Response(s) to Globalization: The case of the KRRS and the Shetkari Sangathana
This article traces
the ideological structure operating behind the New Farmers’ Movements
(considering the Shetkari Sangathana and the KRSS within the scope of the
article) to demonstrate the similarities and divergences but also to argue how
their responses to globalization may themselves have been shaped by the
exigencies and conditions set by globalization.
Oomen(2010:34) divides the history of 20th
century India into three phases in terms of the nature of social movements that
occurred. The first is the colonial period (1900-47), the second phase,
1947-89, roughly coinciding with the time when nation-building was the focus
and the third phase (1990-) is referred to as the globalizing phase with the
liberalization f the Indian economy. In the third phase, we see the rising
prominence of the market, even vis-à-vis the state which gradually loses its
accountability. Within this phase, one can also see the rise of various
farmers’ movements that are a response to this. Although we can trace back its
history to the Vivasayigal Sangham of Tamil Nadu in the 1970s, the New Farmers’
movement denotes the emergence of the Shetkari Sanghatana, in Maharashtra, led
by Sharad Joshi, the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) in Western Uttar Pradesh, led
by Mahendra Singh Tikait and the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha in Karnataka,
led by Prof. Nanjundaswamy in the late 1970s (Dhanagare in ibid.: 109).
However, Oomen (ibid.:38) is reluctant to call these as part of the New Social
Movements (NSM) rising in the West at around the same time, because these were
characterised by mixed feelings, responses and demands and did not crystallize
into sustained movements. The aim of this article is precisely to trace the
ideological structure operating behind these multifarious movements (of course,
evaluating only the Shetkari Sangathana and the KRSS within the scope of the
article) to demonstrate their similarities and divergences and to argue how
their responses to globalization may themselves have been shaped by the
conditions set by globalization.
A brief clarification is required before proceeding any
further. Oomen (ibid.:34) asks us to look for three factors in the analysis of
any social movement: a) Its core institutional order; b) The principal enemy as
perceived by the deprived; c) The primary goal pursued by the society. The
implication of ideology as the motive force is within all of the three factors,
since that would determine the institutional order, how one perceives one’s
enemy and the primary goal. Yet it does not mean that one should contend
oneself with analysing the political inclinations of leaders participating in
the movements, since, for one thing, it is misleading, and secondly, alliances
and fissures are often matters at the tertiary level of leaders. Both the
Shetkari Sangathana (henceforth SS) and the KRSS initially called themselves
non-political alliances, standing for the farmers’ interest, whereas, later
developments show fissures within the groups, with the leaders eventually
standing as MPs and often changing their allegiances. Babagouda Patil, former
leader of the KRSS is known for his changing allegiance between the BJP, SP,
Congress and Janata Dal, and after finally rejoining BJP, is critical of both
BJP and the Congress[1].
We shall specifically focus on the nature of agitations to
reach at their inspiration.
Gandhian philosophy
and its two strands
We know how Gandhian philosophy of swaraj had influenced the course of our nationalist movement. His
idea of village republic, self-dependence and call to revert back to the past
foils him from other thinkers like Nehru who was pro-socialist and believed in
technological modernity, or Ambedkar, who argued for democratic ideals and did
not necessarily believe in a rosy picture of India’s past (Jodhka, 2002). In
his book, Listening to the Loom (2012:284),
the famous culture critic, D.R. Nagaraj, points out to the existence of three
identity narratives to globalization― desire-based, hunger-based and
meaning-based. The desire-based narrative seeks to find a niche within globalization
and resists it because it is not offered one. The hunger-based narrative is a
creation of globalization through its own mode of production. Meaning-based
narrative pertains to larger philosophical discussions about one’s being. Now
there can be mix and match between these three, such as the desire-based and
meaning-based giving rise to some form of religious fundamentalism. Nagaraj
moves on to discuss the political activity of the Sangh parivar and juxtaposes
it against that of the KRSS. His insight leads him to say that both have their
roots in Gandhian philosophy and yet they have significant points of
divergence. How has that been possible? The reiteration of the swadesh is at once invocation of the
Gandhian injunction to use only swadeshi goods and at the same time an attempt
to sell it as an attractive idea amidst global competition. The right wing
ideology endorses the patterns of consumption, only it wants substitutes for
multinational products, Vajradanti for Colgate.
