Volume 6, No. 5, May 2005

Punjab, known as the most developed state of India is going to be a centre of people’s struggle. The model of green revolution projected in the sixties by the Indian rulers as a part of the policies of the American Imperialists started turning yellow in 1973-74. Now even its leaves have withered. Its negative effects on every sphere of the people’s lives have clearly emerged. The peasants and rural workers associated with and dependent on agriculture, who are a larger part of the population of this predominantly agricultural state, have been crushed the most under this so called model of development. They came out on the roads right from their villages to the national capital to safeguard their interests. The centres of their struggles are becoming the villages, instead of the cities. The issues of their struggles no longer pertain to the decade of the 70s-80s, these have transgressed the wishes of any subjective intellectual. Newspapers in Punjabi are also wailing about it. This extremely crisis ridden situation is presented thus by a prominent bourgeois paper, Punjabi Tribune.

"There has never been a phase after independence when the granary of our country has become so depressed, so gloomy and so helpless as it appears now. The incident of Chathewala seems to have pushed this depression to the extreme. This tale of woe is this that a poor peasant of Chathewala got a loan from an Arthiya, (commission agent/money lender) which according to the news, he couldn’t repay. The case went to the court, in which the honourable Judge passed orders for the auction of 35 Kanals of his land for the recovery of the loan. Now the police were pressed into service to get the orders implemented. Whereas according to peasants, they would not let it be auctioned. Thousands of peasants assembled in the village. On the other hand, the police established check posts on the kucha and pucca roads and even in the fields to prevent thousands of peasants from entering the village. On seeing the gravity of the situation the police postponed the auction of the land to 20th January. If today the land of this peasant is sequestrated, it will open up the path of sequestrating the lands of lakhs of peasants under debt.

"The incident of Chathewala has shown that agriculture in Punjab is badly crisis-ridden. In this once prosperous state, when peasants take to suicides, a concrete programme should have been chalked out to solve this agrarian crisis."

The same bourgeois paper notes in another editorial that, "A heart rending report about Punjab has been received and that too by the Government itself and not by any non Governmental agency. This report was put up in the Parliamentary committee constituted to assess the suicides last month. According to the report 2116 peasants have committed suicides in Punjab alone since 1988 to date." According to the paper, "the main point is that most of the suicides are being committed by those peasants who own either very small land holdings or negligible land holdings. When the crops of the peasants under this category are destroyed by natural calamities or for any other reasons, these peasants are unable to repay the loans procured from banks and Arthiyas. When the bank officials or bankers make rounds of the houses of these peasants along with the police party in order to recover the loan, the hard pressed peasants are forced to end their lives out of humiliation. A notable fact about suicides is that many of such events are not recorded by the police or the Government. The main reason is the harassment of the people by the police at the time of investigating such event. Thus according to the unofficial sources the number of suicides by the peasants has crossed 4,000,................Another important notable fact is that most of the suicides are taking place in the Malwa region and within this, Dist. Sangrur tops the list".

These are extracts from a bourgeois paper, the Punjabi Tribune. Due to the natural flow of rivers Punjab is divided into three regions Malwa, Doaba & Majha. The peasants of Punjab produce wheat, rice, cotton, sugarcane and potatoes. A complete belt of districts of Bathinda, Sangrur, Mansa, Muktsar, Ferozepur, Faridkot, Moga of the Malwa region is known as the cotton belt. The devastation of the cotton crop from 1990 to 2003 has crushed the peasants. The peasants by taking loans to the tune of lakhs of rupees rendered their land fit for the production of paddy. But the peasants of this area, inclined towards paddy, have been further pushed to the wall due to the ever increasing prices of inputs, lack of satisfactory arrangement of irrigation and power, and indifference of the Government towards the paddy crop.

