Issue 61 Vol III, April 15, 2008

A N A L Y S I S

A Catastrophe Looms Large
Gobind Thukral

EVERYONE from experts to ordinary farmers agree that there is a serious agrarian crisis in India. It is stated from housetops. It is loud and clear as white as day. Our prime minister admits that there is some serious trouble with agriculture. It is not providing us enough of food and other farm products, although 65 per cent of the people are engaged in over 6 lakh villages. It is stagnating and the Green Revolution has reached its plateau. The people in farming continue to be mostly poor and deprived. For most farmers, it is not profitable at all. It rather brings misery. Suicides are becoming too common. Majority of the peasants and farm workers do not earn even Rs100 a day. 30 crore people live on one meal a day in a country that boasts of 9 per cent annual rate of growth. The neglect does not end here. In matter of infra structure: roads, schools, dispensaries, electricity and communication, they get a paltry share from the national kitty.

We have had commissions and committees to examine the misery. Industry and trade associations have also produced their own assessment and offered a plethora of suggestions including national and multinational corporations can uplift the small and the medium farmers and earn profits. We have voluminous reports to suggest what to implement and what not. Government has promised to bail out the farmers by writing off cooperative and bank loans of medium and small farmers to the tune of Rs 60,000 crore and plans to spend to Rs 18,000 crore to guarantee some minimum employment. Tragically all this would have marginal impact on the fate of farmers and workers.

What exactly is the crisis? The country needs food grains, pulses, vegetables, fruit, milk, oilseeds and host of other eatables to survive. It needs cotton for textile mills and sugarcane for the sugar factories and it needs tea and coffee and much more. Farmers produce all this. Yet majority of them remain poor; living from hand to mouth. One reason is adverse terms of trade. They do not get ruminative prices. Much touted Green Revolution has outlived its role. It is now causing disaster in two ways. There is excessive use of water, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals. It is turning mother earth not only barren, but full of all kinds of poisons. Farming is fast becoming a health hazard. It is no longer uttam, the finest work as our great Guru Nanak Dev thought. Highly mechanised commercial farming meant heavy investments by the farmers yet low returns were ensured by the policy makers, our leaders.  This enriched the middlemen, commission agents, the fertilizer and chemical industry that got huge subsidy and looted the farmers. Much worse this farming is proving an environment hazard.

Last week some experts were in Chandigarh. They were not those who are hired by big companies, but those who are passionate to bring a change and warn farmers about the dangers of excessive use of fertilizers, pesticides and insecticides and unnecessary use of water.  Punjab has just 1.5 per cent agricultural area of India. It uses 18 percent of pesticides and 12 per cent chemical fertilizers. Result is large belt in the Malwa is known as cancer area and the train that leave from Bhatinda to a Bikaner hospital is called cancer train. Women and children are the worst suffers. In the last ten years, the number of cancer patients has just doubled.

According to an expert doctor S.G. Kabra, director, legal affairs and medical audit, SDM Hospital, Jaipur who has studied the problem of Punjab by collecting data and visiting the Malwa area,   our next generations are under threat. As long term residual effects, the pesticides act as “folic acid antagonists” and the folic acid deficiency leads to high rate of neural tube defects (brainless babies). There is an alarmingly high rate of brainless babies in Punjab and Haryana. Kheti Virasat Mission has documented this alarming high incidence of cancer deaths on account of high use of pesticides. Punjab and Haryana High Court chief justice Varinder Jain finds even mother’s milk contaminated. He says, “Environmental degradation is a silent killed and we are being sentenced to death every moment.”

Pesticides are affecting fertility of both men and women and causing cancer other diseases. Alleging that the agricultural growth has taken a heavy toll on the reproductive health in Punjab and Haryana, Dr Kabra claimed that several pesticides act as hormone disrupters causing female foetal loss and disrupting reproductive and menstrual cycles. There is a very high rate of miscarriages and stillbirths.

Dr Kabra asserts, “The reproductive toxins - chemicals damaging the reproductive systems of both men and women - pose serious heath risks to the human population. The pesticide exposure before conception can have several adverse affects such as reduced fertility, abnormal fetus, reduced libido and menstrual dysfunction. Apart from this, the maternal exposure after conception leads to prenatal death and birth defects”.