In short, it wants to be part of the global. On the other hand, Prof.
Nanjundaswamy led the farmers of KRSS to an attack on a sublet of the Kentucky
Fried Chicken in Bengalore, that too on 31st March, 1996, the 48th
anniversary of Gandhi’s martyrdom. He shared the Gandhian distaste for modern
technology and emulated his Salt march, since he was symbolically attacking the
globalizing forces. In fact he is known to have said in his speech at the World
Economic Summit in Cologne in 1999: “We do not want Western money, technologies,
or ‘experts’ to impose their development model on us.” He wanted “a world where
local people are in control of their local economy, where centralized political
and economic powers disappear. . . .”(cited in Herring, 2005). The
Sangh-swadeshi response is desire-based, whereas that of the KRSS is
hunger-based. When we consider the Shetkari Sangathana’s response against the
KRSS’s, we shall see how their focus remaining the same (the farmer’s
interests) they can still be at loggerheads.
Around the Seed debate
Sharad Joshi, leader of the Shetkari Sangathana, was very
clear about his stance. He was for the removal of restrictions on the sale of
farm produce, the abolition of farmer debts, and in favour of the Dunkel-GATT
prescriptions for agriculture. He harped on the famous slogan of ‘India vs.
Bharat’, which directed attention towards the uneven development of urban
centres and rural areas of India. He argued that liberalization would boost the
economy of India, making it self-sufficient (in a Gandhian tone of swaraj) and no more reliant on imports.
It was the new economic reforms of 1990 that sharpened the differences between
the SS, KRSS and others. The differences are clearest in the case of the seed
debate. On 9th August, 1998, a Monsanto Quit India campaign was
launched in response to the purchase of MAHYCO, the then largest seed producing
company in India, by Monsanto, following which on 16th November,
there were trials of the new Bt Cotton carried out without the regional
government’s or community’s consent. After the declaration of the trials
publicly on 24th November, members of the KRSS and the BJP’s Kisan
Morcha burnt the crops of Monsanto’s cotton trials. The campaign cleared its
position thus. It saw the genetically modified seeds as a patent on life, which
farmers could not renew, but more importantly, it saw the tests as another form
of colonization, using Indian soil for experiments, and feared the mixing of
foreign impurities with the Indian breed. The campaign had the slogans, ‘Stop
Genetic Engineering’, ‘No patents on life’, ‘Cremate Monsanto’, ‘Bury the WTO’.
The KRSS threatened to present litigation against Monsanto. The issue gained
spotlight with media persons and activists pouring in different views. This is
how Gail Omvedt expressed her views in the
Hindu dated November 09,
2001:
“The spectre of farmers facing Government troops burning their crops is
only the latest illustration of the fact that Indian agricultural policy is too
often driven by the ideas and illusions of small groups of people who depict
farmers as subsistence producers, as clinging to tradition, as ignorant and
needing protection from rapacious multinational companies. This section of
pseudo-Gandhians has been for a long time spreading fear about the impact of
new technologies, especially biotechnologies and genetic technologies...for
the romantics, opponents of ``big dams'' and biotechnology, the Green
Revolution is only a symbol of unsustainability. Few of them are ready to admit
that farming needs water, that in most of the country's dry areas even the best
``local rainwater harvesting'' is insufficient, that some external water
provided by irrigation projects is necessary. Just as ``big dams'' are opposed,
so biotechnology is seen as simply a conspiracy of multinationals out to make
farmers dependent.”
In the Hindu dated
November 07, 2001, Sharad Joshi calls the call for seed burning jhoothistan, comparing it to the
hyperbolic claims of Pakistan in a similar radio broadcast. He argues that
Bt-cotton crops fare better than non-Bt crops because they are resistant to
bollworms. He further adds, “Farmers were aghast to find that their own government was
ordering the police and other agencies to carry out `search and destroy'
operations against Bt cotton plots. They wondered why the government showed
this enthusiasm for destroying their bountiful crop... All the concerned
villages are getting prepared. The job of protecting the crop is given to the
womenfolk of the village, who will be symbolically strengthened by women
volunteers from Maharashtra and Punjab... The Centre has opened its Jhootistan
channel. On Thursday evening, Doordarshan showed clippings of people —
supposedly Gujarat farmers — voluntarily uprooting the Bt cotton plants. It was
obvious even to the unknowledgeable that the people in the clippings were not
farmers.”
