Travels with Sainath

Sainath tells me he's had difficulty sleeping since he covered the suicides in India's Andhra Pradesh region from the late '90s on. All told, he's visited 300 families in which a suicide has occurred.

How did it all begin? From the early '90s forward, zero investment and a collapse of credit ravaged Indian agriculture. The landless poor saw working days crash as a result. Crippling rises in the costs of seed, fertilizer, utilities, pesticide, and water crushed small farms. New user fees sent health costs soaring, and such costs have become a huge component of rural family debt. Newly commercialized education destroyed the hopes of hundreds of thousands of women, as families, given the narrowed options, favored sons over daughters. Farm kids simply dropped out.

Ruin metastasized. Sainath showed me an 8x10 picture he'd made of a woman, Aruna, positioning a photograph of her husband Bangaru Ramachari among the implements he made for farmers, getting payment in kind. Amid the slump he'd had no customers for two years. He'd died of hunger, too proud to admit, in his last week before he collapsed, that he'd not eaten for five days. The shift from food crops to cash crops, backed by the World Bank, produced another harvest of disaster. New entrepreneurs replacing old government-run networks sold bad seeds that would not germinate.

"The suicides," Sainath says, "are a symptom of vast agrarian distress. For every farmer who has committed suicide there are thousands more facing the same huge crisis who have not taken their lives. In fact, we will never know how many suicides there have been, since there are so many ways of not counting them. We do know that in seven or eight states since '97 and '98 and most particularly since 2000 farmers have taken their lives by the thousand. In the single district of Anantapur, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, so beloved by the neoliberals because of its 'reforms,' over 3,000 farmers have taken their lives between 1997 and 2003."

Increasingly, from 1999-2000 Sainath and some vigilant local journalists noticed a mismatch between what they were seeing in the fields and the official data. Narasimha Reddy, who works for the biggest Telugu newspaper, Eenadu (with a circulation of around one million), started writing about this gap. The government stats were saying that suicides due to "distress" were no more than 54 statewide in 2000. This was strange because when Narasimha and Sainath went to villages to investigate suicides they'd routinely find six or seven. That rattled them. Then they started looking more closely at the death statistics, and they found out what the bureaucrats were doing, first as conspiracy, then out of habit. The overwhelming method of suicide was by drinking pesticide dumped on farmers by the government. The journalists found that the police had listed these as "suicides due to stomach ache."

Sometimes they said that the pain of the stomach ache "had prompted the victims to take pesticide."

Other methods of concealment included counting a death as suicide, but not a "distress" suicide. Or as an "accident." Or as a death due to natural causes or accident. Many of those killing themselves were women running small farms in the absence of husbands who were looking for work elsewhere, or who had taken their own lives. But because these women rarely owned the land themselves, they weren't classified as farmers, so their suicides were not counted as farm-related.

Then there's the stigma of suicide. Many families don't want it, and that's a big factor in suppressing the numbers. Again, legally speaking, post mortems are free, but to prove that a relative committed suicide the police extort money from family members to pay for the autopsy. Officials undercount suicides among dalits and landless laborers or among migrant farmers who've given up, gone to a town and, severed from their social setting, killed themselves.

While these farmers were being driven to suicide by the thousands in Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, the state's chief minister, was being iconized in the western press as the apex posterboy for neoliberal "reform." The Wall Street Journal hailed him as "a model for fellow state leaders." Time crowned him "South Asian of the year." Bill Gates called on Naidu. So did Bill Clinton. So did Paul O'Neill. John Wolfenson, president of the World Bank, tossed him loan upon loan.

The press projected onto Naidu all their fantasies of what a neoliberal modernizer should be, building an IT-based economy in "Cyberabad." Oppression of women? Naidu's fixed that, crowed The Financial Times: "In a country where lower caste women are locked out of decision-making, the government of Andhra Pradesh is sponsoring a social revolution...Women now dominate the village square."

Indeed, World Bank officials clapped their hands as Naidu kicked aside the panchayats--democratically elected village councils--and announced he was empowering women in new local organizations. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. The new outfits usually turned out to be small coteries with the right connections, which got Naidu's patronage and which filched or wasted the money while the genuinely democratic panchayats were sidelined and starved of funding. The collapse of democracy--that is, the framework for collective action to combat disaster--in the countryside contributed to the terrible harvest of death.

On December 27, 2002, Keith Bradsher of the New York Times issued a worshipful resume of Naidu's assets and achievements, selecting for particular mention the asset that Bradsher deemed vital to Naidu's political grip on Andhra Pradesh. "Naidu and his allies," Bradsher breathlessly confided to the NYT's readers, "speak Telugu, a language spoken only in this state and by a few people in two adjacent states." What Bradsher was saying was that Naidu spoke the same language as the other 70 million inhabitants of Andhra Pradesh. It was as though someone ascribed Tony Blair's political successes in the United Kingdom to his command of English.

Apart from Naidu's wondrous fluency in his native tongue, Bradsher fixed upon other achievements likely to excite an American business readership: "Mr. Naidu," he excitedly confides, "has succeeded in raising electricity prices here by 70 percent" and "has enacted a law requiring union leaders to be workers from the factory or office they represent...Andhra Pradesh has also relaxed some of the restrictions on laying off workers."