Yet farmers ought to survive and devise their own plans. One sure way proving successful is organic farming and if it’s done in a cooperative manner, it would be much better. It should be linked with the market, directly without many middlemen.  In all parts of the country, farmers and some right thinking doctors and scientists have taken upon themselves the dignified duty  to see that we produce healthy foods; sufficient for the country . No caner laded contaminated food. Farms would no longer be factories for cancer, infertility and brain damage.

In Punjab those who wish to follow organic and natural farming or Nanak kheti could   talk to farmers like Vinod Jyani   of Kathura village near Fazilka who is growing wheat, paddy, kinno and cotton on his 130 acre farm since 2005 without using any chemical fertilizer or pesticides. He saves Rs five lakh each year and there is mo loss in production. Others are Balwinder Singh from Zira, Pritpal Singh Brar from Chaina village in Faridkot. Jaskaran Singh who is a qualified engineer and has left a high paying job has taken 15 acres on lease near Ludhiana to organically grow vegetables.

In Punjab as Umendra Dutt, executive director of the Mission says struggle to protect environment and  natural resources and our right over our seeds and our agriculture heritage is like a freedom movement. 1500 Punjab farmers have joined. Do not wait for the catastrophe to fall, start now and save the mother earth.

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The Right to Opposition
Ishtiaq Ahmed

I chose the title and topic for today's essay in the naïve hope that now a transition to civilian democracy has taken place. However, I have a feeling that much of what I have to say is irrelevant to the ground reality. In a democracy both majorities and minorities have rights to debate government policy, propose alternatives to them and be ready to form the government in case parliament withdraws its confidence in the existing government. That is why the Soviet-type people's democracies and the Iranian-type censored elections and democracy cannot qualify to be democracies.

The right to opposition by the minority parties is the other side of the more familiar principle that the party or a coalition that wins the majority is entitled to form the government. The chief merit of a democracy is that it is not a perfect form of government and therefore government policies should be challenged and disputed all the time by the opposition.

A democracy does not deny that conflicts and disputes exist in society and among political parties. On the contrary, a democracy presupposes that conflicts will always exist because of the plurality of interests that exist in modern society. However, in a democracy conflicts and disputes are resolved peacefully and in accordance with proper procedure.

The last few days are indicative of the deep malaise in which our society has sunk over the years. The violent and degrading assaults on former chief minister of Sindh Arbab Ghulam Rahim and former federal minister Dr Sher Afgan Niazi, followed by a free-for-all between rival lawyer groups which ended in six of them being burnt to death, should put us all to shame.

Rowdy scenes are quite common in South Asian politics, but to begin a new phase in democratic governance after a long period of authoritarian rule with manhandling of political opponents can under no circumstance be condoned. That the lawyers have been prominent in the attacks on Dr Niazi and in the skirmish at Karachi is a matter of grave concern, because if those trained to defend the law flagrantly violate it, then our roughnecks in the wider society have no reason not to take the law into their own hands.

Some people would describe these outrages as rough justice for the highhanded policies these two men allegedly were guilty of when they were in power, but the correct way to bring them to justice would be to start proceedings against them in a court of law.

The question is that will such treatment of political opponents serve as a deterrent so that in future no high officeholder orders police brutality against people protesting authoritarian policies of the government? I have my doubts because more than acting as a deterrent it will kindle the passion for revenge. Arbab Ghulam Rahim and Dr Sher Afgan Niazi can return to power in some future dispensation and seek vendetta.

In Pakistani politics everything is possible. Who would have believed that Asif Ali Zardari will receive compliments from his political peers of being a farsighted trouble-shooter when only a few weeks ago he enjoyed the unenviable reputation of Pakistan's most corrupt politician, nicknamed Mr Ten Percent?

I might as well add that Zardari's rehabilitation as a responsible politician, nay statesman, has been facilitated by one of his most inveterate critics and opponents who ordered all the enquiries into the corruption charges against him to be dropped, so that the two can now cooperate to provide a stable transition to democracy.

It is important that innocent people are not punished and the guilty do not walk away without serving a sentence for their offences against society. This is possible only in a milieu where the rule of law prevails and people seek justice through proper procedure.

We have to realise that this is not the era of the Grand Moguls, who were constantly involved in fighting their brothers and even took up arms against their fathers in order to capture power. The bloodshed and destruction such conflicts caused ultimately rendered that empire weak and fragmented. To blame the British alone for its dissolution is the easiest way out for a people not willing seriously to consider their own faults and limitations.

