A Colossal Wreck (46 page)

April 3

To meet India’s rural crisis face to face we drive along the lovely wooded roads of Wyanad, a district in northeastern Kerala. To our east rise the Western Ghat mountains. Last night we stayed in Sultan’s Battery, so called because it had been the last stand of the local sultan, when the British came three centuries ago.

Along this road the ancient forests have long since logged off and the state-planted young teak trees are usually cut, to judge by the piles
at the side of the road, with the trunk at about twelve inches in diameter. Familiar follies of state-sponsored forestry have occurred. Some years ago the clumps of bamboo, often forty feet across and fifty feet high, were taken off the ridges and slopes of the Western Ghats and
Eucalyptus globulus
put in, the same way it was in California in the 1870s. Elephants don’t like it because it replaces their natural habitat and drives them out in search of forage. As the old forest was cut, locals claim the weather cycles in Wyanad changed for the worse, putting paid to the orange groves.

We turn off the road through the woods and onto a smaller lane, guided by the area rep of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), whose red flags and local offices are conspicuous throughout the district. Then we walk up a path past pepper vines, bananas, cashew trees, jackfruit and some coffee bushes to a single-story concrete-block house. Here are Dinesan, two of his sisters and two little children. The mother and another sister are away. Dinesan has a job as a projectionist, though Wyanad’s farm crisis means few can afford to go to the movies anymore and so the local cinema is failing. The proprietor refuses to screen the skin movies now churning out of Indian studios.

The property is a house on three acres. Livestock: one cow, one goat. Nearly a year ago Dinesan’s father, B. M. Kamelasan, took note of the collapsing price of pepper, vanilla, and coffee, set the sums he’d borrowed from the banks and the moneylenders against the expected yields, and decided to end it all with the one agent he could get for free, a pesticide called monocrotophos made by Ciba-Geigy. It’s a horrible way to die.

This is no tableau of beleaguered sharecroppers in a tar-paper shanty in West Virginia fifty years ago. The family is trim, the two kids clean and nicely dressed. A farmer’s desperation and suicide do not require the backdrop of a rural slum, even though, after the collapse in agricultural prices, Dinesan and his family have their backs against the wall, with a mudslide of debt (tiny by Western standards) engulfing them. Amid the terrible crisis of the small family farmers in the American Midwest in the past thirty years there have been plenty of suicides or, to put it more tactfully, higher than expected
deaths, in trim ranch houses, where the suicide might be reported as accidental death so the survivors get the insurance money.

Kerala has near 100 percent literacy and a tradition of voracious newspaper reading. The libraries are stuffed with poor people catching up on local and world events. Young Dinesan talks about the reasons for the crisis, the collapse of subsidies, the role of middlemen, the World Bank’s subsidy to Vietnam whose cheap and inferior pepper comes to Sri Lanka, a free port, and then into Kerala whose Malabar pepper is the finest in the world. As with most peasants and farmers across the world, he understands the world picture. He talks about the weakness of the dollar against the euro.

An hour later it’s time to go. The little boy climbs a cashew tree and brings me down a fruit with the large cashew shell growing out of its top. The fruit tastes a little like mango. Cashews came from the New World via the Portuguese, along with chili, tapioca, tomatoes, pineapples, cocoa, potatoes, and groundnuts. That was early globalization. It was quicker in those days. The first housewives on the Indian subcontinent got chilies, a basic for what we regard as the eternal Indian diet, in about 1550, and not too long thereafter it was on every household menu in the whole of India.

In 1957, in free elections, the Communists swept to power in Kerala and delivered on their promise of land reform in a decade where US dollars and the CIA leagued with the local land barons and international firms like United Fruit to crush it in Guatemala and Iran. The Communists delivered on land, on education, and on health. By 1959, under US pressure, the central government in New Delhi struck, dismissing Kerala’s government. The long counterattack followed, with brief interruptions by left coalitions. Kerala’s still the most literate state in India. Its infant mortality rates are the lowest. Its schools are still good.

Last year Sainath wrote about a little girl whose father, working across the state line as a day laborer in Karnataka, scrapes the money together to send her back on the bus each day to get taught by the nuns in Wyanad, a devotion to his daughter’s future all the more remarkable because it’s a daughter, not a son he’s sending back. Millions of Indian parents crave sons, not daughters. When the ultrasound picks
up the evidence of a female embryo in utero, the parents all too often avail themselves of choice and abort that embryo.

