In West UP, Sugarcane Remains Bitter for Both Hindus and Muslims

Poll-bound Uttar Pradesh’s “sugarcane problem” ruptured social relations between the Jat and Muslim communities.

Muzaffarnagar’s sugarcane harvest this year has been as bitter as the yield in 2013 when this western Uttar Pradesh district and another adjoining it, Shamli, were convulsed in Jat-Muslim communal riots that were once a staple of Meerut. For, at the heart of the conflagration was sugarcane, which over the years has increasingly become an unviable crop, affecting not just the Jat landowners but also the Muslim labour hands who tilled the fields.

Rajkumar Sangwan’s face darkened when the issue was broached. He is a former Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) MLA who was not given the election ticket for the third successive time.

Biting off a large chunk of a sliver of guava, Sangwan says in the characteristic gruff Jat tone: “Ganne ka bhugtaan nahin hua hai (The interest on sugarcane hasn’t reached the farmers).” According to a 1954 legislation, sugar mills are bound to pay a 15 percent interest in the event of delay in making payment beyond 14 days.

Non-Payment of Interest

Dressed in a khadi kurta-pajama and sporting a stylish pair of dark blue Nike sneakers, Sangwan explains, as did Ram Meher Singh, a Gujjar leader from Rithana village near Meerut, that the Rs 1,200 crore interest that the sugar mills owed the sugarcane farmers of western UP has not been realised. This has caused “tremendous anger” among the Jats and Gujjars engaged in cultivating this “cash crop” which is also a source of their socio-economic identity in this rustic belt of UP that goes to the polls on 11 February, in the first of the seven-phase Assembly elections.

Both Sangwan and Ram Meher explained that while sugarcane production has gone up, the default on payment of long overdue interest has made cultivation of this crop unviable and uneconomical.

“This is how it has been year after year,” Sangwan said, adding that the Akhilesh Yadav government has done little to assuage the sugarcane growers’ mounting problems and consequent financial crisis.

Diving deeper into the “sugarcane problem”, Ram Meher said the typical average price that the crop commands is as low as Rs 300 per quintal which yields 13 kg of sugar in the mills. “If recovery cost has gone up for a crop whose production costs have gone up in recent years, then why should the farmers not be given Rs 350 per quintal?”

Politics of Religion

To make matters worse, Ram Meher, who in his 30-year political career has jumped from the BJP to the SP and now the RLD, said that the last straw for the Jat and Gujjar sugarcane farmers was when the Akhilesh Yadav government wrote off the interests owed for 2013-14 and 2014-15.

“All that the sugarcane farmers want is the right price for the crop and timely payment,” Ram Meher said, adding that in a “socially and economically complex region like western UP, farmers’ grievances are overshadowed by the politics of caste and religion.”

As sugarcane cultivation became less attractive, the landed Jats found it increasingly difficult to pay the Muslim farmhands, forcing the latter to find other sources of livelihood.

Rupture in Social Relations

“This caused a rupture in the social relations between Jats and Muslims. The skilled Muslim farm labourers took to carpentry, autorickshaw driving, motor repairing, small-time trading and other odd jobs. Both communities were ripe for mobilisation by political parties. The BJP wooed the Jats who were becoming increasingly frustrated of the RLD while the Samajwadi Party remained firmly behind the Muslims,” Sangwan said as he explained the deeper causes behind the 2013 riots.

The killing of two Jat youths, preceded by an incident of eve-teasing in Muzaffarnagar in September 2013, was simply the spark that caused the communal explosion in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli that year.

Rajkumar Sangwan

Acting as opportunistic “riot entrepreneurs”, the BJP’s Sangeet Som and Suresh Rana took full advantage of the emergent breach in the longstanding Jat-Muslim relations which were marked by cross-cutting cleavages that earlier minimised inter-religious tensions.

“What continues to anger the Jats is the favoured treatment and patronage that members of the minority community, even when some of them have criminal antecedents, continue to enjoy in these parts of UP,” Sangwan added.

Meerut’s Communal Harmony

But why did Muzaffarnagar and Shamli get caught in the grip of communalism when adjoining Meerut, which has had a history of Hindu-Muslim violence from the 1960s to the 1990s, remained an oasis of harmony?

While the politics of sugarcane and its increasing unviability explains the Muzaffarnagar riots over three years ago and the deep scars that it has left among both Jats and Muslims, the near-complete inter-religious accord in Meerut is the result of relative affluence and economic stability among members of the minority community of that city and district.

Cricket to the Rescue

First, as Gauhar Siddiqui, a Muzaffarnagar-based community leader explained, the Muslims of Meerut have the ever-growing popularity of cricket in India to thank for their economic and social good fortune. As cricket became increasingly popular in India, the demand for cricket bats and gears went up across the country.

The labourers working for companies such as BDM, SS, and SG, though owned by upper caste Hindus, are Muslims, who prospered because of the countrywide cricket craze. Besides cricket, Meerut is also the largest centre for the manufacture of leather footballs. It is skilled Muslim artisans who stitch the hexagonal leather pieces into whole, durable soccer balls.

Meat Export

Second, Meerut is India’s largest centre for the export of frozen meat which is shipped to diverse countries in Southeast Asia, West Asia and the Pacific basin. The bovine meat business is worth $3 billion which has raked in unprecedented prosperity which was not known to Meerut’s Muslims in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s when the district would frequently experience communal riots.

Today, in Meerut, communal harmony or the disinclination to be swayed by hate-driven mobilisation has been an incentive for consolidating the economic gains made over the last three decades.