The Hindu Business Line : Do farmers have friends?

Laying the blame for much of the farm sector's ills at the door of the Congress, Sharad Joshi says the party leader, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, is on weak wicket blaming the non-Congress regimes. The latter, he says, are guilty by complicity as they sh owed little courage in changing the policies set largely in the Nehru and Indira Gandhi eras.

A rally in Gujarat addressed by the Congress President, Mrs Sonia Gandhi... Will a new stance on the farm sector help this farmer get his rightful due?

WHEN elections approach, political propagandists have only one thing on their minds: Getting into power or retaining it. Politicians, come elections, cannot be expected to undertake serious and objective discussions of issues involving broader interests of the nation. Accusations, counters and obfuscation of real issues is all that can be expected of the politicians till the electoral fever passes.

Everything is fair in love, war and elections. But even the contending parties ought to have, in their own interests, a certain protocol or convention about the mores of propaganda lest it becomes self-defeating and counter-productive. It would be in the interest of all political parties to ensure that thepropaganda invective is not all lies and malice and that it has a modicum of truth.

Mrs Sonia Gandhi has for quite some time been away from the seat of dynastic power. Understandably, she is anxious to get back to the throne that she considers rightfully belongs to her by right of pedigree. A few interested parties have attempted to thwart her by making her non-Indian origins a Constitutional issue. Maybe that is what has ruffled her. Whatever the reason, Mrs Sonia Gandhi is certainly losing her native composure even before the commencement of the electoral bustle.

Quite unnecessarily so. A large majority of the States are already ruled by her party. The best game plan for her would be to maintain a certain poise, and leave it to the Hindutva brigade to commit all the trespasses and faux pas. Unfortunately, this is not happening. She is indulging increasingly in the shrill invective so characteristic of her more adroit mother-in-law even before reaching the hustings. The NDA is offering her, day in and day out, grand opportunities with kickbacks and corruption making headlines. If she claims that all her party members are Mr Cleans and that everybody in the ruling alliance is tainted, it may pass muster as political diatribe. Nothing more.

On the opposite side, there is a grain of truth in the Home Minister, Mr L. K. Advani's insinuations that Nehru, in the first place, and Indira Gandhi, later on, were responsible for the stickiness of the Kashmir imbroglio. But innuendos of this type can never be proved or disproved. The political mud-slinging does not mean a thing. That, however, is not the case with economic invective and accusations.

The accusations in the field of economic policies are a different matter altogether. Irresponsible accusations unthinkingly hurled at the Opposition might come back to roost and prove disastrously counter-productive.

The slogan Garibi Hatao of poverty eradication paid Indira Gandhi rich dividends. The new slogan Garibon ke Saath — With the Poor — might turn counter-productive only if it is interpreted by the public at large as being anti-liberalisation and anti-economic reforms.

Irresponsible statements about economic policies, reforms, liberalisation, globalisation, disinvestment and so on can recoil and prove worse than counterproductive. Political polemics is a part of the electoral game; not so economic criticism.

One sector where the Congress(I) will have difficulty mounting attacks against other parties will be agriculture. It is rather surprising that Mrs Sonia Gandhi should have chosen to open salvos against the NDA policies on the farm sector. Her tirade that the NDA policies have brought about the ruination of the farmer and of the farm sector is like opening the Pandora's box, and Mrs Sonia Gandhi may well rue the day she accepted her advisor's submission to flight it. Her criticism of the NDA's agricultural policies is largely based on post-Marrakesh developments, in particular the abolition of quantitative restrictions (QRs), the inadequate subsidies and the financing of the sector.

But the penury of Indian agriculture goes beyond Marrakesh or the WTO. It will be difficult for the Congress President to escape the responsibility for all the travails of the peasantry in the pre-Marrakesh era. She blamed the NDA Government for the poverty and indebtedness of the farm sector, saying that it is the policies of opening up, in the wake of the WTO, and the globalisation that are causing loss of income and employment and worsening of the farmer's predicament.

The fact is that poverty in agriculture and farmers' suicides pre-date the Marrakesh agreements that were signed only six years back. There is ample, and concrete, evidence to show that the socialist policies of the Congress(I) were primarily responsible for the decline of the agriculture sector, its low levels of production and productivity, deficient quality of production, lack of infrastructure and paucity of investments.

The Nehruvian policies of imposing negative subsidies on agricultural produce were ruthlessly pursued under Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, through a large armoury of instruments and institutions. Farmers are unable to repay loans or pay electricity dues which total less than Rs 50,000 crore because the government's marketing policies have inflicted on the farmers a loss of over Rs 300,000 crore over the last two decades.

It was under Congress rule that, under the garb of progressive socialist reforms, the government proceeded to take various measures targeting tenancy, zamindari, larger holdings and income inequality. That resulted in fragmentation of land, a major handicap afflicting Indian agriculture even today. Also obliterated under Congress rule was the fundamental right to property, that was reinforced by Schedule IX of the Constitution, making it impossible for farmers to have recourse to judicial procedures against land legislation even if they infringed upon the fundamental rights.

Nehru's policy planners developed megalomaniac tendencies in irrigation projects that were contractor , politician and bureaucracy friendly but inimical to environment and farm economy.

The consequence has been the underutilisation of irrigation capacity, high cost of irrigation and overall water scarcity. Nehru promoted the idea of collectivisation of agriculture. Had the initiative not been squarely rebuffed at the Nagpur Congress by C. Rajgopalachari & Co, India would today be in the same bread-basket-case as some of the republics of the erstwhile USSR .

It was in the heyday of Congress socialism that the stalwart socialist leader, Dr Ashok Mehta, went on record to say that "if the PL480 foodgrains were available in the world market so readily and abundantly, Indian agriculture could stand some benign neglect".

Again, a Congress Minister for agriculture — Rao Birendra Singh — is on record as having said in Parliament that the government pays higher prices for the wheat purchased from American farmers as they had a higher standard of living.

It was during the Congress rule that the government built up and fine-tuned the draconian Essential Commodities Act permitting restrictions on movement, trade, processing storage, export and inter-State trade of agricultural produce to keep the prices depressed.

A Congress regime glorified Operation Flood with the result that the milk powder and the butter oil which the European Community was prepared to cast away were used to depress domestic milk prices in India.

The only saving grace in an otherwise poor record of the Congress farm policies is a brief non-Nehru clan period of Lal Bahadur Shastri's prime ministership. It was during this period that the Green Revolution technology was brought in, market support operations introduced, and the farmers given a certain special status with the slogan `Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan'.

But for much of the ills of India's peasantry the Congress is to blame, and Mrs Sonia Gandhi is on a weak wicket in trying to criticise non-Congress agricultural policies.

The non-Congress governments, unfortunately, do not have a much better record. They were chary of tinkering with the agricultural policies and instruments, such as the Public Distribution System and the Food Corporation of India, put in place by Congress governments. The non-Congress governments have been guilty of complicity through sheer inertia.

(The author is Founder, Shetkari Sanghatana. He can be contacted at sharad@mah.nic.in)

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