The statistics are chilling. Over a span of 12 years – from 1997 to 2008 – almost two lakh farmers in India committed suicide. Equally well documented are the links between these deaths and the implementation of neoliberal policies in agriculture (see article by K Nagaraj in this issue). The steady move towards corporatisation of agriculture, which began with the Green Revolution of the 1960s, gained further impetus after 1991, as the nostrum of free trade took hold of agricultural policy, leaving farmers with hugely increased input costs even as the prices available for farm produce dropped sharply. Caught in a debt trap and in danger of losing their land – their only form of security – many small-scale farmers were in such despair that they committed suicide, the only way they could think of to escape the situation.
The indifference of the mainstream media was almost as scandalous as the callous policy measures that had led to the suicides. For many years the deaths went unreported and unremarked upon, despite the simultaneous media explosion that was taking place in India. As P Sainath, the first journalist to extensively cover the issue, has pointed out, even today none of the major national dailies has a senior journalist who exclusively covers rural India, and the amount of space devoted to rural affairs remains negligible. No wonder the suicides went initially unreported. However, to blame the media alone would be unfair; contributing to this neglect was the indifference of the urban elites and India's middle classes generally to rural India and the problems of the rural poor.
The media did eventually take notice in 2006, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finally visited Vidarbha, in Maharashtra, which had the highest number of farmer suicides in the country. There, he announced a package of INR 110 billion for the area, as well as grants of INR 100,000 to the families of farmers who had committed suicide. But subsequent figures show that these measures have had little impact, with deaths continuing to mount. Media interest in the issue rose again in 2008 when Rahul Gandhi, in Parliament, mentioned Kalawati Bandurkar, whose husband Parshuram had committed suicide three years earlier, leaving her to bring up their seven daughters and two sons. Somewhat far-fetchedly, Gandhi invoked Kalawati's name during the debate on India's nuclear deal with the US, saying that signing the agreement would ameliorate the plight of people like her. For a week or two thereafter, Kalawati received saturation coverage, but was quickly forgotten again, as was the matter of farmer suicides generally and the broader agricultural crisis itself.
Satire and realism