People's Democracy

“We Have Built It And Will Build It Again …This Time It Will Be Ours”

G Mamta

IT is quarterly exams time. My neighbour’s son was trying to mug up by reading aloud at the top of his voice, “Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal in 1648.” Immediately my daughter asked me, “Mother who built our house?” to which I replied that construction workers built it. She then asked me why ‘workers’ are needed to build our small house while one person can build such a big structure?

Dumbstruck, I remembered a poem by Bertolt Brecht:
“Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man?
Who paid the bill?”

Trying to escape from answering my daughter, I picked up the newspaper and started reading it only to find that it further stirred up my emotions. The comments made by a union minister and a chief minister of a state made me drop a jaw. They think that the farmers of Vidharbha are ‘lazy’ and ‘incompetent’. All these questions and comments pose one single basic question: ‘What is our understanding of the role of labour in the development of the society?’

The ruling classes always propagate that it is they who toil and all the money they have earned is because of their hard work. The story of Guru is a good cinematic description of this ‘virtue’ that they possess. Naturally, this means that the poor are poor because they do not work. Unfortunately, even the education system encourages this view and always credits the rulers for the progress and development. This effectively rules out the question of exploitation existing in our society because ours is a ‘Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic’ that provides ‘equality of status and opportunity’ to all. Thus we can coolly claim it as an egalitarian society.

So, being a representative of the ruling classes, naturally the chief minister could not think otherwise. Moreover he is also a product of the education system that churns out only eulogies to the rulers and does not teach anything about labour and its prominence in taking this society forward. They live under the illusions that “I am working hard for the progress and development of the state while the farmers are not in the fields, workers are not in factories and both need to be disciplined.” As Bertolt Brecht wrote in one of his poems, “Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry, Of wonderful times to come”.

Fortunately the poor and the hungry are always apprehensive of these ‘wonderful times’ and they always question, “Whose tomorrow is tomorrow? And whose world is the world?”

It is not inopportune for us to remember and remind all the ‘Deshmukhs’ a little bit of history-about events that had happened around 61 years ago in the same region. The peasants of the time had asked:

“Did the landlord sow the grain?
Did he make the cloud and rain?”

When they failed to get the answer from the Deshmukh whose words failed him on being questioned, the peasants answered thus:

“Toiling, boiling in the heat
We produce the corn and wheat.”

When the ruling classes failed to acknowledge this role of the labour, the peasants put their point across quite forcefully to earn their due rights and share. “Driven by hunger and despair,” the peasants told the landlords “The days of tyranny are done” during the historic Telengana People’s Struggle.

The flashy Deshmukh of today is ruling one of the ‘fast growing’ states in the country but does not know what the farmers are doing in Vidharbha. Should we think that he does not know where from he is getting the wheat for the pav that he is eating? Or does he think that it is cooked with ‘imported wheat’ because the farmers are sitting idle and biting their nails? Our rulers are not so naïve for such simplistic assumptions. They want to divert the attention of the people away from the government policies that are causing a spate of farmer suicides in Vidharbha. They are cleverly trying to put the blame on the shoulders of the farmers for the suicides and absolve the State from its responsibility. They want the people to believe that the distress suicides of the farmers have got nothing to do with their strategic surrender to the imperialist powers that ruined our agricultural system and steeped it in a crisis witnessed never before. Remember, now the union government has planned to import wheat at double the price they are giving to our farmers here. Fate behold! What will happen to our farmers in spite of all their hard work?

The income disparities resulting from the neo-liberal, pro-imperialist policies are glaringly visible in this state together with the fact that the State stands for the interests of the rich. It is no wonder therefore that under this kind of rule, Maharashtra stands first among the malnutrition deaths and also the number of malls. It is a state where we can find a select few throwing crores of rupees for purchasing glitzy cars, on the other hand a vast multitude of its population does not have enough money to boil their gruel.

The insensitivity of the Maharashtra government towards the poor is not a new phenomenon except that it was now expressed in the crudest way possible. Few weeks back, they had taken a decision to ‘beautify’ Mumbai city by vacating the poor houseless people living under the flyovers and using the space thus acquired to build showrooms and shopping centres. In their madness, they are forgetting that beauty is not just about buildings and flyovers but is more importantly about its people. But the selectively blind rulers bother about everything else except the people. To forget people and their labour is to invite peril.

As people are realising that,
“This government that, in the name of the people,
Rides on the back of the people, flouts their will
To imperialist winds which, blowing over our land,
Redden the palsied cheeks of men who govern…”
“They have arisen from death-heavy torpor,
Awakened to a sudden realisation
Of their humanhood!
They know they are the mainstay of the soil
They know they have a right, because they toil,
They produce land, fresh air and happiness;”
and also
“United masses wield: one single weapon,
Their single hunger, irrespective
Of creed and colour, leading to one will
Spelling a certain triumph,
Once won, forever won;
Earth-rooted. Look. Their heads are crowned with heaven
More sure than death, more wonderful than life
Of which they are creators…”

(Harindranath Chattopadhyay’s Tales of Telengana)