Our rural disconnect

Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Vidarbha refelcts the way we priortise our issues

It’s been about three weeks since Rahul Gandhi toured for a day some six villages in western Vidarbha, a region that has been in the news for the continuing farmer suicides for a decade now, as part of his much-reported ‘Discover India’ tour.

But the weeks since have been eventful for many others here, mainly because the Gandhi scion mentioned the names of two women in his 10-minute interrupted speech in the Parliament during the crucial vote on N-deal.

The two women he met during his tour, Kalavati and Shashikala, would have otherwise faded with memory. Within minutes of his speech, the media hit the roads to meet them.
Even those who had an allergy to rural India were in search-mode. Sonkhas and Jalka — two sleepy villages — suddenly came alive to regain their places on the map. Sulabh International, an NGO, adopted Kalavati and pledged to give the mother of nine children Rs25,000 a month for 20 years, turning her into the richest villager in Jalka.
Sulabh’s initiative has evoked mixed reactions. Some welcomed it; others shrugged it off with the remorse that there are over 5000 widows facing similar plight in Vidarbha, and Gandhi’s visit or Sulabh’s intervention wouldn’t make any difference to their lives.
Truly, there are eight million people in crisis in western Vidarbha, going by government estimates.

Yet Gandhi’s ‘flying’ visit was important. For one, it sent strong signals within his own party — whose chief minister or agriculture minister in Maharashtra have not visited any village to know the extent to which things have gone wrong. Two, he could see how a once-prosperous region wilted before policies overnight. Three, as the future hope of a national party, he may now have a better idea of mass reality even in comparatively progressive states like Maharashtra. And four, the regional and national media could discover Kalavati!

The point is not the scion’s visit or discovery. The point is the politicians, the media and the intelligentsia have discovered the two villages for the first time because Rahul Gandhi went there. Not because of the Kalavatis or Shashikalas who live there.

In a small hamlet inhabited by the de-notified Pardhi tribe, where Gandhi spent a good one hour, a landless villager chuckled that if a Congress leader in Yavatmal was asked to reach their village immediately, it’d take him at least two hours to discover the place, though it is just 7 km from the town! “No one comes here,” was a common complaint that Gandhi heard in almost all the villages. “And when we go to them, no one has time for us,” they told him.

This visit brought to the fore a stark reality, the entire political leadership of Vidarbha cutting across lines is hopelessly mediocre and completely disconnected from the rural masses. The real interest of the leaders in rural areas today remains the cheap land.
Hopefully, Gandhi’s visit may help local leaders — some of whom are among the leading moneylenders — regain sight of a beleaguered fraternity at least in the election year. Villagers expressed their anger against local satraps during their interaction with him. In the hour of crisis, and of dramatic proportions like this, support is a minimal expectation rural masses covet from their leadership.

When the prime minister announced a relief package for Vidarbha in 2006 he was aggrieved by the ignorance of his party’s regional leadership about the critical issues farmers faced in the region.

Pity, the shortsightedness of local leadership — from the left to the right — resulted in a wasteful relief package announced by the PM. It did not capture local needs and was driven by supplies as there was no local input in the planning of the package. The CAG’s performance audit report of the PM package earlier this year proved that Rs3750 crore from the public exchequer went down the drain, without any improvement in farmers’ economic conditions.

The saga of Vidarbha is not just about suicides. It’s about a complete breakdown of the region’s sustenance. In 1956, when the region got ceded to Maharashtra, the state’s reorganisation commission had said it’s a region with a “surplus agriculture economy”. Exactly 50 years on, it’s fallen off the hook. That is the bigger calamity, scripted by man, not nature. The polity’s failure to connect with crucial processes in rural parts has disastrous consequences and Vidarbha is an example of that.

Post Gandhi’s visit, the central issue of Vidarbha’s sagging economy got buried. Alas, Vidarbha is not an exception — the trend appears pan-Indian and reflects in the way our issues get prioritised in national discourse. Placing non-issues over livelihood issues, crucial for India’s long-term economic goals, has a context: We now have a dominant urbane leadership without rural connection. Gandhi’s ‘Discovery of India’ tour is perhaps an acknowledgement of this fact.