Even some villages are on sale. One of them is village Kishanpura which has passed a resolution to be on sale. One of the links in this chain is village Chathewala of tehsil Talwandi Saboke in Distt. Bathinda, which has become a subject of headlines of all the newspapers of Punjab. Two or three news items in the newspapers of Punjab bear the heading: "The attempts of the banks and revenue officials who came to sequestrate the land of the peasants were foiled". Not to speak of the whole of Punjab or the Malwa region, in the courts of Bathinda district alone there are 340 cases between usurer Arthiyas and peasants. There are several such cases as are settled through negotiation by the peasants organisations. Or the peasants under pressure sell their land to the usurers and big capitalist type landlords. Only those usurer Arthiyas who cannot reach any agreement with the peasants for some or the other reason mainly go to the court are, on account of their connections in the corridors of power, adamant to subdue the peasants. They are patronised by the Congress, Akalis etc., ruling class vote-parties. Through the incident of Chathewala the conflict surfaced between usurer Arthiyas, police, courts, rulers on the one hand and peasants on the other. This is a manifestation of the usurious cancer in the body of the entire agricultural economy of Punjab.

Not only this cancer has been spreading its tantacles for a long time in the entire agricultural economy of Punjab which has been further strengthened under the umbrella of imperialist finance capital in recent times. This class of Arthiyas, concentrated in cities under the market law enacted by the Britishers, has come into existence by transforming itself from a part of the old usurers and big landlords of the villages. Whereas this class uses its usurious capital for further usurious exploitation, it also uses bank finance by various means for the usurious exploitation of the peasants. For this purpose, under the policies of liberalization, the bank limits of the Arthiyas are fixed by the government on a large scale. This class is an exploiter class and extracts surplus in the form of commission from agricultural commodities; in the form of enhanced rates while selling purchasing fertiliser, diesel, sprays etc ; while auctioning the commodities ; in the form of gobbling up a part of the bribe in official work, thus decimating the peasant income. This exploitative class is systematically bound up in alliance with the bureaucracy.

Although a part of this class is limited to commission agents alone, yet the whole class is not confined to commission agents alone. Although in Punjab, in order to get agriculture moving, co-opertive societies, co-operative banks and (after the policies of liberalization), commercial banks also advance loans to the peasants under various schemes, yet the peasantry of Punjab, particularly the landless, poor peasants and middle peasants continue to depend mainly on usurer Arthiyas, big capitalist landlords and rich peasants for loans in various forms. These classes not only exploit them through usury and other means, but also subjugate and bully them.

A report on the indebtedness of the peasantry prepared and released by Prof. H.S. Shergill in 1996-97 at the behest of the Punjab Government, presents a glaring example of this phenomenon. According to the report 71.43% peasants having land holding upto 5 acres are dependent upon Arthiyas and 28.57% on co-operative societies and commercial banks (26.14% + 2.43%) for their agricultural loans. 68.83% of the lower rung of the middle peasants owning 5 to 10 acres of land get loans from Arthiyas and 31.17 % from co-operative societies and commercial banks (20.99%+10.18%). 48.67% of upper rung of middle peasants owning 10-15 acres of land got loans from Arthiyas and 51.33% from co-operative societies and commercial banks (47.93+3.40%). It was also noted from this report that the burden of loans was not uniform on all the layers of the peasantry. According to the report the peasants owning land upto 5 acres were under a total debt of 1229 crore 59 lakh rupees. There was a burden of debt of Rs.10,105 per acre on such peasants. There was a loan of Rs.1,651 crore 31 lakhs rupees on the lower rung of middle peasantry owning 5 to 10 acres of land. There was a burden of debt of Rs. 7,991/- per acre land of theirs. There was debt of Rs. 1694 crore 49 lakhs on the upper rung of middle peasantry owning 10-15 acres of land. There was burden of Rs. 4228 /- per acre land of theirs. There was an outstanding loan of Rs. 1125 crore 53 lakhs on the rich peasants and big landlords owning land above 15 acres. There was a burden of Rs. 4230/- per acre of their lands. There was a total debt of Rs. 5700 crore 92 lakhs in 1996-97 on the peasantry of Punjab. On this loan the peasantry of Punjab paid an annual interest of Rs. 1100 crore. During the last 8 years this loan has risen to Rs.12,500 crore.

