What’s going on in India with the protests of farmers? The New York Times has a report, and that’s the sort of place many Americans will get their news from. But is that enough?
You might think this should be posted on Brown Pundits, but this story is an interesting illustration of how many international stories are about the United States, and its own tribal moods and affiliations, rather than “what’s really going on.” I talked to a friend who lives in India, and he provided his own perspective. This friend is a moderate BJP supporter, just to put his views in context.
One thing that I immediately asked about, because I’m crass and ignorant, was the caste/jati issues at play. The protests are driven by Jatt Sikh farmers in Punjab. Indians automatically know these things, but foreigners are unclear about communal identity and why it might matter. The New York Times mentions the Sikh aspect, but there are many Dalit Sikhs in Punjab, but since they are usually landless they are unlikely to be protesting.
The apportionment of land is highly skewed to Jatt Sikhs in Punjab for historical reasons. Though not really “upper caste,” the Jatts are not a marginalized community in Punjab. They are the ones who stock the rural gentry. They control the villages. For political and social reasons the British gave them title to the lands of the rural areas. If you do a little research you’ll see that Dalits are trying to claw back some of the land-grabs through legal means. The Green Revolution in India was to a great extent due to the revolution of farming in Punjab, away from marginal subsistence, to something resembling a modern economy. It was a massive benefit to Jatts.
In other words, the farmers are not incredibly poor subsistence farming peasants, but more prosperous rural landholders. The subsidies provided by the central government are a consequence of attempts to establish food security for India in the 1960s, and the general pattern across many nations of smoothing the volatility of farming as an enterprise for small-holders. Without massive subsidies often only large industrial scale corporations can engage in farming and make a profit over the long term.
We have farm subsidies in the United States, which are to a great extent the outcome of political compromises. The same is true in the European Union. Without massive subsidies, there would be depopulation in rural France, so society makes the calculation that the tourism value from rural areas exceeds the cost of the subsidies needed to maintain them economically. In the United States, one element of farm subsidies for families is that they maintain the Jeffersonian ethos that we are a nation of individual yeoman farmers.
Of course, we aren’t a nation of yeoman farmers. Fewer than 2% of Americans are farmers. Though farm families are often cash-poor, they are equity rich. One of the major complaints about farm subsidies in the United States is that they are transfers of funds to wealthier individuals and corporations.
Here’s one thing we can agree upon: farm subsidies maintain the status quo. I think one can make a case that in places like France, Japan, and the United States, there is a social good to retaining some number of farmers in rural areas, and not giving agriculture to rational corporations. These are rich societies. They can afford subsidies on various things. So why not to farmers? Even if they are somewhat rich.
But the situation in India is very different. In India, 22% of the population are farmers (whether they own the land or labor on it). This is a very high number. I think one can make the case that in India it would be a good thing if corporations purchased rural land, and farming families declined in number. The case can be strictly economic, but it can also be cultural.
Rural Jatt society is very conservative and regressive in many ways. Punjab has the highest sex ratio imbalance in India and has to import brides from poorer regions. The culture of Jatts is very patriarchal and macho. Much of Diaspora Indian pop culture is actually Jatt pop culture. I’m not saying this to paint Jatts positively or negatively…but if The New York Times reported on the unique aspects of Jatt culture associated with these farmers its depiction of this group as villains or heroes would change a great deal.
Would it be a bad thing if rural villages in Punjab were depopulated as the children of farmers moved to the cities? That depends on your values. I, myself, think it would be good because caste is less salient in cities, and rural villages are oppressive culturally and socially. The old German saying is that “city air makes you free.”
Nevertheless, the bigger context is that the BJP is angering the farmers with attempts to restructure the subsidies, and the BJP and Hindu nationalism are “bad guys” for the respectable global liberal international, and The New York Times is a voice of that international. Since the farmers are against the BJP, the farmers are good, even if the farmers are sexist, racist*, classist, and chauvinistic Jatt farmers. Though the BJP is on some level deeply anti-liberal, how did it become the bête noire of the liberal international? I think this is a scholarly work that might warrant some labor because it seems that the invective and contempt against Hindu nationalism is greater than the ire directed toward Chinese Communism with its own national characteristics, even though in matters of human rights the latter dwarf the former as much as the Chinese economy dwarfs the Indian economy. To some extent, the same applies to Islamism, which seems to get less targeted anger than the BJP, even though Hindu nationalism and Islamism are similar in many ways.
Here’s my final assessment: this is a clash between a petite bourgeoise ethnic group and a national movement that is aiming to break down local solidarities in favor of broader identity markers (e.g., “Hindu”). If the BJP succeeds I do think this is going to be bad for Jatt Sikh farmers, who can’t extract as many rents as they would otherwise be able to. Creative destruction will go full blast on their communities.
Overall, I would suggest people be careful about figuring out who the “good guys” or “bad guys” are ahead of time. Dig deeper. And then decide.
* 90% of the trolls on Brown Pundits are racist Jatts who explain how they are genetically superior to black small ugly Indians due to being taller and lighter-skinned.
