1. An acute systemic crisis has engulfed agrarian India. The symptoms of the crisis can be seen most graphically and tragically in the surge of starvation deaths and farmers’ suicides taking place not just in backward regions but even in the most advanced pockets of the much-trumpeted green revolution. While farmers suffer from distress sale, mounting debt burden and frequent crop failures, agricultural labourers reel under the burden of growing unemployment and falling real wages. We, agrarian labourers who have to bear the brunt of this agrarian crisis have no other way but to fight back with all the strength and determination at our command. Through our organised and united resistance we can and must not only defeat the attacks on our own lives, and win and secure our inalienable rights but also lead the nation out of the current impasse.
2. If the proximate cause of the crisis is to be located in the WTO-dictated trade liberalisation package, on a more fundamental level it stems from the stupid strategy, pursued since independence, of trying to promote capitalist farming without first clearing the soil of the deeply entrenched survivals of feudalism. For all the tall talk of “zamindari abolition” and land redistribution, not even 2 per cent of the total cultivable land in the country has been redistributed till date. While 60 per cent rural households still have access to only 15 per cent of the agriculturally operated land, the top 20 per cent layer of the rural society continue to control more than two-thirds of the total land under cultivation. Rather than providing land to the tiller, which proved to be the key to democracy and development in socialist as well as developed capitalist countries, successive governments at the centre and the states assigned the task of rural development to the reactionary forces of landlords and kulaks, providing them with all kinds of support. The “green revolution” was precisely such a strategy of “betting on the strong” and now the whole thing has started backfiring.
3. The official remedy prescribed to solve these problems – the new agricultural policy wedded to liberalisation (removal of quantitative restrictions on imports, withdrawal of subsidies, etc.) and corporatisation (direct or contract farming by Indian or foreign monopoly houses coupled with large-scale entry of agribusiness corporations) and, of course, the removal of ceiling restrictions to pave the way for all this – has proved worse than the disease. The enhanced and unscrupulous dependence on imported biotechnological products is fraught with dangerous consequences, while the encouragement of reckless switch-over from food crops to cash crops has already destroyed the nation’s food security and exposed our farmers to the vagaries of international market. While mountains of foodgrains rot in FCI godowns and starvation deaths stalk large parts of the country, farmers are condemned to resort to distress sale in the absence of assured government procurement at a minimum support price. Huge reduction in public investment in infrastructure development, notably in the field of small irrigation projects, and criminal negligence in protecting our biodiversity from greedy patent-seekers from abroad, have irreparably weakened the fundamentals of Indian agriculture.
4. We, agricultural labourers, are made to bear the brunt of this man-made, state-sponsored crisis. We are sought to be crushed under the combined pressure of the new onslaughts and the old modes of oppression. While the age old structure of economic exploitation and caste, gender and ethnic oppression is sought to be reinforced by systematic application of feudal-kulak violence and state repression including brutal massacres, the new policies are leading to growing land alienation, declining employment and real wages, systematic eviction of adivasis and denial of their traditional rights over land, forests and hill tracts, and revival of a state of semi-bondage especially for migrant workers. And then there is this ubiquitous ‘development mafia’, the corrupt politician-bureaucrat-contractor nexus, which siphons off the lion’s share of funds sanctioned in the name of employment generation and rural development schemes and disbursed through the panchayati raj institutions and other channels. As for our economic plight, even the most recent National Labour Commission conceded that “Agricultural workers get employment for less than 6 months in a year, there [is] acute indebtedness amongst the rural and agricultural workers … approximately 40% of agricultural workers are migrants … [working] 12 hours a day and getting no weekly rest, they are hardly provided any housing and their payments are delayed and defaulted. The most severely affected migrant workers are women and children. … The enforcement of minimum wages is a real problem… We have neglected the agricultural sector during the last 50 years although it has been the backbone of our society and economy.”