According to the reports of the newspapers half of this is due to usurers and the other half to the banks. The debt on the different layers of the peasants has doubled. This report is prepared by the Government agencies themselves. The real situation is far more explosive. Apparently, the interest rates look lower in the Indian market as a part of world market and also in the bank market, but the rural labourer, landless poor peasants have no other way for loan facility and also the middle peasants don’t get the loans to a satisfactory extent from banks and they have also no official connections, so these peasants are forced to get loans at higher rates from usurer Arthiyas, big capitalist type landlords and rich peasants. These exploiting classes on account of their property and official connections get loans from the banks at lower rates of interest and advance these loans to agricultural workers, landless, poor and middle peasants on higher rates of interest, either directly or through the usurer Arthiyas. In this way bank capital also becomes a means of usurious exploitation.

In Punjab, the peasants have to pay an interest at the rate of 2 to 5 % per month for the usurious loans. The different layers of peasantry of Punjab are dependent on the exploiting classes for other agricultural needs to various degrees. The poor, landless and marginal farmers neither have sufficient land, nor implements and capital. They generally rent the land on high rates of rent from a section of mainly big capitalist landlords. Even for renting the land and for investment on agriculture, they are dependent upon big capitalist landlords, usurers and rich peasants. According to the fresh instructions to cooperative societies, co-operative and commercial banks as part of the World Trade Organisation they have refused to accept the landless peasants as agriculturists. The cooperative loans to them as agriculturists have been stopped, although the marginal farmers own a little land, yet they rent the major part of land from these classes. Their condition is similar to that of the landless peasants. A part of these two layers of peasantry have started engaging in wage labour like agricultural labourers due to the agricultural crisis or lack of means of agriculture. The middle peasants have subsistence land, this land is corroding continuously. They are apparently the owners of this subsistence land, but internally a major part of their land is pledged to big capitalist type landlords, usurer Arthiyas, banks and companies. Generally they rent the pledged land so that there is no slur on their social status. They also face severe shortage of capital, means of irrigation and power connections. They are over head and ears under debt from usurers and banks. The bazars of tractors, scooters and motorcycles in the cities presents a telling example of this phenomenon. New tractors, motor-cycles and scooters are bought against land pledged with the banks and these newest models are sold at lower rates in the markets. This money is used by the peasants to repay their loans.

As a part of the World Trade Organisation policies and due to pressure from the imperialists the measures taken by the government in the agricultural sector — like the cut in subsidies in this sector, Punjab agriculture import/export-oriented, deliberately not increasing the rates of the crops like wheat, rice, cotton, sugarcane, potato etc. — is agravating the situation. Due to these policies the potato crop is so neglected that on account of their proceeds running short of investment on them, the peasants find it unviable to get their potato crop out of the cold storage. They simply deposit their fresh crop along roadsides and on waste lands.

The rate of sugarcane has been stable at Rs. 100/- per quintal for the last several years. Sugar is not being lifted from the sugar mills of the Punjab. It is damaged every year. Under this pretence or that, the sugar mills of Punjab have held back 25% of the price of already sold sugarcane recently as arrears. These arrear ranges from Rs. 68 to 100 crore rupees. On the contrary, the central Government has decided to import 20 lakh tons sugar from Brazil and some other countries. Its objective is said to stall the recent rise (from Rs. 15-16 to Rs. 20-21 per Kg.) in the prices of sugar. This in reality is the policy of shutting down the co-operative sugar mills of Punjab and handing them over to the Private sector. It is also the policy of doing away with the production of sugarcane by devastating this crop. Recently, due to this policy the production of sugar has been continuously falling. Last year production was 125 lakh tons. It was 138 lakh tons in 2003. A few years before it was 300 lakh tons. The price of wheat was raised by Rs. 10 per quintal this time. This drama is being played for the past several years. The attempt has been to appease the peasants with a paltry increase of Rs. 10 to 20. The same policy applies to paddy. Moreover, the Govt. adopted a policy of indifference to the purchase of paddy in the markets of Punjab during the last few years. The peasant’s organisations had to blockade rail traffic for the purchase of paddy at viable prices.