Anyone who wishes to learn more about India and its past and current political life should listen to Shekhar Gupta’s videos. He is the editor in chief of “The Print”, one of the few news outlet that doesn’t indulge in sensationalism but in complete and thorough journalism.
I agree on the class aspect. This is a jath sikh bourgeois revolt against agricultural reforms that more agriculture based regional economies like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are happy about. The BJP just won the Bihar regional elections and a far greater share of Biharis are farmers than Punjabis.
That said, as usual, I can’t fathom how someone can again equate islamism with hindu nationalism. Islamism wants everyboby to be muslim while Hindu nationalism doesn’t care much about what god you pray as long as you don’t belong to the faith of the invaders aka Muslims.
That’s why atheists, women, lower casts, jains, buddhists, zoroastrians and homosexuals support the Hindutva ideology.
I’m an openly gay man, an atheist, beef and pork eating hindu but I’m still a hindutva supporter. Because Hinduism is my identity and because Hindutva protects me from abrahamic barbarism.
As long as the author will keep doing what the western media he criticises does, that is, equate islamism with hindutva, he will never understand why our ideology will keep winning in India.
Here is the dumb question. What is a Jatt? Is it a caste? and ethnic group? something else?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jat_people
@Varoon
“abrahamic barbarism”
Piss off.
“This is a jath sikh bourgeois revolt”
“Bourgeois” is a variant of “burger”, or city-dweller. Rural farmers aren’t bourgeois.
Maybe yeomen farmers is more accurate, but petite bourgeois makes sense too
“Petite bourgeoisie (French pronunciation: [pətit buʁʒwazi], literally small bourgeoisie), also petty bourgeoisie, is a French term (sometimes derogatory) referring to a social class comprising semi-autonomous peasantry and small-scale merchants”
@Walter Sobchak
“Here is the dumb question. What is a Jatt? Is it a caste? and ethnic group? something else?”
Yes.
My limited and possibly flawed understanding is that Punjab’s economic advantage over other states was sort of widening till the 1990’s, and after that it has been falling behind as the rest of India picked up and some other states overtook Punjab in some important economic metrics. Here is a thread on how Punjab got ahead with respect to green revolution: https://twitter.com/bhAratenduH/status/1334006910119448577
After that, it seems like Punjab has been facing diminishing returns for more investment, fertilizer pollution, serious problems with water table etc.
There seems to be this tempting comparison about Pakistan, which is dominated by its Punjab, doing well till about 1990s, sliding economically after that a lot of India catch up with and overtake it, and facing similar sorts of environmental troubles and rising religious zeal (analogous to the Khalistani zeal found in some of the Punjabi “farmer” protests).
Thus, while the trajectories of Indian and Pakistani Punjabs seem to have been different, there also seem to be similarities striking enough to beg for attempts at explanations that involve shared geographical factors.
The expected outcome of Jatt Sikh farmers moving to the cities is fewer Jatt Sikhs. Whether you think that is desirable or not “depends on your values”.
https://theprint.in/national-interest/shambles-over-farmers-protest-shows-modi-shah-bjp-needs-a-punjab-tutorial/553469/
This shekar Gupta?
“Is it a caste? and ethnic group? ” — More of an ethnic identity than a caste based identity i would say.
“That depends on your values. I, myself, think it would be good because caste is less salient in cities, and rural villages are oppressive culturally and socially.” — For land owning farmers, it is definitely not good. Most of them don’t want to live in polluted, overcrowded, stressful indian cities. There is also an aspect of emotional and cultural attachment to their lands.
“The old German saying is that “city air makes you free.”” — Well, in case of north indian cities, the city air makes you asthmatic(along with host of other lung disorders that one may get due to long term exposure).
I live in Brampton, Ontario. This is all I’ve seen and heard about for the last few weeks – moreso than the virus! And we have some of the highest rates in Canada!
First, thank you for an informative post.
Why do we even need to categorize others as good guys or bad guys? Often they just are – people with competing interests. Knowledge is good, so I see value in being informed, but we ought to refrain from seeing others through our domestic tribal or ideological lens, as you point out. We don’t need to see one side or the other as allies or friends and instead should mind our own business. Frankly, we need to get back to seeing the world as us (Americans) and them (others), writing as a nationalist-populist. (This doesn’t mean I think we should think less of others, let alone dislike them, but we ought to be more emotionally detached and not be so eager to see the struggles of others as our own or even as mirrors of our own.)
So, just like your former blog home, The Unz Review. 😉
One more thing. Would you please be able to elaborate on this?
@Twinkie
writing as a nationalist-populist.
I think I fully understand the nationalist part, but wouldn’t we have to have a major rectification of names in order for UMC people to get under the populist tent?
Farming is a loss making venture in India if you are dependent on market for selling your produce. MSP is minimum selling price price at which govt buys your produce. Farmers in Bihar and other states are poor because states there have no infrastructure to buy at MSP besides low land holdings. Agitation is for the survival of the farmer’s livelihood, they know it and will continue it till their demands are met. Don’t ascribe any other reasons. MSP is increased every year for political reasons and is way above market rate that’s the crux of the issue. You decrease it, you are anti-farmer, you don’t increase it you are anti- farmer.
