Tamil Nadu’s season of discontent

Farmers’ deaths have been reported from the drought-hit Cauvery delta. Loan waivers, soft loans and compensation for ‘proven’ suicides are insufficient as state response

back into the debt cycle — as a labouring woman put it, it would appear that one earns only to service a debt.

For its part, the state government appears content to follow a well-trodden path, announcing loan waivers, soft loan options, and compensation in case of “proven” suicides. It does not appear to have a sense that what we have here is a crisis, one that has been in the making for decades. Yet, the government is not averse to systemic interventions — the World Bank has financed ambitious irrigation projects in the state. Also, from time to time, the government has declared its intent to convert waste land into cultivable land and uphold the ecological health of watershed areas.

Not only do these projects seldom dovetail into one another, they also remain opaque bureaucratic exercises — and do not bring about imagined and promised structural changes. To date, it is not clear what World Bank projects in the state have substantially achieved, given that water woes haunt all manner of farming operations. Neither do we have a shining record of reclaiming waste lands on such a scale that this offers an alternative to existing modes of extractive farming. Project completion reports routinely insist that objectives have been met, but perhapsonlyanindependentsocialauditwill allow us to draw a fair balance sheet. Meanwhile, farming continues as it has for the past four decades: High input costs, low procurement prices and a market that is not friendly to the small and marginal farmer.

Farming is not a matter of public concern in the state, and the farmer, unless he is the victim of river sharing crises, occasioned by Kerala or Karnataka, is seldom present to the public imagination. “Alternative” voices that resound on this subject ignore the systemic and human aspects of the agrarian question and instead extol the virtues of organic farming and the need for us to shift to more sustainable ways of being, eating and cultivating. Desirable as this seems, it is a “technical” response to a problem that is the outcome of agrarian inequality, caste-class C R Sasikumar

tensions and top-down policy making, determined by World Bank imperatives. Hardly debated except in fringe political circles, the agrarian problem remains one that only farmers, their unions and unions of agricultural labourers are concerned about.

The agrarian question has had very little political traction in the state because it has been trumped by heady promises of governance — especially from the late 1970s, when M.G. Ramachandran converted government into his personal fief, governance waiting on personal whim. Planning and policy thereafter were conceivable only within the limits of an elaborate populism. Thus, the culture of handing out largesse has substituted every other form of state action with respect to poverty, employment and income generation; corruption and collusion with undesirable elements in trade, manufacturing and the service sectors drive growth and development.

Received wisdom is pretty clear as to how all this unfolds. As a farmers’ union spokesperson put it, solutions offered by the government help extend the heavy arm of the state and its official machinery into the hinterland, and provide opportune moments to the political and bureaucratic class to make money. Even radical protest has to content itself with salvaging what is possible out of government projects — the government, it appears, is beyond repair.

The season of death and discontent will no doubt pass on — and, in all likelihood, be forgotten. For Tamil public culture, when not in thrall to the power of the spectacle, has recourse to either tendentious protest rhetoric or clever humour. Neither makes for a sustained politics of creative protest — but they enable political revelry, of one kind or another.

Meanwhile, shame passes us by.

Prema Revathi writes in Tamil and English and runs a school for children from denotified communities in the Cauvery delta; Senthil Babu is a historian; Geetha is a social historian and translator