Another gruesome death deserves our strongest condemnation: that of a Hindu worker, Jagdish Kumar (25) in a Karachi garment factory at the hands of his Muslim workmates, after a heated discussion on religion which not surprisingly culminated in his being declared a blasphemer. The mob killed him and were about to burn his body when the police arrived and made some arrests.

Last week a man and woman were stoned to death in a tribal area in NWFP after an Islamic kangaroo court found them guilty of adultery. In a society where millions of women and boys are forced into sexual prostitution because of abject poverty, the so-called custodians of Islamic chastity occupy moral high ground by stoning to death two individuals allegedly committing adultery. It was comforting to note that Minister for Information and Broadcasting Sherry Rehman issued a strong condemnation of that outrage.

In the days ahead, the government of Yusuf Raza Gilani will be tested as to how it deals with these ugly incidents. There have been some reports of TV channels being put off the air when they were showing footage of the attacks. Sherry Rehman will have to explain who ordered the TV channels to be shut down. Clearly there must be a difference now when we have an elected government in power.

However, if nothing is done to prevent anarchy taking place, and sooner or later General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani comes to the conclusion that we can only be kept under control via martial law, I am not sure I would be willing to protest his decision.

[The writer is a professor of political science and a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore. Email: isasia@nus.edu.sg Courtesy News International Pakistan]

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Electoral politics to the fore in the troubled Kashmir
Hurriyat is cornered into the 'Prince of Denmark' role
Ajmer Alam Wani

AS the election tempo in Jammu and Kashmir gets charged, electoral winds have started to blow down from the snowy peaks. Yet gloves have not been completely taken off, though  all the three main protagonists – Dr. Farooq Abdullah's National Conference (NC), Mufti Mohammed Sayeed's People's Democratic Party (PDP) and the reluctant Ghulam Nabi Azad's Congress have already set the pot to boil.

On the other hand Hurriyat is cornered into the 'Prince of Denmark' role. For Hurriyat to participate means swearing allegiance to Constitution of India and bidding goodbye to separatism, which they call 'Azadi'. And, not to be in fray means continuing to wander in the wilderness, looking for some bulwark other than Pakistan as it is really more concerned with putting its own house in order.

Yet, all the mainstream political parties and formations barring Congress have no option but to continue to talk about improving Indo-Pak relations in one form or the other to establish their credentials in the Valley.

This is not an attempt to gaze into the future electoral mirror for J-K but to underscore the impact of the Pakistani electoral verdict and its political build-up over the last year on the political perspectives in Kashmir. For the present, the end result is anybody's guess, but one thing is certain, it is going to be one steamy bubbling stew.

Where does all this leave the Kashmir people who continue to suffer the indignities of Human Rights (HR) violations with no redresser and continue to nurse their alienation from the Indian mainstream? High and dry as usual, it would seem, unless the next general election brings in a government in New Delhi that can act with humanity, determination and sagacity.

Jammu and Kashmir has to elect its new Assembly before 20th November this year thus each political party has been holding public rallies in the opponents' strongholds, obviously to bolster its own vote bank. Biased prognostications about the impact of these meetings are further confusing. Hurriyat's pussyfooting about its own position on the forthcoming elections is only adding 'much to the Masala'.

Kashmiri politicians had no option but to withdraw into their small time wrangling, accusations of corruption, inept governance and Azad's defensive claims about a shining 'J-K'. One of the harshest winters in recent times with its rigours of connectivity, electricity, fuel and water added to the 'isolation'. Not surprisingly, the citizenry has continued to grow even more cynical.

How do the political parties approach the elections? NC has reverted to its 'Autonomy' platform fuelled by the strong anti-incumbency factor. PDP is torn between its vague 'self- governance' mantra and a love-hate relationship with the ruling Congress, not to mention its intra-party vitriol. As for the Congress, its last three years' performance has few takers and the leadership has been embarrassed by Saif-ud-Din Soz being sent to replace a discredited Peerzada Mohammed Sayeed as Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee (JKPCC) Chief.

President, All India Congress Committee (AICC) and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Chairperson, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi’s recent visit which was aimed at strengthening Congress in J-Kashmir State could not yield fruitful results.

Though, recurring theme of her speech was that women need to raise their voice against social evils, especially female foeticide, domestic violence and other excesses for which she tried ‘Women Empowerment Card’.

On the other hand fear of infiltration picking up in the run-up to the elections  also looms large as the authorities fear a rise in cross border infiltration levels, as the recent heavy snowfall has damaged the barbed wire fencing on the Indian side at many places along the Line of Control (LoC) that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

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