In the spring of 2004 the Naidu balloon exploded with a gigantic thunderclap. The Indian poor entered his field of vision decisively, even as they shattered the expectations of almost every national political pundit. Rarely has a posterboy been more humiliatingly peeled from the billboards and tossed in the gutter. Naidu's elected coalition plummeted from 202 seats to a quarter of that number.

The verdict, from landless poor to farmers to rural women to the denizens of Cyberabad, was well nigh unanimous: the Naidu model had been a disaster for Andhra Pradesh, as statistics had been inexorably recording even during his glory years. Economic growth was abysmal and other vital statistics equally wretched. The 5,000 suicides remain the prime epitaph for a politician hailed in the West more than any other Indian as the harbinger of neoliberal triumph. Only the Argentinean collapse was as brutal a rebuff to elite opinion.

Three weeks earlier Sainath gave me Rajani Palme Dutt's India Today, in a revised edition put out in 1970, not long before Dutt died. If you skip the predictable boilerplate and ideological postures to be expected of a CP high-up in the 1940s, India Today is an absorbing history and a corrective to any nostalgia for the days of the Raj, or to the current nonsense about its benign role purveyed by such choristers of Empire as Niall Ferguson.

In an early chapter Palme Dutt cites admiring travelers such as Tavernier, traveling around India in the seventeenth century, remarking that "even in the smallest villages rice, flour, butter, milk, beans and other vegetables, sugar and other sweetmeats, dry and liquid, can be procured in abundance." Many travelers at the time extolled Bengal as marvelous in the abundance of its resources, the advanced nature of its crafts. By the 1920s, after nearly two centuries of British rule, India was a byword for the vast abyss of its all-pervading poverty. "The average Indian income," wrote two economists in 1924, "is just enough either to feed two men in every three of the population, or give them all two in place of every three meals they need, on condition they all consent to go naked, live out of doors all the year round, have no amusement or recreation, and want nothing else but food, and that the lowest, the coarsest, the least nutritious."

The British devastation of India was initially achieved by the simple means of taxing it into destitution. In the last year of the last Indian ruler of Bengal, in 1764-5, the land revenue realized was 817,000 pounds sterling. Within a few years of British rule the population had shrunk by one-third through famine, in which ten million perished in 1770 and one-third of the country turned into "a jungle inhabited by wild beasts."

The British destroyed the old manufacturing towns and the economy of the villages. In Palme Dutt's words, "The millions of ruined artisans and craftsmen, spinners, weavers, potters, smelters, smiths, alike from the towns and the villages, had no alternative save to crowd into agriculture..." India was "forced to the status of agricultural colony of British manufacturing capitalism," whose ideologues then invoked Malthus to explain India's degraded condition.

Sainath reminded me of the bit in Tacitus' Annals where he describes how condemned people were recruited to serve as candles at Nero's parties: "they were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as nightly illumination when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle."

"What sort of sensibility," Sainath broods, "did it require to pop another fig in your mouth as one more human being went up in flames?"

And by the same token, Sainath asks what sort of indifference has it required for India's rich--and the very rich in India are among the richest on the planet--to disport while millions starved not far off, and thousands of peasants killed themselves, some of them less than 50 miles from Mumbai where much of India's wealth is concentrated, and where "theme weddings" costing millions have been the rage. Last year an Indian steel billionaire, Lakshmi Mittal, and his wife Usha promised their daughter Vanisha a spectacular wedding. They cashed the promise by renting Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles in France for the nuptials. The six-day long wedding bash cost over $80 million and was attended by more than 1,200 guests including leading Indian industrialists and celebrities from the Bollywood film scene.

Just as interesting, I remark to Sainath, as the festivities and excesses of the rich is the mindset of the policy makers, the intellectual formulators of neoliberal policies that they know well will cause terrible suffering. What processes of self-exculpation insulate them from a policy (say, planned shrinkage of India's small farmers by 40 per cent) and the execution of that policy, inflicting terrible privations and early death on millions?

India became independent on August 15, 1947, after nearly two centuries of colonial rule. There was not a day the villages were quiet in that period. What the Brits call "The Sepoy Mutiny" of 1857, was actually the greatest agrarian uprising the world had seen, at least until China got into the act.

The uprising of 1857 came when the villages exploded. The "sepoy" (a British corruption of the Indian sipahi or soldier) was simply a peasant in uniform, who could not but reflect the mood of his village. For instance, in the province of Oudh, where there was great anger at the new land revenue system imposed by the British, almost every agricultural family had a representative in the army.

When the rural masses rose in millions, the business elite of Bombay and Calcutta held prayers--for the success of the British in quelling the rebellion! This is not to say that there was no revolt in the cities. Just that the explosion was from the villages and towns and that the elites--just as they are today--were on the wrong side. The big difference a city-based Gandhi made to the freedom struggle was bringing the rural masses into the organized political process on the scale he did. With that, Gandhi converted the Congress from a tea party into a political party. The entry of the millions of rural Indians is what made the difference.

"Through these decades," as Sainath says, "the rural poor have kept democracy alive in India. They go out and change governments. The backbone has always been rural."

And it still is.

Out there in the real world of poor farmers on the lip of ruin, the neoliberal model imposed by the World Bank and by infatuated "reformers" across the world over the past twenty years has failed decisively, just as it has across so much of Latin America and the Third World. Let us dare to hope that across the next generation we will welcome a gathering counterattack on neoliberalism and a new path, along which scouting parties and bold detachments are already on the march.