Go, ask the people!

Governments come to grief when they start believing in the fiction they create about their performance. Invariably, those that have an exalted view of high economic growth and its magical powers to transform the lives of the people, suffer the most. The reading of contemporary history has shown that growth induced by policies that involve vacation of economic space by the government in favour of private enterprise is not inclusive and hurts the fortunes of the needy and impoverished. The wretched of the earth cannot endure the machinations of the market forces. They try to hold on to their communities, land, habitat and ecology till they are forcibly thrown out by the police and minions of corporate houses. In a democracy, they retaliate furiously against such authoritarian moves through demonstrations and protests and by voting against parties and individuals that contributed in destroying their livelihoods and dislocating them from their land. Since the time the Indian government has rolled out its Special Economic Zone (SEZ) policy and also allowed extensive mining in ecologically sensitive tribal areas, strong grievance is building amongst the peasantry on the land issue. The speed at which new areas are falling under the Maoists' sway in eastern and central India is indicative of how angry ordinary people are towards a government that wants to take away their land and their livelihood without adequate compensation or initiating a process of dialogue and consensus. The record of previous governments when it comes to rehabilitation and relocation of the oustees from industrial sites has been abysmal. Who can forget the protracted, peaceful agitation of thousands of people displaced by the mega-projects of the Sardar Sarovar and Tehri dam? Even after all these years, we are not very sure whether many of those who were driven out from their abodes have been honourably rehabilitated. What we are witnessing now is qualitatively different. Agricultural fields located around the big cities are being turned into real estate and sold off to builders and large pieces of land in areas like Gurgaon (near Delhi) and Raigarh (near Mumbai) have become multi-utility SEZs. More than 400 economic zones are going to come up in different parts of the country that will spawn armies of unemployed farming refugees who will either migrate to the already bloated cities or hang around at the periphery of these new economic zones providing support and sustenance to those who want to hurt the State for not looking after their interests. Parliamentarians and legislators, who have to go back to their constituencies after every five years, are a worried lot. They do not know how to countenance the grievance of people who are reeling in debt, landlessness and general anomie, including thousands of farmers committing suicide, from Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, to Vidharba and Sangrur in Punjab. Politicians have been taken aback by the trenchant response of the farmers in Singur and Nandigram — in communist controlled West Bengal — to the state government's attempt to give land to the Tatas and Indonesia's Salim group. The worry for non-communist political parties is that if the Leftists, with their famed cadres, could not handle the farmers' discontent, it would be difficult for others to do it. One of the major reasons why no political party wants to face elections, looming as they are in a not-so-distant horizon, is the realisation of the seething rage in the countryside where majority of India lives. The people are upset over backbreaking prices, high agricultural input costs and an unpredictable market and the threat to their farm-holdings from corporate houses and government companies. Clearly, government policies are posing a threat to the livelihood of large masses of people. The NREG scheme has proved to be a scam in many places and the government seems clueless about what it should do to stem the rot. This is a bad time to contemplate elections as anti-incumbency would drive the ruling party into oblivion. The truth is that there would never be a good time to hold elections till the government can walk the talk about seriously sorting out the land issue in an egalitarian, humanist and democratic manner.