Political Economy of Uncaring Understanding Farmer Suicides C Shambu Prasad
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esponding to a parliamentary question on farmer suicides recently, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar declared suicides had declined drastically. However, subsequent media reports suggested otherwise, pointing to newer forms of denial with state governments refusing to register suicides. The Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, which has been monitoring farmer suicides closely in the region, suggested that the figures for Vidarbha alone (512) were over four times more than those quoted by Pawar for Maharashtra in 2012. Behind the numbers, debate is a serious question and paradox. Why is it that India, which has arguably the largest number of farmers in the world, spends little time discussing its worst agrarian crisis? Why are farmer suicides not considered “newsworthy”? What makes us treat them as “distant strangers”? How do we find ourselves as academics, citizens, policymakers, agricultural researchers as part of this silence and “political economy of uncaring”? Shadow Spaces by social anthropologist A R Vasavi is not a study focused primarily on farmer suicides but a reflection on this political economy of uncaring, an attempt to see suicides as a window to understand conditions and trends in rural India. The book is a much-needed, even overdue, addition to the existing literature on agrarian studies and farmer distress in India. The book makes important departures from existing works in three ways. First, unlike most studies on farmer suicides that are state- or region-specific, Shadow Spaces offers a narrative that is pan-Indian and thus a frame that allows for greater explanatory power and insights on the ongoing agrarian crisis that actually extends beyond the “suicide hotspots”. Second, Vasavi argues for a shift in analysis beyond a purely economic or a Economic & Political Weekly
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book review Shadow Spaces: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India by A R Vasavi; Three Essays Collective, 2012; pp 229, Rs 350 (paperback).
primarily psychological argument and suggests that the suicides need to be situated within multiple features of the economy and society. She urges a closer examination of the risks and vulnerabilities of the farmer and a rethinking on the role of agency of the farming community. Should those farmers who have not committed suicides, especially in the eastern region be ignored under relief packages, even as suicides now extend to Orissa, Bundelkhand and other parts that seem free of the cotton-suicide syndrome, or should these regions be subject to a narrative of underdevelopment as they were originally ignored under the green revolution? Are these regions thus outside the web of risks that agriculturists face across India? How then can discussions on agency, adaptive capacity, resilience and knowledge and risks, normally associated with discussions on climate change policies, actually become integral to discussions on mainstream agriculture? Third, by opting to write for a wide and interested audience rather than a purely academic one, Vasavi underscores the need for broad-basing discussions that otherwise gets reduced to disciplinary silos. For researchers on agrarian studies there are newer frames that the book offers for enquiry beyond the economic such as ruralities, vulnerabilities and risks, as also the need to look at “agriculturists” rather than unhelpful categories that divided the community as “farmers” (producing for market) and “peasants” (subsistence). At the same time, Shadow Spaces also opens up vol xlviII no 3
possibilities of a joint enquiry that suggests academic works on suicides and agrarian distress are not seen separately from the pioneering works of journalists and activists. Drawing upon her rich social anthropologist tradition and her earlier work Harbingers of Rain, as well as her more recent writings on farm suicides, she suggests a closer look at the agricultural knowledge dissonance and increasing individualisation of the farming community that have been neglected in past studies. Emerging Structures Shadow Spaces begins with a succinct introduction of the series of essays through well-structured sets of questions and frames that delineate the chapters. In the first chapter on suicides as shadow spaces, Vasavi takes us through the suicides spread across diverse regions indicating the extent to which suicides occupy a “shadow space” in the narratives of the nation. These accounts, read together, indicate both the extent of deprivation and the continuance of fragmented official responses that have changed little over the years. The second chapter locates the suicide hotspots within the emerging structures of India’s ruralities going beyond either the village or agriculture as spaces. The third attempts to answer the question as to what are the key features of agriculture that have enhanced the risk load of agriculturists. In chapter four, Vasavi shows how the individualisation of agriculture and the social entrapment of marginal agriculturists have contributed to the loss of self of the agriculturists and their sense of agency in recent times. In chapter five she asks as to why have these conditions of distress not been adequately addressed by the state and why have agriculturists, despite the onset of intense forms of distress and suicides, not resorted to political and other forms of mobilisation? She concludes the set of essays by reflecting on the significance of the suicides wisely, not falling prey to providing blueprints or policy prescriptions but by reminding us that despite forecasts of imminent 27
