Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 2

The trend of farming supplemented by migratory wage labor seems a rough compromise between the desire of the Indian farmer to remain on the land and the desire of the Indian government to see him off it, and yet it is not a compromise that is acceptable from either an economic or social standpoint: under such an unregulated, ad hoc arrangement, too much arable land lies fallow, labor flows and productivity for those industries dependent on the migrant force are unpredictable, and the costs to families imposed by the ruptures of migration, though difficult to measure, are no doubt considerable. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is, in some sense, an attempt to address this issue, and yet it is plagued by its own serious problems of graft and poor administration. Thus the question must again be posed: How to shift one-sixth of a labor force as large as India’s from the countryside, its ancestral homelands, the plow and the scythe, into the city, the SEZ, and onto the assembly line? Twenty-first century India is not Stalinist Russia; as Nandigram shows, the government can’t simply force people from their farms at riflepoint. Can it?

Meanwhile the pressures of the "agrarian crisis" continue to mount: Indian farmers must contend with the falling prices of many agricultural commodities, including rice; diminished state support for farm livelihoods; a dearth of credit; and, perhaps most ominously, the increasing adversity of meteorological events. Broad scientific consensus suggests that global warming will serve to intensify existing patterns of precipitation: wet areas will receive even more rain, thereby becoming flood-prone; dry areas will receive even less, becoming drought-prone. Semi-arid regions such as southern Rajasthan may tip toward desert and become largely, if not entirely, uncultivable; regions most buffeted by the monsoon in the South and Northeast of India, already menaced by floods on a nearly annual basis, may very well spend every June, July, and August under water. Thus Mother Nature, with an invaluable assist from human negligence, could, at least in part, do what the Indian government cannot: if the science of climate change is sound, many farm families may have little choice but to give up their land. They will migrate to the cities, downtrodden, aggrieved, and ill prepared for life outside of the village.

And global warming will make its presence felt in India in other, more insidious (though perhaps no less catastrophic) ways. Last year scientists were shocked to discover that ice cores taken from Himalayan glaciers revealed no evidence of the radioactive fall-out generated by atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and '60s, thus suggesting that the glaciers have been shrinking for at least the past half-century. Given that the ice fields of the Himalayas provide drinking water for half of the Indian population, their diminishment is serious cause for alarm. A concerted national water conservation effort seems warranted, and the most logical first step would be to impose strict limits on the amount of water made available for irrigation, since the practice consumes far more of the resource than any other activity. From the Indian government's perspective, such an imposition would be doubly advantageous: not only would it conserve water, but it would further hasten the flight of the Indian farmer to the city.

Despite myriad hardships, most of the 16% of the workforce to be absorbed by the manufacturing sector will cling to the land. Farming for many Indians isn’t a way of life; it is life itself, all some families have known for millennia. Dozens of daily suicides attest to the fact that faced with economic ruin, many Indian farmers would rather die than forfeit their land. But if the Indian government is determined to thoroughly modernize its economy, to ensure that everyone shares in the rewards of the Asian Century—if it feels, as that old absolving saw goes, it must act for the good of the nation—by hook or by crook, it will have its way. Further blood will be shed, and the only matter in question will be whether more farmers perish by their own hands or via the clammy appendages of state sanctioned violence.

But for the loss of life likely to accompany a new, modernized, rationalized Indian economy, odds are that a rousting of the countryside wouldn’t threaten the legitimacy of the state. Repression would be decentralized and local, resistance fierce but fragmented, and the central government would be reluctant to intervene, both out of deference for state sovereignty and out of self interest. Those who remained on the land—after all, the overwhelming majority of rural Indians—would be grateful for their good fortune and inclined to remain silent, lest they also find themselves compelled to vacate. Nandigram, whose atrocities were well documented in the press, inspired the outrage of the intelligentsia and politicos in Kolkata and Delhi and a large demonstration or two, but little in the way of widespread condemnation from the masses—I have not once heard it mentioned in conversation in Udaipur. City dwellers might see little evidence of the enormities of their government’s policy and care still less; that is, until the displaced and destitute begin swarming into the cities.

Here, finally, is the event with the power to ignite the nation and all of its latent and not so latent prejudices. A migration of more than 100 million embittered and resentful village dwellers—one driven by resource scarcity, natural and man-made calamity, and government coercion, whether overt or not—into India’s already bursting cities over the course of, say, fifteen years, if not properly planned for and managed, could have disastrous consequences. Not only would such a migration strain already woeful infrastructure, thicken already clotted streets, swell the ranks of the unemployed, heighten competition for resources, and boost crime rates, it would also provide a ready supply of scapegoats for a political class whose strategy of first and last resort has long been one of divide and conquer. India is already a society of the aggrieved, and for the shrewd Indian politician, every grievance represents an opportunity. The opportunities proffered by a massive and rapid urbanization of the rural population (or at least a part of it) would be bountiful blessings indeed.

Put another way, the disaffection engendered by a Great Indian Migration—that belonging to both the dispossessed farmer and the put upon urbanite—would be a vein so deep and so rich that politicians would fall over themselves in their haste to exploit it. Disaffection, the fountainhead of Indian political power, is also malleable, particularly when felt generally, for general disaffection can be most easily twisted to desired political ends. Blame can then be assigned where most convenient: today to migrants, tomorrow to Muslims, the next day to upper caste oppressors. In the event of a face-off, both dispossessed farmers and put upon urbanites would have their cheerleaders, strategists, and co-opters among the political class—harboring excess stores of anger and resentment, the two factions would function as ideal instruments of political ambition. And it's not as if either side will require much goading in order to take up the lathi, cudgel, and torch, or much convincing to divert their wrath, as necessary, to other objects—those which best serve their political sponsors and their own preexisting prejudices—as, notwithstanding the Gandhian legacy, the impulse to violence is still strong in Indian society, as it is in most of the world.

It takes little imagination to conceive of a scenario in which the violence borne of such a conflict swiftly widens its clutches, spreads from city to city, escalates in ferocity, turning into something its political abetters can no longer summon, direct, and dismiss when convenient; the malignant feeling feeding such violence cannot be neatly allayed, being so deeply rooted and diverse in aspect that timelines for reconciliation must be understood not in weeks or months but in years. Of course such a scenario first depends upon a lengthy and improbable concatenation of neglect, misfortune, malfeasance, and treachery in order to come to life...but even that slight probability must be carefully considered. The Indian state is not nearly so stable, nor so assured of prosperity as is widely believed.