Hi People!
Just one request. Please put your names to your comments. Many of the good comments i receive are without a name. That makes it somehow incomplete. Thanks.
This piece is courtesy sulekha. had written it for them in 2003....resurrecting it at a time when farmers suicides are becoming de rigeur...


It seems a little odd to cite an old non-violence hero in the times of international stress, especially when Gandhism has been summarily dismissed as unviable and simplistic.
What is not understood is the fact that though simple, it is too profound to be ignored.
His philosophy is not a tangled maze of absolutes and probables. To me, it is the most pragmatic way of living for the body, mind and soul, for social, economic and spiritual salvation without creating a conflict of interests and by weaving each other's welfare into an all-facilitating formula of community living.
As a nation, it should concern us, especially post-WTO, that we have managed to ignore even his most practical of teachings, while showing an inexplicable eagerness to bear with the pitfalls of embracing a path nobody is clear about.
It is now more than ever that we need that one visionary who demonstrated a non-confrontationist charter of development that helped the individual, the family and the society grow separately and together. Gandhism is a ready reckoner on existence. But look at what we have done. We are disarrayed on all fronts.
Gandhiji told us to ostracize untouchability. We paid lip service, carved out seats for the backward classes, nows Dalits, in disputed sectors like education and sated our souls. Caste today works as the single largest pull factor in elections, from Parliament down to the zilla parishads. He told us to ensure equal status for women. We gave free education to the girl child but still managed to throttle her at birth.
Economically, we are a country with our distinctive needs and definitions of growth. But strangely, we have always tried to co-opt a growth charter not intended for us -- the socialist, the hesitatingly capitalist and now the rabidly opportunistic WTO. Though WTO bears the whip for many of our economic ills, the real picture is probably buried in something as sublime and yet as basic as our fundamentals as a nation.
Grounded in a rock-like conviction that agriculture feeds villages, the Gandhian model holds up the villages as the centrifugal kernel of our prosperity, and social and moral evolution. Not for nothing did British economist E. F. Schumacher call Gandhiji “the most important economic teacher today.”
The economy today is in a shambles, not so much because of the global economic meltdown but because we have failed to insulate ourselves from the self-destructing philosophy that preaches more power to the cities and let villages be damned.
While he said, “India lives in its villages,” we superimposed an economic monstrosity that preys on the villages and feeds cities to grow into outrageously obese, smoke-spouting, crime-festering dragons that kill as much as they survive -- with the result that our villages continue to starve, suffer droughts, are deprived of what urban life takes as a given: electricity, water, education and health care. Cities prosper while villages decay. A skewed paradigm of growth, entirely at variance with Gandhian thought and any serviceable model of socialism -- which Nehruvian socialism clearly was not -- has evolved over the years even as a neatly demarcated policy of growth, much like the line of control, remains elusive.
Sure, villages get subsidies but there is no clear understanding of their needs and concerns -- providing water and power, conserving both, ensuring crop rotation not to the detriment of soil but to enrich it. All the while, we have gone ahead with expanding our industrial base, eating up agricultural land wherever available on the periphery of cities. There is no concept of equitable or justiciable development.
Even today, three-fourths of India lives in its villages. Yet, agriculture has no place in the national sweepstakes. Any Finance Minister's budget is first dissected on the basis of its acceptability to the neatly profiled industrial interests.
Experts say profitability in Indian agriculture went down by 15 per cent in the nineties because of proliferating exploitation. But bumper crops seem to cloud academic judgment. The annual growth in agriculture and allied activities is about one per cent while that of industry is 4.5 per cent. The share of agriculture has shrunk in the GDP reckoning, and the WTO may finish the job of throttling the farmer.
The WTO promised farmers access to markets and support from government. This has not happened. Prof M. S. Swaminathan, the pioneer of the Green Revolution, has said as much. No additional markets have been thrown our way. “In fact, the market has even reduced in the OECD countries in the past six years,” he says.
Sure, the Green Revolution has done wonders for our ego by producing an enviable marketable surplus. But what about food rotting in the godowns of the almost defunct Food Corporation of India and the starving millions being bred on mango kernels. What about farmers committing suicides across the national map in Andhra, in Maharashtra, in Nagaland? Are we happy?
Some inevitable processes are already under way -- soil erosion, depletion of nutrient manure; even as cities expand, fertile lands get sold at throwaway prices to non-performing industrial units. Approximately, 57 per cent of our geographical area is under various degrees of soil degradation.
What's more, after 50 years, we don't have much to show in favor of our urban bias. Over 400 million live below the poverty line. About 300 million do not have access to safe drinking water. Around 700 million live without proper sanitation.
In the Gandhian scheme of things, a greater sensitivity to environment, forests and villages is inalienable in our growth plan. Especially because we are one-sixth of the world living on 2-4 per cent of the total land mass and contributing eight per cent of the world's bio-diversity. Because we are still a rural people. Even when our rural masses have shrunk from 80 per cent during Independence to about 60 per cent today, our growth should necessarily be propelled from within our fields.
By following the western script blindly, we have fostered unhealthy competitiveness, excessive consumerism and wanton living -- the symptomatic outgrowth of a grievously shortsighted development model that the west is now grappling with.
Gandhiji said Britain's prosperity and industrialization were due to the exploitative utilization of half of the planet's resources. India cannot afford this decadent growth, particularly when we don't even have their wherewithal in the first place. Our main resources are our people and the natural bounty in the form of forests, soil, water, air, minerals and trees.
Journalist Mark Shepard observed, “India's leaders have done their best to imitate the western countries by building an economy based on large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture. Gandhi fought this kind of development. He warned it would ruin India's villages.” Gandhiji was one of the greatest advocates of decentralism. But when we did disband the licence raj, it was in deference to the WTO juggernaut and not as a farseeing policy.
The Amul model of growth where participants are their own future-tellers is the only one that practices what the old man envisaged. And the results are stark. An economy of peace and permanence. If we depend for our food on the farmer, wealth should first flow to the farmer, Gandhiji postured. Riches cannot flow from cities to the villages. What flows are only second-hand TVs, audio systems and automobiles, all of which generates more stress than they hope to offer comfort.
The economic chain of supply and demand begins and ends with the villages, the cities being merely supplementary instruments of facilitation. The farmer grows crops, sells it to buy his child a good education, better health and fuels ancillary growth in entertainment, services etc.
When his land is taken away, or when repetitive use depletes his soil and his yield drops, or his crop value shrinks or when the omnipotent landlord flexes his muscles, his purchasing power weakens and that sets the ball rolling back.
Gandhiji said the path to Sarvodaya is antyodaya -- attention to the poorest person. Until this person is brought up on an equitable scale, rational growth is not possible. Until he is neglected, we shall continue pulling the cities up growth paths indexed by material prosperity and suborning the villages to our residual benefits.
Apart from being non-justiciable, this pattern is non-serviceable. It cannot last. The cities cannot spout Harvard English and wean on palmtops while the villages drag on walking miles for water and fighting exploitation. We have to take them along. For their sake and ours. Each year, around one million migrate to the cities in search of employment and better life. What if we had empowered them in the first place?
Gandhism is not a dispensable dogma or a one-day wear. After all, the man who brought the sun to set on the British Empire without fingering a pistol could not have been a moron.