(This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
In this Republic of Fakes that we live in – us, the deliverers of fake news, and them, the creators of it; we can all perhaps agree on one thing: ghosts.
This takes me back to a hot summer afternoon in Delhi’s Nehru Place. I was a television reporter with NDTV. And before the budget, I was tasked with getting vox pops or voices from the people, on what their expectations were.
As I shoved the trademark red NDTV mike in the face of a man sitting on the stairs in the dusty marketplace – home to the Microsoft office and also every grey market computer seller. Before I could ask him anything about money or the budget, he had a question for me. “Madam, kya duniya ulti ho-nay wali hai?” (Is the world turning upside down?)
He mistook me for the tabloid station India TV that had broadcast a soothsayer who predicted that in the next ten days the world was going to turn turtle. Ignorant me rubbished the news at the time but I now I think it was truly prophetic.
Asthana’s Smoke Trail
Think about it. The CBI seems to be carrying so many ghosts, that it turned completely upside down. Some say the CBI’s Special Director Rakesh Asthana, now facing charges of bribery, carries ghosts that go all the way back to his days as investigating officer in Gujarat, who pronounced in 2002, that the Godhra train bogey that caught fire, killing 59 karsewaks was a well-planned conspiracy.
The pronouncement was seen at the time to suit the Gujarat government and larger Sangh Parivar’s response at the time to the pogrom against Muslims that followed: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Distorting scientist Isaac Newton’s laws of physics so that the mob could be seen as the spontaneous combustion of angry Hindus after the train bogey was burnt. When Asthana was made the number 2 man in the country’s top investigating agency, ghosts in the system and naysayers outside it whispered – look at the man’s smoke-trail… is there a law of physics at work?
As allegations against Asthana got louder and the heat too much to bear, a curious ghostly glow directed our gaze elsewhere – to the man directly above him.
No Smoke Without Fire
In a haze of allegations and counter allegations, there were whispers that the CBI director was asked to go on leave after midnight on Tuesday, along with a slew of officers that were allegedly poking their noses into cases Asthana was investigating.
More fog and filthy air: The next morning, it appears as if snoops from another investigating body – the Intelligence Bureau were hanging around the CBI director’s home and were roughly held by their collars, as seen in loop on TV and escorted out.
The only thing that is amply clear is that wherever you look, reality has morphed into exciting macabre scenes from Macbeth. “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” If only it had no consequences in the real world. Every night, our TV screens are crowded by people calling out each other’s ghosts. And while our country’s investigating agencies are turning each other upside down, we are going into a season of state elections where no facts are in the mix at all. The fact that diesel prices are going through the roof and this matters most to farmers who need every last drop for their tractors.
Instead, their very real and tragic voices are reduced to parodies on TV, night after night. The news showcases those ridiculous and stubborn farmers who unthinkingly burn their stubble to clear their fields for the next crop, causing the air in cities in North India to clog up with smoke.
But no one wants to give these farmers reasons for their ridiculousness, where the joke is actually on us. We, who want more food, more luxury, more everything, no real politics, no real responsibilities in the part we play in invisible-ising farmers’ distress, so our markets and the pleasures they afford us as consumers continually expand.
But... What About Rural Distress?
Meanwhile in rural India…
…I spoke with an old, trusty farmer friend who is also a socialist and a political activist. He is a rich farmer by the standards of Bundelkhand, one of the poorest districts in Uttar Pradesh on the state’s border with Madhya Pradesh. So he gets by. He has enough to eat unlike most of his fellow agriculturists. “You know Revati,” he said, his voice heavy and weary, “there’s marking out going on in our area for land to be acquired for the expressway. And farmers whose lands are marked out are celebrating ki jaise koi tyauhar ho – as if it’s a festival.”
“Every farmer is desperately trying to sell his land for any price at all.” This wasn’t the case ten years ago, he added.
But look at what’s happened just this year. The price of an absolutely essential fertiliser – DAP or diammonium phosphate – has shot up by 10 percent or an extra 140 rupees per 50 kilo bag just this month, at the start of the rabi season.
Overall, the price per bag in UP has gone up Rs 490 per bag between March and October, my farmer friend said.
And the math for the rice and wheat growing farmers is appalling. It costs about Rs 1,500 to grow a quintal of rice and what a farmer can expect to get for it in today’s market is just about 1700. Imagine the small and marginal farmers who only have 2 or 3 bighas of land – which in Bundelkhand means they can grow upto 4 quintals per bigha or 8 on two. That means he earns Rs 1,600 on 2 bighas of land – for an entire agricultural season. So they don’t grow rice or wheat if they have such small tracts of land. That wouldn’t just be suicidal. It’s inconceivable. Suicide, you see, isn’t all that inconceivable any more.
Some Issues Aren’t Sexy Enough for TV
So the small and marginal farmers grow vegetables. And we’ve seen many farmers agitations these last couple of seasons with the vegetables being tossed out onto inter-state highways because farmers are so fed up with not getting even basic sustenance prices from the market for growing them.
But real problems of real people don’t make it to TV studios or the pages of papers until farmers die. What of the living?
Are farmers not meant to have any aspirations? In an election season, Modi and Amit Shah and their election team must be worried about the extreme, and nation-wide rural distress. Perhaps the ghost of things to come in the state elections around the corner and the national elections next year are making them paranoid enough to not allow any dissent.
That’s at least what their detractors and even a few distant observers like me are concluding from the surreal drama unfolding around us.
Asthana today, another tomorrow. I solemnly swear to puncture these spirit-like seances with regular doses of reality whether the election conversations factor them in or not.
(Revati Laul is a Delhi-based journalist and film-maker, and the author of ‘The Anatomy of Hate’, forthcoming from Context /Westland in November 2018. She tweets at @RevatiLaul.)
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