Wyanad is a district caught in the backwash of “market freedoms.” The Christian churches, who brought in thousands of immigrants into Wyanad after World War II are in trouble, with their Sunday collections down to 10 percent of normal. Priests aren’t being paid, though bishops surely must be. Movie houses have closed down. There are less Tamil migrant laborers around and those that are can’t afford the 10-rupee ticket.

At least the Kerala State Road Transport Corp’s buses are doing a booming business, ferrying people looking for work in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Thousands cross every day. Back in 1995 there were six buses a day to Kutta, in Karnataka; now there are twenty-four daily. On them are skilled men—masons, carpenters, electricians. These are the people who worked on the half-built houses, many of them substantial villas, one sees mile after mile each side of Wyanad’s rural roads, abandoned after farm income slid into the pit.

The state-licensed toddy shops are in trouble too. Toddy is a fermented brew from the sap of the palmyra palm. We visit Uttaman, the toddy man. He’s a genial fellow, with the slightly knowing grin, redolent of tolerance for human folly, one often finds in barkeeps and kindred providers. Uttaman pays 48,000 rupees a year for his license, 100,000 rupees for the welfare fund for his six employees. These days they’re tapping 120 liters of toddy a day. Five years ago he brewed and sold 250 bottles a day, today only ten or fifteen. He’s being ruined by arrack, a spirit distilled from fermented toddy that’s illegal in Kerala but for sale just across the Kabini river in Karnataka. It’s stronger, and because it’s illegal and the distillers don’t pay taxes, cheaper.

Uttaman offers me a glass of toddy. It’s pleasant. He lets the toddy ferment for twelve hours, to get an alcohol content of 12 percent. If he leaves it to ferment for twenty-four hours, it will go to 24 percent. It’s got a shelf life of forty-eight hours. As I sip, Uttaman describes to us the visit from the cops after Sainath’s piece on him was published in the
Hindu
in January. Why was he talking to Sainath, they asked him. Sainath was the man who’d personally overthrown Naidu, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Sainath gives a gratified smirk.

April 4

Sainath tells me he’s had difficulty sleeping since he covered the suicides in Andhra Pradesh from the late ’90s on. All told, he’s visited 300 families in which a suicide has occurred. How did it all begin? From the early ’90s forward, zero investment and a collapse of credit ravaged Indian agriculture. The landless poor saw working days crash as a result. Crippling rises in the costs of seed, fertilizer, utilities, pesticides, and water crushed small farms. New user fees sent health costs soaring, and such costs have become a huge component of rural family debt. Newly commercialized education destroyed the hopes of hundreds of thousands of women, as families, given the narrowed options, favored sons over daughters. Farm kids simply dropped out.

Ruin metastasized. Sainath showed me an 8×10 picture he’d made of a woman, Aruna, positioning a photograph of her husband Bangaru Ramachari among the implements he made for farmers, getting payment in kind. Amid the slump he’d no customers for two years. He’d died of hunger, too proud to admit, in his last week before he collapsed, that he’d not eaten for five days. The shift from food crops to cash crops, backed by the World Bank, produced another harvest of disaster. New entrepreneurs replacing old government-run networks sold bad seeds that would not germinate.

“The suicides,” Sainath says, “are a symptom of vast agrarian distress. For every farmer who has committed suicide there are thousands more facing the same huge crisis who have not taken their lives. In fact, we will never know how many suicides there have been, since there are so many ways of not counting them. We do know that in seven or eight states since ’97 and ’98 and most particularly since 2000 farmers have taken their lives by the thousand. In the single district of Anantapur, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, so beloved by the neoliberals because of its ‘reforms,’ over 3,000 farmers have taken their lives between 1997/98 and 2003.”

Increasingly, from 1999 to 2000, Sainath and some vigilant local journalists noticed a mismatch between what they were seeing in the fields and the official data. Narasimha Reddy, who works for the biggest Telugu newspaper,
Eenadu
(with a circulation of around
one million), started writing about this gap. The government stats were saying that suicides due to “distress” were no more than fifty-four statewide in 2000. This was strange because when Narasimha and Sainath went to villages to investigate suicides they’d routinely find six or seven. That rattled them. Then they started looking more closely at the death statistics, and found out what the bureaucrats were doing, first as conspiracy, then out of habit.

