Peasantry in India

Dr Mohinder Kumar
Free peasant’s travesty is such that he is not freed by his tiny private parcel of land. That title of land clings to him. He is not free although he is independent. Peasants can’t relish the possibility of installation or evolution of private capitalism in agriculture as long as they mutually separated. For peasant it is always pleasant to be entrenched and entangled in the realm of petty independent owner-operator status. He is nothing but his own employee or wage-laborer, but strings of his wage-employment are controlled by exotic power of big private capital (output market, bank, input supplier, companies). There is some alien capitalist who is decisively challenging his free existence of being owner-operator. He can’t really defend his position.
Peasant deserves emancipation from subjugation to free ownership and compulsive over-dependence on autonomous production which have left no alternative than to creep with this servile freedom of owner-operatorship as he detested cooperation.
Now even his apparent independence is getting challenge from exotic world of alien legal contracts, private capital, corporate, companies, etc. When this idyllic positioning of peasant gets challenged, it threatens his physical survival. Autonomous production process can be so fragile! And see the paradox. Autonomous peasant yearns to retain separated production but dislikes alienation, exclusion and estrangement! Now he has to choose between autonomy and exclusion; between independence and alienation; between separation and estrangement. The first trait in all these three choices is his idyllic past and the second one is his deadly future. Inhuman estrangement is facing him like a demon as he struggles to survive. He is going to become economic outcast.
Peasant can survive any challenge including fury of nature but challenge to independent economic status endangers his survivability. It takes him to the logical extreme of independence that is, absolute alienation. Being forced to leave agriculture, he feels as if he is sent to exile. Day-by-day he is becoming less independent and more and more over-dependent on factors outside his control of farm-household like, trader, trader-cum-grower, collector-cum-grower, commission agent, super-bazaar, bank, agencies, exports, Azadpur Mandi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore markets -a huge human and institutional cold human chain of intermediaries whom he has to face quite frequently. The more this once pleasant ‘independent peasant’ faces them the more he feels alienated, estranged and left-out.
This once celebrated isolated independence of petty private farming is now charging huge price from him. His space between personal being and household is drifting; space between household and farm is widening as well. The compound called ‘farm-household’ is on the verge of disintegration. It may happen; and it may not. It depends. But threat is there. But who is challenging peasant’s autonomy? Global forces are exercising control over peasant farm to dissociate his demographic ‘household’ from his economic ‘farm’. Farm household subsistence is breaking, veiled under massive supplies of apple meant for ‘cold atmosphere’ stores (CAS) taking place by the reformulated chain of intermediaries. Area under commercial crops (mainly horticulture) is 12%. If it gets enhanced to say 50%, it may spell disaster without independent, separated peasants getting united. Any way this tendency of human (and land) resource degenerating market worship had started long back surreptitiously under a chauvinist compulsion of Green Revolution, which has now changed its color, impact and intensity -only to re-write the destiny of the peasant world.
Green revolution in Punjab and Nexalite movement (tenant revolution) in West Bengal, are incidentally concurrent. While green revolution technology had put exorbitant demands and binding expectations on the shoulders of peasantry in Punjab, Nexalism promised tenants of West Bengal an end to the exploitation by semi-feudal Zamindars. The contrast is visible. Later, expansion of green revolution and militancy in Punjab were concomitant. It could be that sudden, enforced over-dependence on capital intensive technology bred discontentment among the peasant class.
Introduction of economic reforms and structural adjustment policy of liberalization-privatisation-globalisation (LPG) during the 1990s is coterminous with the period of militancy in J&K. Kashmir, rightly termed as ‘heaven on earth’ by Urfi, the great Persian poet cherishes freedom from dehumanizing bondage and independence of thought and activity. Whether LPG reforms did it or the militancy, the fact is rural development structures and infrastructures of cold storage, processing plants, cooperatives, small industry -everything got destroyed during the decade of nineties. The lesson is: peasants and small producers dislike uncertain, ruthless, economic over-dependence, subjugation and market humiliation. Today peasant fears market.
Farmers’ suicides in India are to be explained by analyzing gripped, depressed mind. Any amount of loan overdue simply does not kill him; otherwise how could we explain the phenomenon of both petty and big defaulters committing suicide? It’s the humiliation of not being able to save and accumulate something and being always helplessly obliged to accept this or that support or subvention or subsidy that humiliates his inner-personal self and kills his abstract being -before he thinks about ‘committing suicide’ so as to complement the first loss with putting an end to his concrete being. The dichotomy of a divided individual being living in the dual existence of abstract and concrete being thus finally comes to a tragic end. This is the current status of the rift ridden free peasantry in the third world.

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