban oriented. Except an occasional sponsored tour of select reporters to some roadside villages, over 95% of the journalists hardly have any connection with villages. As their interests are in cities, their sympathies naturally lie there. Urban interests being antagonistic to the rural, it is but natural that our Press, owned by capitalists who protect their interests through this media, should cater to this section only. And it is these journalists together with government officials, planners, economists, who have successfully painted the farmers as lolling in wealth and described it as the “kulak lobby“.
No doubt Ministers, MPs, MLAs hail from villages, and are elected by the rural vote. But being a cog in this huge giant wheel, they have become really helpless. Rather they fall in line, unable to resist the temptations of urban life. They want rural votes and urban money. To get the votes they seek the money that has to come from the urban rich. This money being a daily need they can afford to forget the rural voters until the next election comes when they can go with a fresh set of pro- mises and fool the poor, innocent villagers. Politicians have come to know that money can get votes and not vice-versa. So why should they bother about the voters? This is the position today and things will only go from bad to worse. Political leadership, therefore, cannot save the farmers. It is this overfed, urban, affluent sections which has made the eternal pursuit of pleasure as its sole aim in life, seeking entertainment through TV, radio, film, sports, press and even religion – the tiger turned maneater – which is responsible for the urban boom, rural decay. It wants everything for itself. It wants to have the cake and eat it too. Parasites of the first order. A penpusher in the city after few years of service gets Rs. 1000 a month. Over and above this he gets bonus, leave etc. To get this much of income in villages one should have 30-40 acres of dry land and the number of such people is small in a village. Here we are not speaking about such affluent farmers. They do not form even 10% of the agriculture sector. Farmers say that they are the actual producers of the country’s wealth. Yet they are not getting any govt. facilities. Only brickbats, no bouquets. What they produce goes to the urban people to eat at a subsidised rate. While the govt. has applied strict control on the prices of farm products, it has allowed the industrialists to jack up prices of inputs like fertilizer’s, pesticides, electricity, etc. When farmers agitate for higher prices, the police is used to crush them.
Despite all this suffering and treatment by the govt. as third-class citizens, they get no sympathy from the society because they are not following the right strategy. These farmers, mostly shudras (middle castes), who are held responsible for the rising atrocities on Untouchables. The fact is they are only practicing a religion of which the high castes are the real founders. The brain gives the order and the leg kicks and kills the Dalits. But who gives the order? The Dalits are not concerned about the brain behind the order. They are angry with the leg that kicks them. That is why the farmers can never mobilize agricultural laborers, mostly Untouchables, who are immediately below them in the caste hierarchy. Nor can they get the support of Brahmins and other upper castes who belong to the ruling class. The tragedy of India is the tragedy of this vast middle castes. Th’s landed gentry is more brahminized than Brahmins. No, they are the real practitioners of Brahminism. And that is how they lose their case. As long as they do not win over agricultural laborers, they can never make Dalits join in their war against the urban exploiters who will drive a wedge between the two and only play one against the other. That is the reason why farmers agitation can never be success in Hindu India. The Untouchables will never join them as the interests of the two sections are hostile to each other. On the other hand the powerful urban lobby will dub farmers as kulaks. Call the dog mad and shoot. They will neither get any support from the top nor from the bottom. They have lost a very good case by a wrong strategy. It is a contradiction that can never be resolved as long as the caste system remains.
Be that as it may, a feeling has developed among the farmers that it is the rural people who grow the food to feed the urbanites – who sit and eat and yet ride roughshod over them. These urbanites want cheap food, whereas the farmers are not able to meet their production cost. “So why not stop growing food crops which are uneconomic and switch on to commercial crops that make a fast buck?”, Farmers have started talking on these lines. They say; land reform is brought to curb and crush the rural leadership. But urban property is untouched. It is a fashion to talk about land-to-the- tiller but not even leftists bother about giving house to the dweller. Landlords owning urban property are worth millions of rupees but no millionaire lives in villages Socialism is a one way traffic in India. Till now the farmers have not found a proper leader. Caste has divided farmers also. But such a realization is fast dawning on them and if they clinch the issue, the urbanites will be driven to a tight corner. The urbanites have a much easier life and much higher income. That is why there is a steady migration of Untouchables to cities and towns. They get their monthly pay packet whether there is flood or famine. But to the farmer he still depends on nature’s bounty. But because the govt. bows only to bullies, the urbanites have their way. If the existing rural-urban gap widens, (and it is bound to widen) a time may soon come for confrontation leading to explosion. We welcome it. It is also one of the basic contradictions in Hindu India. As every contradiction has to be welcomed and sharpened, this one also must be encouraged. The only thing is dalits and other persecuted minorities will have to choose their friends and allies in this fast-developing polarisation.
