Punjab witnessed a remarkable agitation of the debt-trapped peasantry and labourers in the month of June (initial reports have already appeared in the July issue of Liberation). It all started on 2 June when some peasants were beaten up at Tapa Mandi (a grain market at Barnala Tehsil in Sangrur district) by the local police and henchmen of the grain merchants. These peasants were protesting usurious extortion by ‘commission agents’ (a euphemism for money-lending middlemen who lend money at exorbitant interest rates hovering around 50% per annum or 4-5% every month) – in this case a farmer was being pestered for shelling out more even after he had repaid Rs. 1,50,000 as per a settlement mediated by the local DSP. A team comprising leaders of the CPI(ML) and Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ekta) reached the spot and announced a protest rally at Tapa on June 10. The CPI(ML) and mass organizations of labourers (Mazdoor Mukti Morcha) and students (AISA) also backed this call.
It was to foil this protest rally that the Amrinder Singh (a scion of the erstwhile ‘Patiala Raj’) government of Punjab launched an indiscriminate campaign of mass arrests. CPI(ML) leaders in Mansa district began to be picked up by the police two days ahead of the proposed Tapa march. On June 10, hundreds of protesters were arrested at Tapa while hundreds more were detained in different railway stations and bus stops. The arrested activists were lodged in jails all over the Malwa region. If the government had hoped to break the morale of the protesting peasants by unleashing such heavy police action, it ended up achieving the opposite. The peasants and activists all refused to apply for bail and instead turned the jails into discussion and protest camps for the movement. After two weeks the government was left with no other option but to release unconditionally all the arrested activists. On 25-26 June when the country remembered the thirtieth anniversary of the draconian Emergency, comrades in Punjab had their obvious reasons to celebrate. They had just won their first political victory in the battle against debts and the state that are driving peasants to suicides.
Why did the state ‘over-react’ to the protests of the peasantry? The state is obviously jittery. It is afraid of a powerful peasant backlash. And it sees such a possibility in the anti-debt protests brewing particularly in the districts of southern Malwa.
It is now widely known that the celebrated green revolution of Punjab has run into a major crisis. The crisis is deep, multi-dimensional and rooted into the specific structure of capitalist development of agriculture in Punjab . Falling incomes and mounting debts are two key aspects of this crisis. While the domestic market for the agricultural produce of Punjab remains constrained by low levels of demand (the hungry do not have the money to buy food, and the consumption levels of a largely unemployed and underemployed and underpaid working people are bound to be low), it is being further threatened by growing agricultural imports under the WTO regime. Meanwhile input costs have been steadily rising even as prices remain depressed and yields increasingly uncertain. Depleting water levels and deteriorating quality of the soil further compound the problem.
The upshot of this chronic crisis has been an explosive growth of the debt burden. According to a recent survey by the NSSO (59 th round), an Indian farmer household has an average debt of Rs 12,585. Punjab tops the list with an average as high as Rs 41,576, which translates into a total rural debt of Rs 5,000 crore. Knowledgeable observers of the Punjab agrarian scene, however, hold these figures to be a gross underestimate. Within Punjab , the debt burden hangs particularly heavy on the shoulders of the small farmers of Malwa who have little access to non-farm employment or income. The incidence of migration to foreign countries is also rather low in this region. The only way to ‘escape’ the crushing debt burden is to sell off the land (or see it get confiscated) and face the ignominy of turning into a labourer in one’s own land, or seek an ‘honourable exit’ through suicide.
The problem of debt is not confined to farmers alone. Agricultural and other rural labourers and small shopkeepers are burdened as well. In the case of labourers, the debt burden often takes the form of forced, unpaid labour, especially by women. The fight against debt is thus emerging as a common and unifying struggle for large sections of the working people in the districts of Malwa. The demand raised by the united struggle of small farmers, labourers and shopkeepers is simple: cancel the debts, free the labourers and stop confiscation of land. It is a crusade against suicides, confiscation and bondage, a battle for saving one’s land and life, for survival with freedom and dignity.
The money-lending middlemen or commission agents are of course a powerful lot. They are an integral part of the trader lobby and the ‘loan capital’ they employ comprises ‘investments’ by top bureaucrats, police officials and politicians. It is therefore not difficult to understand why the state is siding so solidly with the ‘commission agents’ and trying every possible trick from coercion to deception to stop the protesting peasants. The state is only too aware that unlike the farmers’ movements for remunerative prices or withdrawal of hikes in tariffs, the movement for ‘freedom from debt’ hits at the basic relations of land and wealth, private property and power.
Time was when the Indian ruling classes believed that in the green revolution of Punjab they had found their perfect answer to the ‘threat’ of a red revolution in India. The boom in Punjab not only halted the agrarian unrest inside the state, it also exercised a moderating impact on the growth of rural militancy elsewhere by creating a modicum of food security in the country and drawing agricultural labourers from the economically backward and politically turbulent regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh into its web of prosperity. The air today has begun to blow in the opposite direction. The crisis of green revolution has created a huge reservoir of misery and mass resentment and Punjab once again seems to be getting ready for a resurgence of communist-led peasant militancy. The bonds of unity and shared struggle developing between agricultural labourers and small and marginal farmers in the Mansa-Sangrur belt under the leaderhip of CPI(ML) portend such great possibilities.