Chennai/ Bengaluru: People dance in the rain for the fun of it. People take off their shirts after a big cricket win, for the heck of it. People roll on the ground, outside temples, for the religious fervour of it.
The nation’s capital has seen 28 days of such desperate protests by farmers from Tamil Nadu. On Monday, the farmers trying to meet the Prime Minister decided to shake out of their clothes to draw the government’s attention.
Did it work? Not really.
“The PM’s office has agreed to take a memorandum from a few of the farmer representatives. But we aren’t getting an appointment to meet him,” said Manoj Selvaraj, a Supreme Court advocate who has been trying to liaise for the farmers these past weeks.
These past weeks have seen the farmers doing semi-naked dharnas (loin-cloths for men and petticoats for the women), dharnas with dead snakes in their mouths and then with dead rats (to say this is all they get to eat now), dharnas carrying skulls (a reminder of the farmers’ suicides), held a mock funeral, tied a noose around each other’s necks and so on. Dramatic protests but none of which has drawn the Central government’s attention.
RK Radhakrishnan, Associate Editor, Frontline, said, “The BJP has no stake in Tamil Nadu, so they don’t care. That’s always been their policy. In UP, they waived loans of Rs 35,000 crore when the government there clearly cannot afford to. If a Gujarati farmer had joined this protest, the BJP’s response would have been different.”
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Take a look at the kind of response that the Tamil Nadu farmers’ protest has evoked with the BJP. On Monday, BJP spokesperson Tirupathi Narayanan criticised the naked farmers’ protest (though it was clear farmers were driven to despair from the lack of response).
“This is not the way they react, and it is a shame for Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu government should take responsibility, agriculture is a state subject, and government should waive crop loans, not expect this from the Centre,” he told CNN-News18.
Compensation that the farmers are asking – Rs 21,000 crores for crop losses due to a rain deficit of 62 percent during the last monsoon which the worst in a 100 years – does not fall under the national disaster response fund, he said. (Farmers' groups point out that the State has waived loans from cooperative banks; it's the loans of nationalised banks that are hanging over their heads).
“That fund can be given only for emergency relief. The Act was framed in 2005,” he said, while arguing that the protests are motivated by a state government that wants to wash off its responsibility.
“Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley have met them, and will consider their request. Should they come here now? They are running the full country,” Raja said angrily, when asked about the agrarian crisis at a press conference.
Quizzed more on why the BJP has been aloof, he retorted, “Don’t try to belittle the Indian Prime Minister. You are conspiring to do this, I am hurt. When Italian Sonia was there… has anyone protested? Has any farmer gone and done such a protest in Delhi? No, because she is Italian, she is white-skinned. They are scared. Now we have an Indian PM, so everyone thinks he can kick all he wants.”
Refusing to be drawn into a debate on why aid goes to foreign countries but not Indian farmers, he asked people to shun an anti-Modi mindset and went on to call all media-persons ‘anti-national.’
Asked about the tax-payer’s money, he hit back at one journalist, “Tell me, what is your tax money? I will pay you right now. Come on, tell me how much is it, whatever you have paid till now (sic).”
The BJP’s apathy towards Tamil Nadu’s farmers is so severe that even BJP leaders in neighbouring States weighed in with an equally insensitive opinion.
“The Tamil Nadu High Court ordered waiver of farmers’ loan will only encourage Dravidian parties and CMs like Siddaramaiah to pursue appeasement and populist policies,” wrote BJP’s Karnataka General Secretary C T Ravi.
This came a day after he praised the UP government for its bold farm loan waivers, and calling out the Karnataka government to also waive loans for drought-hit farmers in his State.
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Neither the Centre nor the two warring factions of the ruling AIADMK have had the time to listen to the farmers’ plight.
“If they (BJP) spend even Rs 10, they would wonder how it would be useful to them. Tamil Nadu people are very clear they won’t vote for national parties. So that is the major drawback,” said Selvaraj, having seen the interactions of the farmers and Central government officials during the protests.
“One way of protesting is to do a dharna. These farmers have gone past all that. Their protests are showing such despair – they have nowhere to go, they have pledged all their land, faced crop losses three years in a row. They have nothing left and are at their wit’s end. They are not even able to move to cities to get daily-wage jobs, as the city jobs have dried up,” he said.
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