Farmer Suicides Highlight BJP’s Rural Failures

The Farmers Distress Management Task Force in Maharashtra, India, reported earlier this month that 89 farmers had committed suicide in January 2016 alone. According to The Indian Express, this comes after an estimated 1000 suicides in 2015, with officials citing the inefficiencies and lack of morale behind government schemes as the driving forces behind the farmers’ decisions. While India has seen significant growth in its infrastructure and its economy almost two years into Narendra Modi’s term as Prime Minister, these developments do not deny negligence on the government’s part on the rural front.

Under Modi’s watch, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has positioned itself as a modernizing force in India. Through a series of initiatives, the administration has created programs to clean the streets, extend banking networks, encourage foreign investment, and stimulate domestic manufacturing production. However, just outside of Ahmedabad and other rapidly growing urban centers, The Hindu reports that growth and development have occurred alongside massive crop failures and insurmountable debt for many farmers in India’s heartland.

While both state and central governments have launched benefits schemes to provide food security, crop insurance and loan access, it would appear that more needs to be done as high suicide rates persist. “It is clear that the government officials, especially at the local levels, have failed to create confidence among the farmers regarding several government schemes intended to benefit them,” stated Kishore Tiwari, head of the Farmers Distress Management Task Force in Maharashtra.

The BJP’s turn toward the globalized financial market and a neoliberal growth model may have caused it to turn a blind eye to the largely agrarian population in the countryside. This, in turn, might be the cause of the scores of farmer suicides that have occurred. Tiwari, however, acknowledged that government schemes had just been launched a few months before and recognized that “it will take some time to overcome the problem”.

Ironically, these same farmers who have been crippled by BJP policy helped elect the party in power in 2014. Preaching Hindutva and strong communal rhetoric, the BJP was able to draw on the religious identities of these traditional farming communities to win the vote from Congress, Reuters reported. The current situation reflects inherent tensions in the BJP’s dual tenets of agricultural communalism and development, as the party makes tradeoffs and sacrifices in policy execution.

Furthermore, the official numbers of farmer suicides are also heavily disputed. According to The Times of India, the Prime Minister’s Office claimed in response to a right-to-information query earlier this month that only one farmer took his own life between 2003 and 2012 due to crop failure in Gujarat. At the state level, however, the Gujarati Minister for Agriculture has claimed that over 600 Gujarati farmers committed suicide in a two year span between 2013 and 2014. Clearly, there is no consensus on the severity of the farmer suicide problem in India.

With these numbers in mind, it is important to note that the BJP does have an incentive to withhold information and figures. With a slowdown in the Indian economy predicted by the Japanese financial services firm Nomura, the BJP has good reason to downplay policy failures and highlight its past successes.

For now, the BJP has chosen to stick to its guns. As The Hindu reports, the party recently announced the Kisan Jagrah Saptah scheme, a national-level crop insurance plan which has been described as “historic”. The program will be rolled out in April after a two-week national  campaign to spread awareness. Whether this new scheme succeeds or follows the path of its predecessors remains to be seen.