Gujarat results show that only market prices don't define rural distress

A more pertinent indicator of rural distress would be rural livelihood as a whole

Some quick inferences stray and linger into folklore even after a time lapse sufficient for a deeper and more meaningful analysis. That is lazy thinking. Rock-solid support of the American ultra right for President Donald Trump was one such until the political storm unleashed by the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury challenged it. Results of the recent Assembly elections in Gujarat have led to a summary judgement that rural Gujarat is disenchanted of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Wholly objective, and not partisan, considerations suggest that this conclusion, too, needs similar parsing.

“Experts” who carpet-bombed Gujarat in the run-up to the elections gave us their takes comprising several binaries: Patidars vs the rest, Dalits vs the rest, sufferers of notebandi and the goods and services tax (GST) vs the rest (if there were any), and most important of all, villages vs cities.  The verdict was a close call for the BJP, but voters seemed scarcely affected by any of these dichotomies save the last one.

And that led to its being blown out of proportion. It was made to appear as if the Gujarat countryside and cityscapes belonged to two different planets. Not many bothered to question why this was so. This was surprising since Gujarat unquestionably had an enviable record of agricultural growth in the last decade and a half, which gave a big boost to its development.  The state government and its paramount leader (even today), Prime Minister Narendra Modi have no dearth of critics, not confined to political parties, mainly the Congress.  They interpreted poll outcome as a protest against what they saw as policies favouring industrialists and the urban better-off.

There is no denying that agrarian adversity affected Gujarat as much as it did the rest of the country. Harish Damodaran points out that two-thirds of the nearly 60 lakh rural Gujarat families depend on agriculture as the source of their livelihood, which proportion is 10 percentage points higher than the national average (The Indian Express, January 3, 2018). The November 2017 wholesale prices of the two most important commercial crops of Gujarat, cotton and groundnut, were lower than their minimum support prices including state bonus (MSP) by 16 and 8 per cent, respectively. Worse, they were even lower than those a year ago in November 2016.

Cotton and groundnut are the dominant crops in Saurashtra, both season-long and taken once a year.  Lower prices following a bumper harvests would have a year-long impact.  MSP was of little relevance as market prices were significantly lower.  The state government had arranged purchases by other agencies such as the National Agriculture Co-operative Marketing Federation, but they were less than effective.  Widespread dissatisfaction with the way these purchases were handled has been in the news lately.

It would thus appear the Gujarati villagers have indeed punished the party ruling the state for the last 22 years. Yet a more detailed break-up of the votes that appeared in this paper last week (“Gujarat results do not fit into a neat picture,” January 1) paints a more nuanced picture. While in 2017, the Congress gained 17 seats in rural Saurashtra, nine of them at the expense of the BJP, as compared to 2012, it gained only one of the 63 rural seats in the rest of Gujarat. The BJP not only kept its 36 seats there but also increased its winning margin by a whopping 50 per cent!

This disaggregation suggests that just lower prices of key commodities might not be the sole determinants of rural distress and the resulting electoral behaviour everywhere.  Framers in the rest of Gujarat depend on milk as well as vegetables to an increasing extent for their income.  In Banaskantha and Sabarkantha districts of north Gujarat, dairying is the dominant rural activity.  Milk prices paid by local co-operatives affiliated to the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation remained steady and even increased a little in 2016-17. Vegetable prices did suffer at the end of 2016, but recovered in later seasons. Vegetables are grown for not more than about 10 weeks and farmers take three or more crops a year.  The impact of one bad season could be minimised by other seasons in the year.  Dairying and market gardening have both proven to be rewarding activities in the rest of Gujarat, earning farm households on an average as much as Rs 100,000 annually.  That is not king’s ransom in these times, but has apparently kept rural voters content with the current political dispensation.

Another and somewhat unrelated aspect of rural distress is visible in Gujarat.  On any given day, the many new second-class-only trains from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar can be seen disgorging masses of people with little more than the clothes off their back alighting at Ahmedabad, Vadodara, and Surat.  The long-suffering rural populace of these states have found succour in the industrial hubs of Gujarat.

The moral of the story?  We would be barking up the wrong tree if we thought only market prices of crops, or for that matter, farming as an enterprise, defines rural distress.  The more pertinent indicator would be rural livelihood as a whole.  Agriculture is but one means to that end.  Further reflections on this theme follow.
 

This is an excerpt from the Eighth Manu Shroff Memorial Lecture the writer delivered in Vadodara on January 7, 2018