SS (Shetkari Sanghatana) underlines five distinguishing features of the new agrarianism.
First, the new agrarianism does not put on a pedestal lifestyle as being particularly virtuous for its blissful simplicity and spiritual richness.
Second, it does not glorify the pastoral/agrarian pattern. Rather, the new agrarianism is aimed at ensuring, for the farmers, highest possible degrees of freedom as also a life of self-respect on par with that of the non-farming communities.
Third, the SS recognizes that capital formation of the new industry needs to come out of surplus from agriculture. In the Soviet Union, the matter was debated in during the Stalin reign, to the conclusion by Stalin sending tanks against farmers. In India, the debate was resolved by establishing a complex of economic system which encouraged higher production but denied the farmer remunerative prices.
Fourth, unlike peasants’ movements of the past, which pitched tenants against the landlords, the lower castes against the higher castes, the SS farmers’ movement was not ‘divisive’ of the rural community. The significant line of internal contradiction was between “Bharat” and “India”. Mahatma Gandhi as also Marx have emphasized the conflict between the town and the country. Sharad Joshi’s view does not make a geographical division. As he states it, “Bharat is that notional entity which continues to be exploited by the same policies as those of the Colonial Rule even after the British left; while India is that notional entity which has obtained the inheritance of Colonial exploitation.”
The misery in the village is not caused by the “slightly” better-off farmers in the neighborhood but by an “outside exploiter” – the urban India. “Transcontinental imperialism” represented by the British has been replaced by “internal colonialism.”
Finally, since surplus in agriculture expropriated through a policy of cheap raw materials and artificially depressed prices constitute the main technique used by the exploiters (the government) the agenda of the SS has been to bring in a one-point programme of “Remunerative prices”.
The remunerative prices for their agricultural produce are to be acquired not through a hackneyed system of Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs), Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), Food Corporation of India (FCI), and Public Distribution System (PDS). These four institutions have been the basic instruments of exploitation of the farmers. A genuinely free market assures a price that adequately covers the cost of production. Freedom of market and opposition to all forms of State interventions in the market mechanism becomes the basic plank of the farmers’ movement.
The rationale for the remunerative price agenda is as follows:
Thus, the overall philosophy of the Shetkari Sanghatana is that price incentives in agriculture and a “natural” process of capital accumulation driven by an agriculture revolution can benefit the entire economy and break the vicious circle of poverty. As opposed to this, an accumulation process driven by industrial revolution (before agricultural revolution takes place) is always premised upon a coercive expropriation of agricultural surplus.
The SS is the only farmers’ organization in favour of an uncontrolled market in agriculture produce and international free trade in both inputs and outputs in agriculture. Though regional in base, the Shetkari Sanghatana has been able to force a debate on the developmental path chosen by India in the context of its demands at the highest level. The organization has played a crucial role in shaping the ideology and the demands of the largest coalition of farmers’ organisations in India.
This essay is part of a series from the Indian Liberals , a project of the . This essay is an excerpt from a booklet published by “Shetkari Sanghatana” titled “Visionaries of a new “Bharat ” in 1999. The original version can be accessed on this .