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disappearance and death, the rural and the agricultural remain the bedrock of life in India that might require the sustenance of multiple forms of agriculture and even a “re-ruralising of the world”. How has the rural as a space been reconstituted in neo-liberal India and how have the suicides been a dampener on the Indian growth story, a drag on the economy poised to leapfrog, “a new blight” that threatened an emerging and shining India? In her study Vasavi extends human geographer Paul Cloke’s understanding of rurality as a frame of complex interweaving of power relations, social conventions, discursive practices and institutionalised forces. Focusing on rurality as a space, what she suggests is to enable an integrated perspective (on suicides) and to shift the focus from purely administrative or government definitions, which define rural by default or by what is not urban. Vasavi extends Kalyan Sanyal’s work on rethinking capitalist development, stating that the rural in India today is the intensification of the neo-liberal agenda that has led to the marking of the rural as an arena of new market opportunities, a space with new resources to be exploited. The rural is also the site of multiple programmes that seek to address the negative fallout of the neo-liberal economy. Vasavi identifies eight kinds of ruralities in India which relate strongly to the ideas on agro-ecology or agro-ecosystems but are rarely used in designing agricultural policies. She points to how the diversity and heterogeneity of agricultural forms have been subjected to the postcolonial state’s agenda of systematic objectification and normalisation in many ways more rigid and pervasive than the colonial objectification of India and its economy and culture. In this process of dominant economism, the productivity of agriculture has been privileged over all other aspects of agriculture and the rural social structure. This has transformed agriculture where norms of productivity prevail over ecological specificity, the individual farmer’s success over collective empowerment, and income growth over equitable distribution of resources. She highlights how in this process some significant changes in social structure in Economic & Political Weekly
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villages have occurred such as the increasing feminisation of agriculture and enhanced tenancy. The reproduction of caste as a structuring principle and institution has however continued unabated. A significant contribution of the book is to extend frames of rurality and discussions on the risk society and vulnerability that have been often discussed in academic contexts of post-industrial societies in the Indian context. Vasavi has done this in a lucid manner in Shadow Spaces that not only provides a better understanding of the complex phenomenon of suicides but also adds value to these very concepts from a distinctly Indian or south Asian perspective. There is also a sense of wanting to know more about the research dilemmas in exploring suicides that made her move from typical ethnographic research to other forms of research alluded to in the earlier chapters. One would have preferred more discussions on these ideas but recognise that the purpose of the book is for a mixed audience and not a purely academic one. Increased Risks Are there common features from the range of case studies across different states of farmer suicides? Vasavi points to an emerging picture of increased risks posed to the livelihoods and lives of agriculturists due to the impact of commercialised agriculture, based primarily on the green revolution model. The risks imprint agriculturists in multiple ways: ecological risks depletes local resources and defies ecological specificity; economic risks that encapsulate and enmesh agriculturists into external circuits and demands of capital and credit; and as personal risks, that become loaded as social and psychological burdens, and which constitute and entail for the marginal agriculturists the defining terms in which they must conduct agriculture and also their lives (pp 97-98).
Together, these risks make agriculture a gamble that affects agriculturists differently. According to Vasavi, the increasing erosion of the locale specificity of agriculture and agrarian cultures has led to agricultural knowledge dissonance. Agriculturists today are unable to draw on vol xlviII no 3
earlier forms of knowledge in cultivating the land or in choosing the appropriate combinations of land quality, climate and crops. Capital and specialised/high technology and its know-how have initiated an enhanced separation of natural resources from society. Local agricultural patterns and practices that drew from a shared repository of knowledge transmitted and reproduced through the social and cultural structures of agricultural transactions and practices are no more available in the new agricultural regimes. The green revolution model’s use of hybrid seeds and external inputs to the current use of genetically modified (GM) seeds induce an increasing dissonance between knowledge and know-how and has led to significant “deskilling” of agriculture as has been pointed out by Glenn Stone in his study on cotton in Warangal district. This deskilling, which has been accompanied by newer actors, input suppliers who double up as moneylenders, and extension agents with strong local presence, has in many cases exacerbated the risk of the cultivator. State support and stable markets that were enabling for a previous generation of cultivators are both unavailable and unpredictable for the new and marginal cultivators, intensifying pre-existing uncertainties. This decline in capability of agriculturists has not received adequate policy attention in the relief packages. Crop loss is not merely a source of economic distress but also a deep sense of erosion of one’s own self, leading to increasing individualisation. Coping mechanisms vary, with the upper castes often more effective in insulating themselves by
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investing in other occupations and transferring risks to tenant farmers. Newer entrants and tenant farmers are affected more as knowledge is often not shared by the upper castes. The individualisation has been compounded by social entrapment that has meant increased debts due to newer desires or the cultural load, apart from increased expenses on health and education. What most newspaper reports and many official reports have not recognised is that focusing on the individual alone (as weak, failing and inept) allows for escaping from larger responsibilities that call for looking at deeper and larger structural bases of the distress. Agrarian communities, however, recognise that suicides are caused by a combination of failing agriculture, the humiliation of loss, and debt, and the burden of multiple onerous responsibilities and demands that place the rural and the agriculturist at a disadvantage. Systemic issues such as increasing input costs and stagnant or incommensurate agricultural support prices, high presence of informal credit agencies, ecological stress, etc, do not get reflected in the relief and compensation packages. Policy Responses In the new imaginaries and expectations of the nation, agriculture is not the future; the rural and the agricultural are represented as problems existing in a time and space warp that is antithetical to the larger design and desire of a globalising India. Vasavi brings out the contrast by putting together two crises that occurred simultaneously in India in different pasts though. The alacrity with which the government deployed resources to rescue one IT company and its employees in urban India needs to be contrasted with partial and lackadaisical responses to the farmer suicide. She suggests that it is the rendering of the rural and the agricultural as an “anti-economy” that largely accounts for the relegation of the information of the suicides into a “shadow space”, which in turn legitimises the way in which the distress of the suicides and the problems themselves are sought to be ignored, or dealt with partial and ineffective measures by the government. Why has the distress that 30
