[Assertions that the suicide rate
among the country’s agricultural workers is nearly three times the national
average are widely believed in India ,
but precise figures are difficult to come by. (Health workers, social
scientists and statisticians point out that the issue is extremely complex.)
The World Health Organization estimates that roughly 170,000 Indians in all
walks of life commit suicide every year; the Indian government put the figure
at about 135,000 in 2010. That is misleading, not least because suicide is a
crime in India ,
and as such falls under the purview of the National Crime Records Bureau. The
social stigma it brings, and the risk that it may mean a loss of government
compensation, feeds a family’s reluctance to report such deaths. Moreover, many
suicides occur among agricultural workers who are not officially categorized as
farmers.]
By Sonora
 |
Credit Sébastien Thibault
|
As politicians scramble for India ’s
815 million votes in the most expensive and closely contested general election
in the nation’s history, an unexpected protest is rumbling from what was once
one of the country’s most placid voter blocs: its farmers.
The protest is inflamed by rising
attention to the shocking suicide rate on India ’s
hardscrabble farms. Since 1995, more than 290,000 farmers have killed
themselves. Though that figure, compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau,
is sketchy at best, perceptions are what counts in politics. And that
perception, along with the reality that most of these suicides are borne of
desperation wrought by decades of official corruption, crushing debt and cruel
neglect, is being coupled with a revolutionary change in election law. For the
first time, angry farmers can reject all the politicians clamoring for the vote
and mark their ballots “None of the Above.”
Kishor Tiwari, the grandson of a
farm security guard in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra
state, is one of many advocates who say the so-called NOTA ruling will give
people new political clout. His organization, the Vidarbha People’s Protest
Forum, monitors suicides and fights for financial support for the families of
the dead. He says government aid to beleaguered farmers is always promised but
is often stolen, or simply not delivered. But now voters will no longer have to
make a choice between bad or worse, or lose their voice by staying at home.
Politicians, he says, “think we respond to campaigning. No. We respond to
action.”
He says the high suicide rate is
the direct product of deep poverty aggravated by the government’s risky
economic policies and bureaucratic apathy. Moreover, he thinks such deaths are
purposely underreported.
Assertions that the suicide rate
among the country’s agricultural workers is nearly three times the national
average are widely believed in India ,
but precise figures are difficult to come by. (Health workers, social
scientists and statisticians point out that the issue is extremely complex.)
The World Health Organization estimates that roughly 170,000 Indians in all
walks of life commit suicide every year; the Indian government put the figure
at about 135,000 in 2010. That is misleading, not least because suicide is a
crime in India ,
and as such falls under the purview of the National Crime Records Bureau. The
social stigma it brings, and the risk that it may mean a loss of government
compensation, feeds a family’s reluctance to report such deaths. Moreover, many
suicides occur among agricultural workers who are not officially categorized as
farmers.
“There is likely to be a serious
underestimation of suicides,” Professor K. Nagaraj, an economist at the Asian
College
Other studies raise more
ambiguity. “Suicide Mortality in India ,”
a report by eight Indian doctors and public health professionals published in
the British medical journal Lancet in 2012, estimates that there were 187,000
such deaths in India
in 2010: 115,000 men and 72,000 women. But the authors added, “Although most
suicide deaths occur in rural areas, our findings do not suggest that suicide
is any more prevalent in agricultural workers (including farmers) than it is in
any other profession.”
Whether or not perception exceeds
reality, there is no denying that India ’s
farmers have taken a battering in recent years. The global competition that
came with the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 has cut into
earnings. Costs soared when genetically modified seeds produced by foreign
agricultural-products companies flooded Indian markets in the late 1990s. Most
traditional farmers are now forced to borrow, often from private moneylenders
at exorbitant interest rates.
Though it’s little wonder that
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Indian National Congress has lost ground among
farmers, other candidates are doing no better. Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya
Janata Party swooped into Vidarbha last month with a promise to declare the
recent weather-ravaged farm conditions a “national calamity.” Another of the
main prime ministerial candidates — Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party —
has also made the kind of last-minute campaign promises that farmers have heard
before.
Faced with such an unpopular
roster, thousands of farmers and their families gathered on March 15 at
Bhimkund village in Vidarbha, where a farmer named Kiran Kolvate led the
protest. “All political parties across the spectrum have totally ignored the
plight of half a million farmers,” she declared, urging the crowd to vote “None
of the Above.”
That rallying cry is spreading.
On April 7, the day India began five weeks of voting, people from 25 farming
villages in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh declared that they too would
mark their ballots NOTA. On April 11, the Indian International Youth
Organization placed an advertisement on YouTube in which a young woman responds
to her grandmother’s accusations of political apathy by saying she plans to
press NOTA, and a voiceover declares that a protest vote sends a strong
message, while refusing to vote solves nothing.
In choosing “None of the Above,”
many farmers are demanding that India ’s
leaders take action to end the misery undermining one of the key sectors of the
economy. They can do this by making good on the unfulfilled promises of the
past two decades: debt relief, fair market prices, better infrastructure,
reasonable subsidies and aid for destitute families. The struggle to bring
prosperity to India ’s
farmers is far from over. But those who are tempted to give in to despair would
be wise to remember the words of one of their own, the son of a farmer from a
village in Tamil Nadu who became the first in his family to graduate from
university and become a lawyer.
In handing down the Supreme Court
ruling last September that put NOTA on the ballot, that lawyer, now India ’s
chief justice, P. Sathasivam, wrote: “Gradually, there will be a systemic
change and the [political] parties will be forced to accept the will of the
people and field candidates who are known for their integrity.”
Sonora Jha is the author of
“Foreign,” a novel about Indian farmers’ suicides. She teaches journalism at Seattle
University