Outlefting the Left

The Left will now find it difficult to shrug off the pro-poor measures initiated by the Congress as mere 'half-hearted tokenism'

Rajat Roy Kolkata

After years of neglect, the Congress-led UPA government appears to have turned its focus on the agrarian crisis in the country. The Rs 60,000 crore loan waiver, announced in the Union Budget, is aimed at giving relief to three crore small and marginal farmers in the country. In addition, another one crore farmers with larger land-holdings will also benefit from it.
The decision to write off the debts of farmers comes as part of a package that the ruling coalition in New Delhi has announced in an attempt to improve the condition of the country's poor peasants. The 'Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana' proposes to give insurance to one crore poor farmers in the first year of its introduction. The scheme to distribute smart cards among peasants is meant to provide them with food grains at a much cheaper rate than what is available in the market. The 'Rashtriya Swastha Bima Yojana' is aimed at providing all workers in the unorganised sector and those who fall under the 'below the poverty line' category with a medical insurance of Rs 30,000. An estimated 220 million to 280 million people are said to be in this category. The monthly wages of the Anganwadi workers have also been increased from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 as part of the relief measures for the rural poor. In addition, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which ensures at least 100 days' work for those in rural areas introduced some years back, has now been expanded to all 596 districts in India.
The general elections are scheduled for early next year. If the underlying assumption of this budget is to create a support base in rural India for the incumbent UPA government, perhaps it is a smart move. The muted criticism of the Left on the budget only proves the point. The CPM's politburo was forced to admit that "some of the demands of the Left have been addressed in the budget such as the welcome measures of debt relief for farmers; the increase, though inadequate, of the allowances to Anganwadi workers...." This grudging admission shows the Congress has played a card strong enough to capture the imagination of the rural poor and if it is backed by an effective campaign, it can well turn into a winner for the ruling party in the forthcoming polls.
Since the economic liberalisations of 1990s, successive governments have tried to focus more on attracting investments for the industrial sector. While most of the attention was being centred on the high-growth rate of the economy, agriculture got neglected. This led to a fall in food grain production and forced the government to import a huge amount of wheat from the international market at a very high price. This in turn led to rise in prices of essential commodities in the domestic market. Additionally, the lack of remunerative prices to farmers who went for cash crops like cotton and sunflower created a situation where they were unable to repay their loans that they had borrowed from the market. According to a rough estimate, more than 150,000 farmers who were unable to pay their loans had committed suicide in the last 10 years.
The decade-old crisis in agriculture has also led to rural unemployment and growing landlessness among peasants. Surveys show that more than 50 per cent of rural workers are not even paid the national minimum wage. But few governments, neither at the Centre nor in the states, have paid any attention to this fact. Instead they have gone around acquiring agricultural land for creating Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to bring in investment. The pro-industry bias and the apathy to the plight of the farmers have created situations like Nandigram, Kalinganagar or Singur, where the rural poor have tried to actively resist the take-over of their land by the government. The Congress-led UPA government perhaps has drawn lessons from these incidents and is now trying to make amends. With the series of relief measures for the rural poor in this year's budget proposal, it now seems keen to bring the issue of agrarian crisis to the political centre stage and wants to fight the forthcoming elections on this plank.
The connection between land and electoral prospects of various political contenders can best be understood by looking at West Bengal, the CPM's stronghold for the past three decades. In the early 1950s, the Congress government in the state took a revolutionary step by enacting a law to abolish the zamindari system. This paved the way for redistributing surplus land of the zamindars among the landless and poor peasants. Later, it came to be known as the Land Reform Programme. The Congress continued with it for nearly 25 years, but because of the resistance from the powerful landed gentry within the party, it failed to cash in on it politically.
After the Left parties came to power in the state in 1977, they strengthened the programme further through 'Operation Barga' by registering the sharecroppers and protecting their right to till the land. Despite the initial success, the land reforms failed to solve poverty in rural Bengal. According to an assessment made by the West Bengal government (Rural Household Survey, 2007), nearly 20 per cent of the rural population in the state are still unable to get two square meals a day.
Yet, the rich political dividend it paid to the Left Front and what it continues to pay them in terms of electoral support has also been noted by other political parties.
In a country where 60 per cent of the population is still dependent on agriculture for a living, affirmative action by any political party is likely to go a long way in winning it support. The Left parties realise this and in an attempt to stem its impact on a larger section of the rural voters, it has already launched a campaign to tell people that the measures promised in the Union Budget was nothing more than "tokenism and half-hearted measures." But at the same time, they are also trying to take credit for whatever pro-poor steps the government has taken. CPM politburo member Sitaram Yechury claimed recently, "The government removed pulses, wheat, and rice from the purview of forward market due to our pressure."
If it wants, the Congress can turn the heat on the Left for not doing much to elevate the condition of the rural poor. The land reforms in Bengal have led to fragmentation of land to such an extent that 80 per cent of the land is now with small and marginal farmers. Because of the small size of the land, even public sector banks have not considered offering credits to most farmers in the state. Unlike Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra or Karnataka, few farmers in Bengal have been exposed to institutional credit of high-scale. This is one main reason why there has been no incident of farmer's suicide in the state.
But the poor state of agriculture has forced a large section of the rural population in Bengal to remain at a subsistence level of existence. Even on this, the Left Front has come under criticism from different quarters for its poor performance in implementing the NREGS. The scheme was envisaged by the UPA government to help generate income among the rural poor. A sum of Rs 16,000 crore has been allocated for it in the Union budget with the condition that only those states that are able to implement the scheme fully will given more money.
It will be difficult for the Left now to shrug off the pro-poor measures initiated by the Congress as mere 'half-hearted tokenism'. With this year's Union Budget the Congress has managed to shift the focus from the "rise-and-fall" in the Sensex to rural India. In the 1970s Indira Gandhi had managed to fire the imagination of the common man with her "Garibi hatao" slogan. If the party under Sonia Gandhi also manages to achieve that feat it will be yet another example of how a government can intervene to protect the interest of the poorer sections of the society even within the ambit of a market economy. If that happens, it will surely teach the Left a lesson or two.