RURAL V/S URBAN, CASTE AND LARR.

ESSAY FODDER—the hindu

MODERNITY IN VILLAGE

As Anna Hazare, the new age Gandhi consolidates his flock to protest against the government’s anti-farmer land ordinance, one is reminded of the original Mahatma and his love for village life and polity. While Anna’s protest may be more about the right to private property of the farmers, Gandhi had a moral vision that was larger and beyond just the risk of farmers losing their land. Gandhi saw village life as the ideal form of intimate sacrifice and high culture, where an anarchy based on self-sacrificing morals would sustain itself far from the mess of modern industrial life and interest-driven politics.

B.R. Ambedkar strongly disagreed with Gandhi’s celebration of village life and morals. He considered the idea of a village republic as one based on undemocratic values. He said, “What is a village — a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”. How relevant are Ambedkar’s observations today? As relevant as they were in the late 1940s. Even now, close to 67 per cent of India’s population live in villages. In 2000, about two-thirds of rural Dalits were landless or near-landless and close to half depended on farm labour for their livelihood — including in Left-ruled States. Much of the minimalistic land reforms in many States of India ended up providing land to the tiller and not to the labourer, which meant that the Sudra castes became powerful, landowning castes in rural India.

The dependence on landowning castes for survival makes the Dalit assertion for freedom and dignity difficult. Violence against Dalits that includes cutting off their noses or hands for transgressing caste norms is, therefore, nothing unusual.

POWER OF LAND—credit-yes, taxed-no, dowry-yes, daughters- bad debt

Our village culture and values are intrinsically linked to a control of land and agriculture. Land in present times has turned out to be a major economic resource — it gives access to institutional credit, subsidies on fertilizers, power, farm equipment and almost institutionalised, decadal loan waivers. Some numerically powerful landowning castes also enrol themselves as Below Poverty Line (BPL) families. Land, thus, is a key form of private property that yields persistent rent, which is not necessarily based on its actual merit and which is, of course, not taxed. Above all, land signifies power — how much dowry one gets in villages mostly depends on the extent of land the groom’s family controls. The cultural value attached to lands and its patrilineal ownership has turned daughters into bad debts.

Land makes certain castes ‘kingly’ in rural communities. The control of such castes on local politics aggravates masculine hubris. Land and agriculture, thus, partially construct the localised cultural peace in rural India.

CITY MUCH BETTER

City life is not free of caste prejudices either but the vulgarity of its form is minimised in an uprooted context of anonymity. Modernity and its key economic constituents of urbanisation and industrialisation bring with them some basic norms of civility. No landlord in a city or small town can insist on tenants defecating in the open. You cannot ask the caste of a person serving you chicken nuggets at a fast-food outlet, or insist on knowing the caste of your fellow commuter in a cramped local train.

NON-FARM EMPLOYMENT AND DALITS

IMPACT OF LARR ON DALITS AND THE LANDLESS

For Dalits and other landless groups, therefore, limiting their economic and cultural life to village morals and farm boundaries offers little space for livelihood negotiation. To them, land acquisition by the state for hyper-industrialisation may not seem unreasonable. The NDA’s new economism and hyper-industrialisation may well generate a new wave of liberal values that positively unsettle our village economy and culture.

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