By far the most common method of suicide was drinking the pesticide dumped on farmers by the government. The journalists found that the police had listed these as “suicides due to stomach ache.” Sometimes they said that the pain of the stomach ache “had prompted the victims to take pesticide.” Other methods of concealment included counting a death as suicide, but not a “distress” suicide. Or as an “accident.” Or as a death due to natural causes or accident. Many of those killing themselves were women running small farms in the absence of husbands who were looking for work elsewhere, or who had already taken their own lives. But because these women rarely owned the land themselves, they weren’t classified as farmers, so their suicides were not counted as farm-related.

Then there’s the stigma of suicide. Many families don’t want it, and that’s a big factor in suppressing the numbers. Again, legally speaking, post mortems are free, but to prove that a relative committed suicide the police extort money from family members to pay for the autopsy. Officials undercount suicides among dalits and landless laborers or among migrant farmers who’ve given up, gone to a town and—severed from their social setting—killed themselves.

While these farmers were being driven to suicide by the thousand in Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, the state’s chief minister, was being iconized in the Western press as the apex poster-boy for neoliberal “reform.” The
Wall Street Journal
hailed him as “a model for fellow state leaders.”
Time
crowned him “South Asian of the year.” Bill Gates called on Naidu. So did Bill Clinton. So did Paul O’Neill. John Wolfenson, President of the World Bank, tossed him loan upon loan.

The press projected onto Naidu all their fantasies of what a neoliberal modernizer should be, building an IT-based economy in
“Cyberabad.” Oppression of women? Naidu’s fixed that, crowed the
Financial Times
: “In a country where lower caste women are locked out of decision-making, the government of Andhra Pradesh is sponsoring a social revolution … Women now dominate the village square.”

Indeed, World Bank officials clapped their hands as Naidu kicked aside the panchayats—democratically elected village councils—and announced he was empowering women in new local organizations. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. The new outfits usually turned out to be small coteries with the right connections, which got Naidu’s patronage and which filched or wasted the money while the genuinely democratic panchayats were sidelined and starved of funding. The collapse of democracy—that is, the framework for collective action to combat disaster—in the countryside contributed to the terrible harvest of death.

On December 27, 2002, Keith Bradsher of the
New York Times
issued a worshipful résumé of Naidu’s assets and achievements, selecting for particular mention the asset that Bradsher deemed vital to Naidu’s political grip on Andhra Pradesh. “Naidu and his allies,” Bradsher breathlessly confided to the NYT’s readers, “speak Telugu, a language spoken only in this state and by a few people in two adjacent states.” What Bradsher was saying was that Naidu spoke the same language as the other seventy million inhabitants of Andhra Pradesh. It was as though someone ascribed Tony Blair’s political successes in the United Kingdom to his command of English.

Apart from Naidu’s wondrous fluency in his native tongue, Bradsher fixed upon other achievements likely to excite an American business readership: “Mr. Naidu,” he excitedly confides, “has succeeded in raising electricity prices here by 70 percent” and “has enacted a law requiring union leaders to be workers from the factory or office they represent … Andhra Pradesh has also relaxed some of the restrictions on laying off workers.”

In the spring of 2004 the Naidu balloon exploded with a gigantic thunderclap. The Indian poor entered his field of vision decisively, even as they shattered the expectations of almost every national political pundit. Rarely has a poster-boy been more humiliatingly
peeled from the billboards and tossed in the gutter. Naidu’s elected coalition plummeted from 202 seats to a quarter of that number.

The verdict, from the landless poor to farmers to rural women to the denizens of Cyberabad, was well-nigh unanimous: the Naidu model had been a disaster for Andhra Pradesh, as statistics had been inexorably recording even during his glory years. Economic growth was abysmal and other vital statistics equally wretched. The 5,000 suicides remain the prime epitaph for a politician hailed in the West more than any other Indian as the harbinger of neoliberal triumph. Only the Argentinean collapse was as brutal a rebuff to elite opinion.