5. The Commission did in a way mention the need to put in place an “effective framework of laws and social security” for agricultural workers, but the demand for a comprehensive central legislation for agricultural labourers continues to be denied by government after government at the Centre. The government now talks about an umbrella legislation for the unorganised sector as a whole, once again bypassing the insistent demand for a separate legislation for agricultural labourers and ignoring the fact we, agricultural labourers, constitute the overwhelming majority of unorganised workers in the country. All talks of empowerment of working women are bound to remain empty till the government could enact and enforce a legislation for agricultural labourers guaranteeing equal wage for equal work and adequate maternity and childcare benefits to the more than 50 million-strong contingent of women agricultural workers, who, in turn, are the biggest segment of working women in the country. Ironically, with the sole exception of Kerala, all other state governments including those donning the progressive mantle have refused to enact any legislation for agricultural labourers. The Left government of Tripura has put its own legislation in cold storage while the CPI(M) in West Bengal refuses to recognise the existence of agricultural labourers as a class, refusing to open a branch of its agricultural labour wing in the state even though the founding conference of the organisation was held in West Bengal itself.
6. The attitude of the propertied classes and their representatives in state power becomes crystal clear as soon as we raise our democratic demands. When, as producers of food and cloth for the whole people we claim ownership of the lands we till, they invoke the sacred “fundamental right” to property enshrined in the Constitution, making a laughing stock of the “directive principles” which require the state to secure to all of us “work, a living wage… a decent standard of life” and so on. When we ask for even a small rise in wage, let alone demanding the statutory minimum wage, the sky seems to come crashing on the heads of kulaks, landlords and rich peasants. They do not refuse to pay when the prices of fertilisers, insecticides and diesel go up, or when electricity and irrigation costs escalate, but the moment we seek even a meagre increase in wages, they begin to talk of enhanced costs of cultivation. If we press further, they try to displace us by hiring machines and cheaper labour from outside. When these tricks do not work, they let loose their goons and the administration and the police rush in their favour. Clearly, their view is that the entire burden of the crisis must be borne by the direct producers, while they enjoy the sunny side of economic reforms.
7. We straightaway reject this logic of the rich. We are for a comprehensive and constructive resolution of the crisis based on radical land reform. To this end, we the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat, in close alliance with poor and middle peasants, are locked in a mortal combat with the old and new landlords, the agrarian bourgeoisie or kulaks and the upwardly mobile, reactionary sections of rich peasants. No amount of violence can deter us from the path of struggle. We must prepare and organise ourselves to wage a determined resistance in every form necessary and defeat the anti-poor anti-worker design of the rich and the powerful at all costs.
8. Our struggle is not confined to the issues of land, wages and employment alone. As producers and workers, we have every right to secure a decent standard of living and an improved quality of life. But our children are still held in social and cultural bondage, they have to bear the burden of illiteracy and malnutrition, educational backwardness and all sorts of discrimination. We know that it is not possible to bring about any significant and durable improvement in our lives without changing the existing order based on exploitation and oppression of the working majority. And political power holds the key to any major socio-economic and cultural transformation. This is why the ruling classes and their state, all the old and new forces of domination are filled with horror when they see us rising and marching with the red flag.
9. We are confident of victory in this protracted war because we know our strength. We are the largest contingent of the Indian working class. And we are a growing army: the proportion of landless households to total rural households increased from 35 per cent in 1987 to 41 per cent in 2000. We are not alone, we encompass and have close ties with the vast majority of toilers and so-called weaker sections of society – dalits and other oppressed backward castes, adivasis, women, national and religious minorities – whose multiple movements together are contributing to a mighty awakening and assertion of the Indian people for democracy, development, social justice and genuine independence. Together with the industrial workers and the labouring peasantry we constitute a formidable force, the biggest and strongest bulwark for freedom, democracy and people’s unity.
10. We are the inheritors of a glorious legacy of heroic peasant rebellions and militant people’s struggles. Our predecessors have shed their precious blood to free this country from the yoke of British colonialism and thousands of our brothers and sisters are still waging valiant struggles for a better tomorrow, for a real people’s democracy and socialism. We have to build on this great heritage to chart a new course of advance. In the course of our fight for land and liberty, dignity and democracy, we have been putting up a bold resistance to imperialist domination and the forces of feudal reaction and communal fascist violence. Now we have reached a stage where we must be able to make our presence felt as a class, not just at the grassroots and in the rural society, but on the national plane and in the country as a whole. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, the revolutionary party of the proletariat and in close solidarity with the toiling, struggling millions, we shall eradicate feudalism, and defeat the emerging reactionary kulak power to march ahead to a new India, a people’s democratic India, a socialist India.