Fifty-two-year-old Raisingh Chavda is a criminal lawyer, who practices across several district courts in Madhya Pradesh’s Malwa region. But today, with the advent of the soyabean sowing season, he has taken to the tractor, tilling 10 of his family’s 100 acres of land, nine kilometres west off the Indore “superhighway”.
He cuts off the tractor’s engines, ambles across the dark soil characteristic of the Malwa region, wipes away the encrusted dust from his calloused fingers before venting his anger against Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s “flawed” and potentially disastrous farm policy, that has “caused incalculable damage” to farmers in this part of MP.
But I must admit that Shivraj has a sharp political mind. His programme to undertake a prolonged fast has taken the sting out of the violent agitation and, at once, the wind out of the Congress’ sails.Raisingh Chavda
“This was bound to happen as the Congress, especially its Madhya Pradesh leadership, remains divided,” Raisingh, a staunch BJP supporter by his own admission, added.
Back in his village of Rajput-dominated Palakhedi, a couple of kilometres further west, Raisingh’s elder brother, 65-year-old Ajab Singh, a peaked cap sitting steady on his crown, ushered us into his godown stocked with mountains of onion and wheat, which he has not been able to take to the local mandi that has been shut since 1 June when the farmers’ agitation began.
Ajab Singh and his 70-year-old cousin Nirbhay Singh, who doesn’t shy away from using the choicest expletives against Chouhan for the crisis that the farming community finds itself in today, are staunch Congress supporters. Raisingh’s criticism is more nuanced, though. While their politics are at opposite poles, both brothers will – separately – plow different plots of land and then sow soyabean seeds, an important crop that can make or mar a farmer’s fortunes.
We were expecting the Congress to throw in its lot with us, but all three leaders –Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia – are nowhere to be seen after Rahul Gandhi’s departureAjab Singh and Nirbhay Singh
- 01/03Ajab Singh’s godown is filled unsold onions. (Photo: Chandan Nandy/The Quint)
- 02/03Raisingh’s unsold stock of onions. (Photo: Chandan Nandy/The Quint)
- 03/03Onion spill over from the corners of Ajab Singh’s godown. (Photo: Chandan Nandy/The Quint)
Distressed farmers across the Malwa region, which returns about 70 legislators to the MP assembly, are not surprised by the Congress’ half-hearted “breast-beating” in favour of the hapless farming community.
An emerging leader, Rau-Indore MLA Jeetu Patwari, who had Rahul riding pillion on his motorcycle the day the Congress Vice-President entered MP via Rajasthan, too appears to have been halted in his tracks, leaving Congress supporters in Malwa all praise for him, but still searching for the elusive leader who could put up some fight against a wily Shivraj and the BJP.
The Political Potential of Soyabean
Anurodh Jain, an emerging Indore-based Congress ticket aspirant for next year’s assembly polls, is trying to chart his own political course in the face of the party’s fractious groups. Jain, a software engineer who quit a promising professional career in the US to join politics in MP, is trying to “make sense of the farmers’ grievances and harness them politically” and has concentrated his attention on the humble soyabean.
On Saturday, Jain took part in an insipid Congress demonstration in Indore, which was just an hour-long affair that mocked Shivraj Singh Chouhan for his “farcical” fasting programme. Jain has made an in-depth study of the “political potential of soyabean” which, he said, “may or may not be as charged an item as the cow, but it certainly promises to be a political legume” in the months before next year’s polls.
Last week’s police firing in Mandsaur on farmers agitating for a fair hike in the minimum support price for their produce, did not force Madhya Pradesh’s Congress leaders such as Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia to rush – and force their way – to the flashpoint spot. “We seem to have been left in the lurch,” Nirbhay Singh of Palakhedi village said, as his facial muscles contort in anger.
For Malwa’s farmers, soyabean production costs around Rs 4,500 per quintal. But today, soyabean fetches only about Rs 2,600 per quintal in the mandis, leaving farmers with dire losses. Raisingh’s house is piled with sacks of soyabean that were cultivated in 2014, but he has still not been able to dispose them. “I will have to sell cheap, if and when the local mandi reopens,” he said, scooping a fistful of soyabean before admitting that “these are rotting” and “they will fetch a price far lower than that is trading on the market”.
In 2014, Raisingh invested Rs 3.45 lakh into soyabean and is today expecting a Rs 2.50 lakh hit in losses. His genial elder brother Ajab Singh, who owns large tracts of agricultural land on Indore’s fringes estimated to be in the region of Rs 40-50 crore, is worried nonetheless. His investments over the past two years have not returned him even matching prices. “This is ruinous,” Ajab Singh said, as his cousin Nirbhay Singh railed on against Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
Beyond the crops and the financial crisis that the farmers of Malwa region find themselves in is politics and how it may play out in the months before next year’s assembly polls. As an immediate succour for the farmers, Raisingh suggests that the state government “must find ways to enhance the capacity of the storehouses”. His brother Ajab Singh, however, takes a political shot: “The Congress high command must quickly appoint a new leader when Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia have failed to deliver even as we suffer.”
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