One more thing. Would you please be able to elaborate on this?
stuff like bhangra music and the desi party culture.
“ The expected outcome of Jatt Sikh farmers moving to the cities is fewer Jatt Sikhs. ”
Not sure if this follows. The jatt sikh diaspora is international and politically influential in places like Canada and the UK.
Why would moving to Chandigarh or Delhi dilute their commitment to the Sikh faith.
This is the nuanced take that you’ll never see in the NYT… This is of course, the problem with India: too many groups with too many entrenched privileges, so I agree with you that movement to break down this isn’t bad.
I don’t know much about the new laws enacted by the government but I do know the realities of village life in Punjab and Haryana. The biggest caste group in both states are the Jat farmers who are sikh in punjab and hindu in the other.
They were an untouchable group in the first millennium living in lower indus valley. With the muslim invasion they moved northwards in huge numbers and became settled farmers. Gradually they gained power and established ruling states and they still own the majority of land where they live.
They’ve ruled the village economy in hinterlands since a long time now. They hire poor bihari labourers and these biharis do all the farm work and are treated very badly.
Jatts are also famous for their backward and medieval tribal mentality. They’ve the worst sex ratio among all ethnic groups in India. They buy brides from poor states and their khaps(clan organizations) widely encourage Honour Killings.
They were also the ones who spearheaded the Khalistan movement which eventually died out in India due to resistance of non-jatt sikhs who realized they would be living in a Jattistan not Khalistan.
It seems that among the sikh jatt diaspora in north america and Britain there’s still that zeal remaining.
The rural poor have always sought to migrate to the cities, even if it means becoming urban poor. ‘City air makes one free’ isn’t only true of the medieval cottar or villein. Naphtali Lewis in ‘Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule’ writes about Egyptian peasants migrating to the Greek cities, and being deported en masse by the authorities. Whatever upper class Romans may have written, the countryside was certainly no Arcadia.
Never having been poor, it was interesting to observe that in Kenya virtually every poor person preferred crowded, dirty cities to poverty in the rural areas. When I traveled to rural Kenya I quite enjoyed it, but I was hanging out with equity-rich, cash-poor farmers and not migrant laborers. Basic survival is obviously more difficult in a rural area than an urban area, but it seems that another reason for rural exodus is that the stultifying influence of the employer/landlord/rentier in the rural world is much more oppressive than its equivalent in a city.
The wealthiest countries in the world today are the most urban, and the poorest are the most rural. The trend is only to become more and more civilized, for peasants to become citizens. The only corollary to this is the fact that hunter-gatherers almost never seek to become farmers.
I believe that some have noted disproportionately large migrations of young women to the cities for similar reasons.
Though it seems difficult to me to disentangle from economic trends. The tendencies for rural regions are that productivity tends to rise to larger landlords using lower labour, land rents rise in real terms for smaller farmers, and this happens in concert with growth of cities, as countryside able to support larger surplus population with less food. The economic arc of transformation is unfavourable to the average standard rural worker.
The American rural frontier was pretty attractive to rural folks across Europe, and some from cities too, back when land was very plentiful, the cities were relatively hard to live in, and these more typical sort of constraints didn’t apply.
@Matt: What would be the endgame of this migration? Historically, cities used to be population sinks. Has it changed at all?
It has changed mightily: clean water, flush toilets, public health, vaccinations, a whole mess of things.
@Matt
Ya there are quite a few counterexamples now that I think of it. The American frontier is one, the Great Trek in South Africa another. And maybe the Ostsiedlung? Land scarcity probably=rural oppression, whereas if there’s a frontier there’s more freedom.
Very true that you can’t disentangle from economic trends or the law. I think it took the ‘Inclosure’ Acts in England and Wales to force a lot of peasants off common land and into the cities. And giving landowners legal title to that land encouraged them to make more investments in their land- helping along the British Agricultural Revolution. And more people in the cities coincides with the Industrial Revolution.
@Roger: You forgot contraceptives.
@A. Karhukainen, interesting question, yeah, seems like the question might be whether cities eventually adapt to become demographically sustainable, or whether urban fertility demography is a product of characteristics inevitable to cities or due somewhat to selection for migrants to cities and such. I’m no Nostradamus here though and I really have no prediction/guess, sorry.
“In India, 22% of the population are farmers (whether they own the land or labor on it).” — @Razib, i am not sure what’s the source of this 22% figure but this number is far higher at ~50%.
“They hire poor bihari labourers and these biharis do all the farm work and are treated very badly.” — @Rao, these claims are exaggerations, to the contrary, a lot of bihari laborers have converted to Sikhism.
Duke of Qin described the situation neatly. Due to assortative mating, India is basically a patchwork of hundreds different ethnicities, not a relatively monolithic chunk like the Han.
The key to Indian prosperity is to break up these groups into a single one, down to the genetic level (then complete the geopolitical area by integrating Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives)