When a diplomat says ‘yes’ he means ‘perhaps’; when he says ‘perhaps’ he means ‘no’ and when he says ‘no’ he is no diplomat. - Old (External Affairs) Jungle Saying!

Pune International Centre, a self-propelling platform of mainly retired government servants of all hues and colours - Armed Forces, Foreign Service (IFS), Administration (IAS) and other Central Services (ICS), keeps responding to the policies of the powers that be in a haughty pompous manner in regular meetings and through articles by the more vocal (vociferous?) from their midst. So it’s in order that since they have been provided a hey day by Trump they will make more noise than the king!

Ours is a (too) free country and loudness in expressions of patriotism is our habit. Because the government servants were hardly allowed to express themselves during their tenure, they are sure, after retirement, to amplify their thoughts and views (supposedly) so that the world shall hear them loud and clear so they have been shouting hoarse last few months. This time it’s fallen to Mr. Gautam Bambawale, former ambassador to China (!) and High Commissioner to Pakistan but moreover a puneit, to take on Trump and exhort our countrymen to convert the adversity (the Trump words and deeds on tariffs on Indian imports and punishing India for importing oil from Russia) into an opportunity (to show the world that India won’t sing and dance to the tune and beat of Donald, the bully!

Actually, this is too mundane to catch on; every Modi, Jai Shankar and Rahul are meeting this out round the clock. We are masters of double-speak in the we can claim to be upright even when we are prostrate. The usual fare is; India stands tall; is on the door steps of a 5 trillion economy; borders are secure; vigilance never slackens; the GYAN are marching to a bright tomorrow etc; and Mr. Bambawale is only dishing out what we are habituated to here.

With typical diplomatic acumen he also quips that Trump is more noise and less action and: but who is not? Take our own NaMo. Have all his words and promises materialised. Have we seen ‘Achche Din’ becoming a permanent rumour. Leave aside Donald and NaMo; are not all heads of nations masters of this? The only exceptions being Israel (currently), Russia, China and North Korea!

Interestingly, Mr. Bambawale still wams his people to tighten their belts to march towards aatmanirbharata (self-reliance) in a globalised economy. Another double speak because an obvious corollary of Aatmanirbharata is status quo at home. Aatmanirbharata works more emotionally with Indians; it rarely implies change in the domestic political economy but what is worse demands that citizens should forget self-interest and deprivations till the ghost of threat to the country’s sovereignty’ is exorcised. He has added a short passage on which sectors of the advanced economy are likely to suffer if Trump does what he threatens to.

But all this follows after he has warmed up. Here is how he starts; ‘negotiations between India and the United States (U. S.) appear to have entered a difficult, last phase. Apparently, Indian negotiators are holding firm about not bartering away protections to our agriculture and dairy sectors as a huge mass of our population earns a livelihood from them. Moreover, with average land holding in India being small, our agriculture sector can never be as productive as larger farms in the U. S., Brazil, Australia and other such nations. Hence the need to continue protecting our farmers.”

What commitment and empathy for the Indian farmers!

The only truths he has reiterated are that over 50% of our population wilts under agriculture as its share in GDP has fallen to around 16% and the land holdings are small; thanks to the breakups of the joint families in the mofussil and land(liability?) re-distribution policies during the socialist stint of policy making. But has the Indian State (I am not saying kings and governments!) ever protected the farmers?

The Indian farmer is like Yossorian (Yoyo) in the super ironical novel of 1960’s Catch-22. When Yoyo screams, they are: trying to kill me! he is not talking of the enemy soldiers and generals-he means his own generals and policy makers are trying to kill him! The Indian farmer’s enemy is not Donald Trump or whoever occupies that seat; it is the Indian State-headed at the moment by a master of make-believe and double speak. But it’s not just the PM and his party but the entire political establishment is against the agriculture sector and in particular, the farmer!

The ingenuity the Indian State in exploiting the country’s farmers with a pretense of ‘protection’ has been remarkable. Firstly, they freed him of the British only to enslave him themselves. In the name of Socialism, they punished the private money lenders only to hand over the peasantry to state, national and cooperative banks on a platter. To ‘liberate’ the farmer from self-serving traders the State introduced self-serving monopoly procurement schemes which never paid even cost of production. The State provided capital and know-how to start cooperative sugar factories, only to place the member farmers at the mercy of political goons and touts where the polity could not dabble the farmer was at the mercy of the unforgiving administrative juggernaut. All in all, the Indian State proudly owned up that ‘the farm sector will have to suffer benign neglect’ and all the so-called protection, subsidies, seed-capital schemes and ‘distress relief’ boiled down to the Indian farmers getting 28 rupees for farm produce w

That Mr. Bambawale never returns to the agriculture sector in the course of his article is understandable - such is the ignorance of the Indian elite about the country’s farm sector and those who are condemned to it. The continued sinking of this sector’s share in GDP is generally still attributed to the small holdings, traditional methods of farming and vagaries of the weather. What’s worse farmers’ labour on the land is sort of taken for granted and there is a consensus that they should just survive, like the workers under early capitalism, and should not aspire for the benefits enjoyed by those outside the farm sector. This is what the late Sharad Joshi highlighted when he analysed that there was colonisation within one nation - there was a Bharat sweating in agriculture and there was an India reaping the harvest of Bharat’s toil. Even after seven decades of Planning (Neeti) Commissions our agriculture languishes under out rightly apathetic step motherly treatment. As a result farmers have to beg all the time: except for a few success stories in horticulture the farmers continue to get poorer. The sector is so emaciated due to not getting the price due to it for its produce it has become like a handicapped burden on the economy.

Also Read: Farmers Agitation: Still No Light at the Other End of the Tunnel by Vinay Hardikar

There also seems to be a conspiracy here to which the whole political establishment seems to be a party. Democracy is deep rooted at least in the regular ritual of elections and votes are crucial. The next logical step is creation of vote banks. Earlier these were base on community, caste, class, language, region etc. But later the wisdom dawned that vote banks on the above lines would still be divided regionally. Instead, starving and robbing the country wide farm sector through ‘benign neglect’ was a faster, surer method of reducing the number of classes to four. Very rich, middle, poor and very poor. The first two would need cumbersome persuasion but the latter two would desperately flock to the voting booths propelled by the standard national drive of Garibi Hatao (originated under Indira 55 years ago). Initially the so called secular forces captured power through it now the so called communal forces are taking their turn. The day may not be far when the agriculture sector’s share will be zero in the GDP and yet there will be around half a billion people living in it.

As I have discussed the issues of the agriculture sector in previous columns I am not going to recapitulate that. But my advice to Mr. Bambawale and the PIC would be not to paint Trump as the villain of the Indian farmer; the present Prime Minister has grabbed that mantle the day he got power and he is part of a long list of PMs who duped the farmers for generations.

True to his salt, the diplomat in Mr. Bambawale suggests cautious wisdom when he asks us to wait and watch. I, in my humble turn, have followed the ‘wait and watch policy’ for the Indian elite to wake up to the reality of the country’s agriculture sector. Moreover, to go back to the quote at the beginning, what is to be surmised when a diplomat says neither ‘Yes’ nor ‘Perhaps’ and is totally misinformed.

- Vinay Hardikar
vinay.freedom@gmail.com  
(The writer has been working in the public sphere of Maharashtra for the last five decades. His versatile personality has several dimensions, but the primary ones remain to be that of an established writer, journalist, editor, critic, activist, and teacher.)

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