Before it gets into my book as a chapter, it needs to be preserved on my blog as a post.
My job is not to take people down per se, but to chronicle the anatomy of India’s agricultural collapse, which I believe is going to happen sooner or later.
Also, I now believe India to play the end game in the global destruction of agriculture, as one of the precursor to the ecological collapse that the planet is also facing, of which one part, mass extinction, is now ongoing.
In that context, I feel it important to chronicle this anatomy of a failure from another angle. Sustainability is being euthanized by politicians of all hue. They cannot help it. It is in the global political DNA. It is up to the people, to fix it, or let it continue. But then, human society too has the DNA equivalent of the lemming.
And so the story goes …
Avik Saha and Yogendra Yadav spoke at the NUJS university hall on the 20th about Farmer distress and democracy. I went to attend it, along with Rabin Banerji. I found another person I knew there – Somnath Mukherjee of AID, New Jersey, USA.
I had a lot of expectation, being aware of how they were evicted from AAP some years ago, and how they promoted clean politics as al alternative platform for a new India.
But I have been greatly disappointed with the talks. I consider this to be a lesson that political change may not come to India from political leaders of any hue, and that the people would have to wrench the mantle away from leaders and take initiative at grassroots level. How such a movement lead by millions of people can succeed without a head – I have no idea. But the heads have gone toxic, or have lost the clue, has been amply demonstrated repeatedly across the world, across India, and once again demonstrated by the least likely of the candidates – Yogendra Yadav and Avik Saha of the Swaraj Abhiyan movement. This also proves, sadly, politicians are politicians first, everything else later.
I decided to place this observation on my blog, to be perhaps incorporated into a book to cover my trip in India, since India is in many ways the epicentre of the endgame representing the global destruction of sustainable farming. I had given my impression already on the social media of Facebook. But here, it can be better preserved.
To put it briefly and bluntly, I have not been impressed by Mr. Yadav. Mr. Saha has little to say of real substance other than bringing issues to the court. Yadav’s comments were, to me, far more relevant and damaging, to Indian agriculture and the farming community.
While their intension may be honest & noble, which I now begin to question, I was surprised by some seriously disastrous points that Yadav promoted such as wanting to lift all trade restrictions on agriculture, while in fact India is already reeling under hundreds of millions of tons of toxic pulses being imported from Canada/Australia, thus mass poisoning the people on one side and pushing more Indian farmers to insolvency on the other. I am thunderstruck that Yadav would propose more of the same.
He also missed the bus on a number of major issues that bug India relating to impending loss of food sovereignty by capture of the food web by local and foreign corporations, doling out highly toxic food in the process, linked with an impending collapse of the healthcare and agriculture system from this disasterous policy grounded in Anericanisation of Indian agriculture, wrong syllabus being adopted in agriculture colleges and a systen designed to finish off indian farmers & farming.
And talking about democracy – both of them failed to nail the coffin by stating that the most important stakeholder in democracy is the citizen – that democracy has been hijacked – and that the cause of the failure is the citizens of India abdicating its most important duty, of vigilance and upkeep of the democratic process, instead of watching cricket, Bollywood movies or aping the west. He failed to identify one of the root causes of the degradation of the Indian society is that education and English language has now become a path to cultural slavery of the US. Yadav spoke about “Desi modernism” but appeared to lack 20/20 vision on the very definition of either Desi or Modernism.
He mentioned a book about the great Irish potato Famine. I would have suggested he reads Tagore’s 1922 English essay – “Robbery of the Soil”, if he had allowed me to speak during the question and answer session.
I am done with these two gentlemen.
No matter what happens to their personal standing and stature, they cannot provide solution to India’s agrarian crisis, food sovereignty crisis or related healthcare crisis by selectively missing out major root causes.
They arrived an hour late, keeping everyone waiting – I seriously dislike public figures who take the public for granted and waste their time.
Even worse, they had no time for me to voice my concerns during the question and answer session, since they were short of time and only allowed a few students to ask questions, none of which covered my points. What a waste of effort and time at least on my part.
Sad.
Listening to Yadav, one could bid goodbye to India’s sustainable, farmer and people friendly agriculture, to be euthanized by new age Indian politicians of all hue. Rest in peace, Indian farming. You had a great run for over five thousand years, before politicians learn to poison it all. It’s time to say good bye.
Tony Mitra