has been ongoing for more than a decade (1997-2010) had no forms of large-scale protests, movements or rebellions? Vasavi does not answer this question in detail but points to the complexity of political conditions in the rural areas and the failure of agriculturists to mobilise themselves and engage in collective actions. Vasavi suggests policy responses in agriculture seem to follow three parallel tracks in recent times. The first track consists of a body of policies, missions, commission reports written by experts of different hues that have broadly pointed to possible ways of scaffolding agricultural growth. Quite independent of these is a process that involves policies, legislations and programmes that are formulated within closed doors and, like the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture or the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority Bill, have had very little debates and discussions or democratic scrutiny. To add to these are state-level initiatives on agriculture that largely comprise populist policies with little economic rationale or environmental safeguards. What emerges from all these is an overall response that mistrusts farmers and vests enormous faith in the new kids of administrative expertocracy to resolve problems. None of the reports of the National Commission on Farmers, Vasavi points out, have engaged with a critique of the green revolution model although the suicides and the extant forms of ecological, economic and social distress indicate these to be fallouts from the model. In her concluding essay, Vasavi raises questions about the significance of agrarian suicides. She argues that the predicament in rural India can no more read through the singular “Agrarian Question” that rests on an assumed teleology of an inevitable period of transition. Instead, this needs to be seen as reflecting and responding to multiple questions. She suggests that these questions can be linked to at least eight factors or conditions and relate to that of class relations, forms of wage labour, political mobilisation, the creation of a pool of reserve labour, food security, gender relations, ecological conditions and the question of knowledge forms. january 19, 2013
In an important discussion on agricultural pluralism, Shadow Spaces suggests that there is a need to recognise the links between an enabling pluralism with regionally-specific knowledge collectives that are eroded and fragmented by the growth of singular and dominant forms of culturalism. The promotion of corporate agribusiness interests has implications for the very foundational premises of India’s pluralism. Vasavi reminds us that Gandhi recognised the importance of decentralised, plural rural cultures even as he overlooked the role of rural communities in reproducing the hierarchical and iniquitous caste system. Asserting the importance of agriculture as a vocation, Gandhi believed it to be capable of being the seedbed of swaraj – the new ethically and morally grounded form of “self-rule” that would enable India to not only break away from colonialism but also generate a new civilisation. Conclusions What then might be the way for “selfrule” for agriculturists? The book does not offer suggestions but indicates that the continued reliance on experts of different hues in policies and the failure of agrarian movements could possibly lead to newer responses from both civil society and agriculturists. The significance of the Kisan Swaraj Yatra by a motley crowd of activists and their formulation of a Kisan Swaraj policy needs to be seen not in their effectiveness in shaping agricultural policy but by suggesting a shift from the “political economy of uncaring”. Vasavi mentions the yatra but the book is likely to draw attention to other renewals of these shadow spaces. This review ends with a few suggestions. The loss of meaning, confusion and
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disorientation among cultivators due to the continued failures of policies and responses are unlikely to change unless there is a paradigm shift in thinking that begins not just with trusting agriculturists but by recognising their knowledge and working towards those elements that enhance their capacities for collective action. As the spread of agro-ecological methods, such as nonpesticidal management and the system of rice intensification have shown that community-based extension systems have and can present themselves as credible alternatives but need public support that values the non-economic aspects of these interventions. Even as agriculture has changed significantly in
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the last 20 years, agricultural skills are not taught in schools or are part of any mainstream educational curriculum. Even the National Skill Development Corporation does not recognise the skilling needs of the agriculture sector. The agencies responsible for higher agricultural education have for far too long ignored the knowledge dissonance that can occur by ignoring rural sociology, which is seen as more a domain of agrarian studies. Thus, while Vasavi’s book would perhaps end up as recommended reading in the social sciences, the ideas and insights of the book require a more serious engagement from the agricultural research establishment. If there is
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one failing in the book, it is the relative lack of emphasis on the (re)production of knowledge and its paradigms and the greater silence and isolation of agricultural research centres and universities on the ongoing agrarian distress. This, however, is not the work of one individual. The book, it is hoped, will lead to greater interest by students, agriculturists, political movements, academics and civil society to work towards a programme that would seek to address a large and in many ways a very unique problem that India faces. C Shambu Prasad (
[email protected]) is with the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.
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