During this Kharif season the crash in the rates of cotton has again shattered the peasantry. The rate of cotton last year was Rs. 2,800 per quintal. This time at the beginning the rate was Rs. 2600/- per quintal, but when the cotton was brought to the market on a large scale its rate fell to Rs. 1700 to 1800 per quintal. The peasants had to suffer a loss of Rs. 1000 per quintal. The situation has been aggravated as the peasants have bought the B.T. cotton seeds at the rate of Rs. 2500 per kg. The cotton crop had been damaged by the American ball-worm during the previous 15 years. Only this time the crop was good. Due to the lack of timely purchase by the Govt. procurement agencies, due to purchasing 16 lakh bales of cotton from the world market and depending more on synthetic yarn than cotton yarn, the pro imperialist policies of the Govt. have badly crushed the peasantry of Punjab and all over India who are dependent on the cotton crop. It has further sharpened the debt crisis of the peasantry.

In brief, recently due to the devastation of the crops like cotton, potato, tomato, kinnu, grapes etc., the continuously decreasing per acre yield, the indifference to the produce in the market, the sky rocketing prices of agricultural inputs and consumer goods, and the lack of agricultural facilities, even the middle peasants have found themselves incapable of repaying the loans of usurers, Arthiyas, big capitalist type landlords, rich peasants and banks. A part of this section, humiliated by usurers, Arthiyas, bank and police, is being forced to commit suicide out of frustration. Under pressure by the Govt. a part of this peasantry is forced to sell their property to these exploiters in spite of their misdeeds. Right from the revenue officials to D.C.’s, judges etc., in complicity with the usurers, they grab the land of the peasants of the villages adjoining the cities at cheap rates. Later, by turning this agricultural land into urban property they have rendered it swiftly into immense value. To this end they have propped up gangsters in each city, who capture the disputed properties forcibly. The revenue officials, in complicity with them, manage to get legal sanction to these captured properties. This land mafia operates in cities as well as villages. Usurer Arthiyas are directly involved with these gangs. Whenever there is a dispute with peasants, their association and goonda gangs turn up in their support.

The case of Chathewala is one such case in which usurers, Arthiyas, courts, police, civil administration and the Congress rulers of the state are on one side and the peasantry on the other. The peasantry has raised the peasant struggles to great heights on their own strength. The auction of land of the peasant has already been deferred twice. The chief minister of Punjab, by his direct intervention on 26 October, got it postponed. He adopted the path of direct bargaining with the concerned peasant by side tracking the peasant organisation. He has attempted to patch-up this conflict, but one thing is certain that the issue of remission of debt of usurers and banks and the prevention of sale and pledge of land of the peasants have emerged as an important issue of struggle.

Now the peasants struggle is focusing on the issue of land. In these struggle usurers, Arthiyas, courts, police, big capitalist type landlords, the civil administration along with the Congress/Akali rulers which represent imperialists, particularly the American imperialists, big capitalist type landlords and comprador bourgeoisie are on the one side, and the vast peasantry and its supporting forces are on the other. Numerous Chathewalas are bursting forth out of the cancerous tumour of usury on the body of the agricultural economy of Punjab, which demands not only the temporary solution on only a single issue of the peasants or a Chathewala, but demands an operation with a sharp edged blade of the very cancer of usury. While fighting for concessions there is need to get to the roots of the cause for the growing problems of debt, usury, Arthiyas, etc and the growing agrarian crisis in Punjab. This factor is ignored by most of the existing peasant unions.

The political line and leadership of the struggle is badly afflicted with right reformist-economist understanding of treating the cancer of usury by use of mass organisations and mass struggles alone. The radical operation is beyond the capacity of mass organisations of peasants, mass and legal struggles alone. In such a struggle the revolutionary mass organisations of peasantry can play a complimentary and important role, can resolve some issues like Chathewala, and certainly they should do so, but also a force must be built up that is able to effectively hit at the very system that is generating this crisis in Punjab’s agrarian economy. That can only be achieved by destroying the authority of the existing rural elite/state forces in the villages. This cannot be done by mere mass movements but by building up the armed forces of the people and the establishing of the power of the revolutionary peasant committees in the villages. The genuine Maoist forces are bound to think along these lines, while at the same time to take measures to strengthen the revolutionary peasant organisation to face the worsening situation. Only then can the Maoists successfully ride the rising wave of peasant struggles.

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