The above is not without some truth. After 2002, farmers refused to
accept compensation from KRSS, and some even called in the police (Scones,
2008). Due to pest attack, cotton crops had repeatedly failed. In 1998,
over 500 cotton farmers took their own lives in Warangal district of Andhra
Pradesh (Stone, 2012), but the suicides have continued. According to a recent
report[2],
about 30,000 farmers in Maharashtra felt cheated by the government’s Mahabeej
corporation because compared to the seeds purchased from private firms, the
state soybean seeds did not sprout. Sharad Joshi enthusiastically counters
anti-Dunkel propaganda, "What's wrong with Dunkel? I prefer to pay royalty for good
quality seeds than pick up bad subsidised ones[3]."
It is clear that Shetkari Sangathana’s narrative is that of
the desire-based, since it clearly wants farmers’ produce to compete in the
international market. However, things are much more complicated than they seem.
The paradox of
globalization
To say that KRSS’s narrative is hunger-based and that of SS
is desire-based is like painting in black and white. As we move towards the
latter half of 90s, we already see fissures in the associations, Sharad Joshi
sets up his political party- the Swatantra Bharat Party in 1995, Anil Gote
leaves the group and joins the Samajwadi Janata Party, and recently he has been
included in the BJP, Raju Shetty starts his own Swabhimani Shetkari Sangathan
in 2004, Nanjundaswamy’s falling health
is followed by the decline of the KRSS movement in 2002, there is gradual
institutionalization meaning that there is a bureaucratic structure in place
and leaders have started forging alliances with parties. According to a recent
report by the Ministry of Agriculture, number of farmer suicides in the last
three years stands at 3313. The
five States — Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala —
account for 3301 of them[4].
Clearly, the New Farmers’ movements have failed.
D. R. Nagaraj (2012:306) says that globalization creates
conditions where there remains no more a difference between the global and the
local. In such a state of affairs, everyday objects lose their sacred aura;
people cannot identify themselves with products that are continuously changing.
The local item cannot replicate itself. Hence, the attack on the KFC joint by
KRSS did not give rise to any mass support countrywide, as the case of salt
satyagraha did for Gandhi. On the other hand, it is not as if the SS did not
take any step for alternate methods of farming and limited itself to simply
agitations over onion prices. It took over constructive work of training
farmers in organic farming, with locally-developed seeds, bringing out farming
magazines like Bali Raja, and also
showed resentment towards the use of fertilizers and pesticides (Omvedt, 1991).
Also, just like the KRSS, it adopts non-violent means of agitation, such as
according to a news report[5] in
August, 2014, the SS staged a rail blockade at Lasalgaon railway station,
demanding the lifting of ban on onion export.
However, Joshi’s free-market approach has problems of its
own. He glossed over the fact that there vast inequalities between the
countries (consider the ratio between the population and total food production)
and hence, free trade would not mean trade between equal partners (Dhanagare in
Oomen, 2012:116). A pure free market is a myth and there is always state
intervention. Objectivist as it may sound, it is precisely indirect subsidies
like direct payment to farmers, environmental subsidies and subsidies for
backward regions that the developed nations will continue to provide their farmers
and thereby ensure a hold on the market, despite the stipulations of the GATT
for countries to reduce subsidy where the aggregate support to agriculture is
above 10 per cent. The liberalization policies have an inherent nature of
violence that seeks to weaken the state power. True that the government had put
ban on exports or imposed license restrictions, but to put the rein of the
economy in the hands of market forces would only prove to be
counter-productive, since it forgets to make the state accountable and instead
of asking it to reform its policies, simply dismisses it from such functions
(Omvedt, 1991). Biotechnology institutions are run not by public funds, but by
multinational corporations, and the push for patents would mean farmers would have
to buy seeds at a high price. On the other end, the slogan to ensure the
farmers’ intellectual property rights undoes its own purpose. In a response to
an article that called such a move progressive, Shalini Bhutani (2015) writes:
“This Indian version (i.e. the Protection of Plant Varieties
and Farmers’ Rights (PPV&FR) Act, 2001) of the plant variety protection
(PVP) model is considered by some as more farmer-friendly, since it regards
farmers as breeders unlike its European counterpart. But it grants IP
(intellectual property) on seed nonetheless and in doing so privatises it.”
