Abstract
Autopsy of a Farmers’ Movement
Populism and Power brings together the author’s work over the last 40 years on farmers’ movements in Maharashtra. The book draws upon his long association with the Shetkari Sangathana (SS) and its charismatic leader, Sharad Joshi, and reflects upon the rise and demise of the movement, including its class politics, its short-lived but wildly meandering brush with politics, its focus on women’s issues and its response to the WTO and GATT among others. Beginning with an extensive literature review of the work on peasant movements in colonial and post-colonial India and a critique of the Marxist, Subaltern and Chayanovian frameworks used to understand them, the book takes us through the journey of the SS after it was formed in 1978. The book argues that the SS became a tour de force to reckon with due to its ability to bring together farmers from various class categories including women, and successfully hold them together under an overarching ideology of victimisation by the state and urban interests—captured in the slogan ‘Bharat vs India’.
All across India, sections of farmers have clamoured for remunerative prices and continued input subsidies ever since these movements began in the post-Green Revolution phase of the late 1970s and 1980s. The recent farmer uprising in 2017 has seen similar demands for loan waivers and higher minimum support prices (MSPs). These populist demands have often been derided, and farmers’ movements have been dismissed by some critics as anti-democratic, elite farmer agitations calling for continued state pampering, by others as harking back to a traditional, hierarchical agrarian order and by yet others as the outburst of the ‘irrational peasant’. Disagreeing with such an assessment, Dhanagare argues that the demand for remunerative prices rested on a ‘distinctively sophisticated, theoretically well-grounded ideological formation’ (p. 90) articulated by Sharad Joshi, drawing upon economic ideas such as terms of trade, urban bias and the role of agriculture in development. Joshi’s charismatic personality and oratory ‘convinced the masses of farmers to act collectively’ (p. 90) in order that they could compete in domestic and international markets, and to ‘ensure that capital formation and accumulation could take place in rural areas, and modernity—both in terms of adoption of new farm technology and new lifestyle—as well as profit-oriented farming, could take roots in the countryside’ (p. 30). The book challenges the romanticised notion of the subsistence peasant and argues that small and marginal farmers were also growing for the market, and would therefore benefit from remunerative prices.
‘Bharat vs India’ became the key ideological framing through which class differences were overcome and ‘rich, middle, poor and marginalized farmers [came together] on a single platform’ (p. 31). Maratha farmers, who played an important role in the movement in western Maharashtra, overcame class divisions amongst themselves and allied with other caste groups in the movement. The book surmises that rich farmers had a hegemonic presence in the movement without any domination, but that eventually as they benefitted more from greater state support, the success of the movement might result in greater class polarisation (pp. 118–20, 236).
The book also argues that unlike some other populist movements of the past, these movements were not challenging the authority of the state per se but rather arguing for distributive justice. With the increase in agricultural productivity due to the Green Revolution, farmers found agricultural profitability declining. With rising input costs and prices controlled by the government, farmers were in a squeeze. With adverse terms of trade, there would be nothing but continued debt.
But while both the farmers’ movements and the analysis in the book focus upon the issue of prices, two of the underlying elements of the story are taken as a given—one, the reasons for the rise in input costs and two, the reason why terms of trade came to matter so much. To take them into account would require paying attention to non-social elements of the agrarian system—the farm, pests, water, soil, chemicals, machines and seeds, and the monoculture treadmill connecting them. Between the rising cost of pest control and water extraction every season, and the rising vulnerability of the output due to growing soil degradation and other environmental factors, farmers undoubtedly face declining yields. Buying newer seed varieties helps tide over for a few years before they need to be replaced again—the treadmill turns faster and faster each year forcing farmers to incur more and more debt. In such a scenario, remunerative prices are always going to be about playing catch-up. With the state under financial strain and post-liberalisation demands under the terms of GATT and WTO, it was no wonder that things gave way during the 1990s, and protests soon turned into suicides.
At the root of this is an even more innocuous shift that has been cloaked under the garb of modernisation and development—the growing redundancy of agriculture as a relevant sector of the economy. Over the last 120 years, industrial products have replaced agricultural commodities not only for urban consumption but also in the agricultural production system. All modern inputs into agriculture are sourced from industry—this dependence is what makes terms of trade crucial. But given the working of the monoculture treadmill, this dependence is also the road to exploitation and demise. This is also one of the fundamental contradictions being faced by the Jats, Marathas and Patels who have been recently agitating for caste-based quotas in jobs; they have been the vanguard of modernising farmers. Unfortunately, there is no future on the so-called modern ‘capitalist’ farm.
Returning to the book, the chapter on the women’s movement (‘Mahila Aghadi’) shows that while Sharad Joshi and a group of women activists from the SS initially articulated a very progressive agenda for women’s empowerment, including by overriding the ‘Bharat vs India’ dichotomy (claiming that rural and urban women alike are exploited), it did not translate into sustained activism on the ground due to political exigencies. Another chapter outlines the flip-flop political participation of Sharad Joshi and concludes by arguing that he ‘sacrific[ed] the farmers’ movement at the altar of his ambition for political power and position’ (p. 249), leading to the decline of the Sangathana in the 1990s. One may argue that the failure lay not just in dabbling inconsistently with party politics but also with the expectation that agrarian capitalism would lead farmers on the road to prosperity.
On a final note, I wish the book had an Introduction where the larger argument that emerges from the research was outlined and a future direction for research on farmers’ movements was given. As it stands, the book is an amalgam of different essays that have been revised from their earlier publication but do not necessarily speak to each other in ways that they could. I recommend the book to scholars of agrarian studies, political science, sociology and agrarian history, and to policymakers interested in finding out where our farmer leaders have gone.