Skip to main content

Farmers and Criminals

O P Dhankar [Courtesy The Hindu]
Farmers are criminals and cowards, according to the BJP.  The party’s agricultural minister in Haryana, Mr O P Dhankar, explained the logic.  “Committing suicide is a crime, according to Indian law.  Any person who commits suicide escapes from his responsibilities and leaves the burden on his wife and innocent children and such people are cowards.”  Mr Dhankar was the former head of the BJP’s Kisan Cell.

It is easy to dismiss Mr Dhankar’s view as a personal opinion.  Rahul Gandhi, who seems to have found some enlightenment after his long contemplation abroad, has started questioning the BJP’s anti-farmer policies eloquently if not effectively enough.  His lack of effectiveness stems from his lack of vision.  It is not enough to question a system; one has to suggest an alternative one.  Mr Gandhi is yet to rise to the stature of a leader with any practical vision in spite of rubbing shoulders with the aam aadmi for quite some time.

Laptops for Haryana MLAs
Courtesy The Indian Express
Coming back to the BJP, look at what the party did in Haryana recently.  While the state did nothing to alleviate the misery of the farmers, it has declared a lot of benefits to the MLAs.  Every MLA is being given a free laptop.  Every MLA can claim a car loan amounting to Rs 20 lakh.  The housing loan for every MLA is increased to Rs 60 lakh.  All the 90 MLAs of the state have already received their free laptops.  All of them are quite sure to make ‘proper’ use of the car loans and housing loans.  And the poor farmers in the state will be labelled “criminals” and “cowards” because they are unable to make both ends meet.

Mr Dhankar did not understand the gravity of his statement or the situation in his state.  He stuck to what he said and asserted that some “drama” like suicide won’t make him change his statement.  Our tragedy as a nation today is the abundance of leaders like Mr Dhankar who lack understanding and sensitivity.  Lack of intelligence is not a crime.  But trying to lead a whole people without the ability to understand their problems and needs can be a crime. 

Who are the real criminals?  Our political leaders or the hapless farmers?


Comments

  1. While i agree to some of your arguments,Indian media blows things out of proportion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, these are true thoughts... On one side you call them cowards, on the other side you make your life full of leisure.. The amount of farmer deaths in the past decade can put us to shame in front of the entire world...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Our politicians are terribly insensitive. Such insensitivity is worse than corruption.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...