We see that the leaders of these movements have all the
while been simply self-proclaimed intellectuals claiming to represent the
farmers. An article spoke of Joshi in a derisive tone:
“Joshi, 58, wears jeans, speaks fluent English, and last held a job in
the UN Postal Union at Berne in Switzerland. But that was in the '70s. Since
then, he's been known largely as a leader of farmers in Maharashtra, organising
agitations that were sometimes called off as dramatically as they were
announced... He can eat onion and roti, speak rustic Marathi with his
supporters and between bites, engage urbane observers on his view of rural
India[6].”
Nanjundaswamy’s
International Caravan was in fact not joined by any victimised farmer.
Activists have always spoken at a level of condescension, and the intent to
preserve the local has in itself become a global product, of selling ideas
about organic farming, ways to agitate against Monsanto, and in trying to find
a place within such similar global narratives. There is, therefore, no
necessity in keeping a conceptual separation between hunger-based and
desire-based narratives. The conditions of globalization are such that any
resistance against it becomes ultimately a part and parcel of it. Figuratively
speaking, there is no hunger if hunger is not recognized. In vain, the New
Farmers’ Movements tried to draw from Gandhi’s successful ways of agitation to
attack the power of globalization. It is only another good case to assert the
truthfulness of Marx’s statement in the Eighteenth
Brumaire that history repeats twice, the first time as tragedy, the second
time as farce.
Conclusion
The New Farmers’ movements rose in response to new
developments occurring in global politics during the period of their rise, and
they are significantly different from earlier peasant movements in that their
focus group remaining the same, they showed mixed responses to globalization.
While the KRSS resisted it with a demonstration of neophobia reminiscent of
Gandhi, the Shetkari Sangathana welcomed the GATT proposals, stressing on
freedom from state impediments, self-sufficiency and development through competition
in a free market. Despite their differences, both these responses have their
resonance in the Gandhian usage of the terms swadeshi and swaraj. At
the same time, both the approaches have failed to fulfil their cause, because
the conditions set by globalization direct their attacks onto themselves. The
call for competition in the free market is only a ruse to gain monopoly access
to the markets of the developing nations. The KRSS failed to mobilize mass
support for its symbolic attacks, because the symbols were already globalized
with which the local could not connect to. Ultimately, its own assertion in the
globe has acquired a quality that puts it on the same shelf with other global
products. In short, the New Farmers’ Movements have failed in emulating the
Gandhian satyagraha or his philosophy.
References
Bhutani S. (2015). Seed Sovereignty. Economic and Political
Weekly, May 23, 2015 Vol. 1 No. 21 pp.4
D.R.Nagaraj (2012). Listening to the Loom: Essays on
Literature, Politics and Violence. Orient Blackswan: New Delhi.
Herring, Ronald J. (2005). Miracle Seeds, Suicide Seeds, and
the Poor GMOs, NGOs, Farmers, and the State. (in Social Movements in India:
Poverty, Power and Politics, Ray and Katzenstein ed.). Oxford University Press:
New Delhi.
Jodhka, S. ed. (2002). Nation and Village.
Economic and Political Weekly. Vol - XXXVII No. 32. August 10, 2002.
Omvedt G. (1991). Shetkari Sanghatana's New Direction.
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 40 (Oct. 5, 1991), pp. 2287,
2289-2291
Oomen, T.K. (2010). Social Movements I: Issues of Identity.
Oxford University Press: USA.
Scoones I. (2008). Mobilizing Against GM Crops in India,
South Africa and Brazil. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 8 Nos. 2 and 3, April
and July 2008, pp. 315–344.
Stone, Glen D. (2002). Biotechnology and Suicide in India.
Ver 1.4, 12 July 2002 (see Anthropology News, Vol 43 No. 5, May 2002)
[1]
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/babagouda-patils-curious-moves/article7598402.ece
[2]
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/seeds-of-failure-33851
[3]
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/shetkari-sanghatana-leader-sharad-joshi-for-converting-peasants-into-entrepreneurs/1/292630.html
[4]
http://www.thehindu.com/data/over-3000-farmers-committed-suicide-in-the-last-3-years/article7130686.ece
[5]
http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/farmers-led-by-shetkari-sanghatana-stop-train-at-lasalgaon-114081401224_1.html
[6] http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/shetkari-sanghatana-leader-sharad-joshi-for-converting-peasants-into-entrepreneurs/1/292630.html
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