From as far as 50 metres, you could easily miss the patch of land in which white flower petals flutter in the gentle spring breeze. Walk a few steps closer, and you would gasp at the beauty of the flowers that appear like small, fluffy pom-poms: Papaver somniferum or poppy, which the Sumerians called the ‘flower of joy’.
Far from Amitav Ghosh’s sterling novel Sea of Poppies, a story which begins in the East India Company’s opium fields of Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh sometime in the 1830s, octogenarian Ram Iqbal Singh’s land in Gohda village is a humble pond of poppies. His cultivated plot of poppy is spread over a mere “duss biswa” or 3,571,428.6 sq feet – the size of a village pond.
Ram Iqbal’s son Jaswant Singh snaps a slender green stem and holds up a still green pod, ties together four thin metal incisors, and runs the sharp edges down the bulbous fruit – “dhedhi” in the local dialect – and holds it up for us to see a viscous pink-brown liquid ooze out in all its glory. “Yeh hai afeem,” says Jaswant, who holds a Ministry of Finance licence to cultivate opium. This liquid turns blackish-green at harvest time, which will be by the end of March.
From Romanticised History to Harsh Realities
Not far from the Ganges, Gohda and its adjoining villages are ideally located for poppy cultivation. The moisture of the Gangetic plains, the mild winter breeze, and an amiable sun are conducive for poppy cultivation across Ghazipur. But far from the 1830s when East India Company merchants, along with their Indian gomustas (agents) forced the poor and wretched farmers of Ghazipur to grow and harvest opium across villages, its massive cultivation in this district of east Uttar Pradesh has today been reduced to just 1 acre.
Besides Jaswant, there are two other licence holders – Shyamlal Kushwaha and Hairdwar Singh – who live in nearby Noorpur.
Jaswant’s “duss biswa” yields about 9 kg of opium which he sells to the Ghazipur Opium Factory (which also finds mention in the opening pages of Sea of Poppies), built by the East India Company in 1820 to process the drug that would be shipped in wooden chests on crooners to China.
“My grandfather would tell me stories about how most of Ghazipur would grow opium,” Ram Iqbal says in his gruff and hoarse Bhojpuri.
He also recalls stories his grandfather would narrate about indigo plantation in Ghazipur, which falls under the Zamania assembly constituency, and its other adjoining districts.
Is the Wind Blowing the BJP Way?
Ram Iqbal is fully aware of the East India Company’s monopoly over the drug that raked profits in millions of rupees.
“But today, we barely make Rs 50,000 from the legal sale of opium. Profit is minimal. Today, this belt is better known for rice cultivation, which is certainly more profitable,” Jaswant says, turning his face away with a mischievous smile when asked whether some of the opium is sold on the black market.
As the paddy threshing machine whirrs in the courtyard, Ram Iqbal jumps many years from the romance of the opium history to the harsh realities of the forthcoming elections in UP’s Poorvanchal. “Pichhli baar Sapa ke Omprakash Singh ko bhotwa (vote) diya tha. Lekin iss baar soch rahein hain ki Bhajpa ko deibe kari,” he says in a mix of Bhojpuri and Hindi.
Even though Ram Iqbal admits that Akhilesh Yadav has “done good work” by providing at least 12 hours of electricity, “which is sufficient to run the irrigation pumps”, this time, his preference is for the BJP. He won’t say why, but he admits that “paisa zaroor batega”, which is a reference to political parties’ attempts to “buy” people’s votes in these parts of eastern UP. “Har vote pe paanch-sau,” he says with a chuckle, exposing his khaini-stained teeth.
Besides his democratic duty to vote on 8 March, Ram Iqbal will perform the ritual involving the harvest of opium later that month. The opium pods have grown to a healthy size. The “naharni” (long metal pins with flat but sharp edges) and the “sithua” (in which the opium juice is collected overnight) are being readied. All that Ram Iqbal and Jaswant await is the globular pods to ripen.
Once harvested, the opium liquid and the remnants of the pods will be dispatched to the Ghazipur Opium and Alkaloids factory, where they will be processed before being delivered to pharmaceutical companies in India and abroad, for the preparation of drugs containing narcotine, thebaine, papaverine and codeine phosphate.
But far from being a walled, tranquil processing unit, the opium factory in the heart of Ghazipur town, of late, has become restive. This is primarily because the workers who toil away inside the secure, 43-acre sprawl on the banks of the Ganges, are dissatisfied with the working conditions, poor pay and little promise of advancing up the professional ladder.
We have met and appealed through written representations to Manoj Sinha, who is a central minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, seeking his intervention on matters of our employment terms and conditions and salary, which need revision. But he hasn’t bothered to take up our petitions, though he represents Ghazipur in the Parliament.Omprakash Yadav, member of the factory’s workers’ committee
The factory’s workers’ committee, of which Omprakash is a part, is aligned to the BJP’s Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh.
The Unheard Stories of Disgruntled Workers
His colleagues nod in agreement at the “awful treatment” meted out to the workers, especially the “seasonal labourers” whose pay packets are a pittance. “There are about 100 seasonal labourers and 559 sanctioned posts of full-time workers. The former work for six months a year and sit idle for the rest of the year. This continues for 10 years before they are regularised,” complains Santosh Singh, adding that “the workers’ conditions have improved only slightly from our ancestors, who worked here in the early years of the 19th century.”
Besides, the workers point out that the factory bosses’ decision to install modern mixture-cum-drying (MCD) machines has reduced the “percentage of morphine” in opium. “The old and time-tested sun-dried method yielded more and better quality morphine”, says Rakesh Singh, who also claims that workers are not given hand gloves, masks and safety shoes to “perform hazardous tasks among chemicals.”
While these human complaints go unheard, the only living beings who have no cause for complaint are the battalions of the workers’ simian friends, who partake in the opium slush, and sleep out the drug-induced haze atop the old banyan trees and red-bricked walls of this British-era souvenir to modern India.
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