By Abhimaan Kashyap
The rains didn’t stop falling during 1996-2004 because Chandrababu Naidu was in office any more than they started pouring when he left office. But what is true is that Naidu reigned over a time of frightening extremities -- unprecedented riches for the urban middle class and abject destitution for farmers and labourers – and allowed himself to be seduced by one side of the story. While we know that Naidu’s danse macabre was excited by the fawning of the faux press, there does exist a large body of reportage that explains how his flawed vision went horribly wrong.
We present a summary of the most illuminating work on Naidu’s nine years.
The most celebrated critique of the Naidu era was produced by the Guardian columnist George Monbiot. “In throwing him (Naidu) out of their lives, the voters of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh may have destroyed the world’s most dangerous economic experiment,” he wrote when the nine years of a lopsided vision came to an end in May 2004. What experiment was this? This was the Vision 2020 ghosted for Naidu by McKinsey.
“…Vision 2020, is one of those documents whose summary says one thing and whose contents quite another. It begins, for example, by insisting that education and healthcare must be made available to everyone. Only later do you discover that the state's hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by "user charges". It extols small businesses but, way beyond the point at which most people stop reading, reveals that it intends to "eliminate" the laws that defend them, and replace small investors, who "lack motivation", with "large corporations". It claims it will "generate employment" in the countryside, and goes on to insist that more than 20 million people should be thrown off the land.”
Monbiot also laid bare the underpinnings of Naidu’s quixotic dalliance with white elephant projects such as the IMG deal and the Formula One project, an outlandish deal for which he lobbied to have the ban on cigarette advertising lifted.
Read Monbiot’s chilling account here.
Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga was another writer to document the ruins left behind by Naidu. Arriving in Andhra Pradesh just after the ugly entrails of the Naidu years were laid bare by the elections of 2004, Adiga found the rural landscape dotted with failed bore wells and countless farmers deep in debt. “In Potaram, the rains have failed for four years in a row,” he wrote in Time Asia. “Balayya, a 30-year-old farmer, borrowed $1,100 to have a borehole dug but found no water, so he spent another $1,100 on a second hole. After that, too, turned out to be dry, Balayya hanged himself in his house last year. His sister, Balarajavva, says she voted against Naidu: "He did nothing for us, only for those in the cities. We're happy that he's gone.”
Read the Booker Prize winner’s reportage for Time here.
With two days to go for the outcome of the 2004 elections, Naidu was cocksure that he will be back in power. But he seemed to have sensed the discontent in the rural areas. But as usual he came to the wrong conclusion. "My next five years will be about irrigation and power,’’ Naidu told the Guardian in an interview two days before the results came out. “But people will have to pay for these. If you can afford cable television then you can afford to pay for electricity." As a man who had courted three Bills -- Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Dollar Bill – for nine years, he was still adamant that user charges could be extracted from an indebted people.
Read the Guardian report here.
Reportage on the distress Naidu’s anti-farmer policies began as early as 1998. By 2000, journalists were recording the suicide phenomenon in Warangal and Anantapur districts. “In the last fortnight, a dozen farmers and four girls belonging to farmers’ families have ended their lives by consuming pesticides meant to drive away pests from the groundnut crop. However, the state government has failed to respond to the emerging crisis. Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has refused to sanction ex-gratia (of Rs 100,000 each) to the victims' families arguing that it would induce more farmers to commit suicide,” wrote Syed Amin Jafri for rediff.com in September 2000.
Read this early warning report here.
Even earlier than that, in 1998, cotton farmers had started falling like flies in the heat in Warangal district. In a searing report for Frontline, S Nagesh Kumar recorded the plight of farmers in wry prose: “Nearly 55 other distraught cultivators, most of whom cultivate rain-fed crops in the Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh, were killed by the pesticide they consumed. The pesticide, which has had little or no effect on the pests that thrived on their cotton crop, killed them almost instantly. Madhav Reddy spoke to Frontline of his close encounter with death: he said that he was not sure at all if he was better off alive. To die was to escape the grip of the moneylenders to whom he owed a lakh of rupees…. In addition to that, he has now incurred medical expenses amounting to Rs. 40,000.”
Read this report here.
With farmers’ suicides staring everyone in the face, Frontline proceeded to examine the well-spring of this phenomenon. “Going by the Centre's official figures, out of the 495 farmers who ended their lives during the last two years (2001 and 2002), 385 were from Andhra Pradesh,” wrote in Nagesh Kumar in January 2003. “The government encouraged farmers to shift from food crops to commercial crops such as tobacco, cotton, chillies and castor seed. Small farmers who did so found themselves ill-equipped to cope with the market, which was governed by the WTO regime. The huge investments made on commercial crops went down the drain, while the debt burden went up.”
Read his report here.
Whyre farmers committing suicide? Asked the Financial Express in May 2004, days before the Naidu government fell. “…had the Naidu government paid even a modicum of the attention to agriculture that it was paying to setting up cyber parks around the state capital, Nagi Reddy would have lived. But there had been no irrigation works, and when drought struck, no loan waivers or special drives to help farmers plant alternate crops and mitigate their hardship. All that used to happen in the ‘bad old command economy’ days that India had left behind in 1991. It simply wasn’t in fashion any longer,” it concluded.
Read this analysis here.
The suicides might have been prevented had the institutional credit structure been preserved. Bereft of this protective net, farmers were left to the mercies of the moneylender. Newspapers had been reporting on the moneylender problem stalking distressed farmers right from the time the first rash of suicides was reported in 1998, just two years after Chandrababu Naidu took office. “Early this week, a team of Government officials go round… villages where several more farmers committed suicide over the past few weeks. Stalking the team is a suspicious-looking man. Confronted by Warrangal District Collector Shalini Mishra, the man says he is a moneylender who lent a total of Rs 4 crore to cotton farmers in the area and was now at a loss about how to recover the loans from his creditors who killed themselves. He is following the officials because the Government has decided to disburse Rs 1 lakh to the family of each of the victims and he thus hopes to swoop on the money before it is late,” wrote Ashis Chakrabarti for the Indian Express in January 1998. The government first tackled the suicide phenomenon by disbursing relief. Then when the spate became a flood, it stopped even that. It did not have the presence of mind to tackle the usurious lending systems in rural AP.
Read the report here.
Concurrent with the destabilization of long-established farming systems, Naidu’s policies also disturbed the structures of local governance which might otherwise have served to rescue distressed farmers. “Naidu government's Janmabhoomi model of development gutted the panchayats and curbed local democracy. The panchayats proved totally ineffective during the agrarian crisis,” wrote P Sainath in this analysis.
The stories from Chandrababu Naidu's cyber-friendly Andhra Pradesh led to Kafkaesque consequences. Suicide was only the last resort of farmers driven to despair. Before that they tried every desperate measure they could think of to stay alive. First, they tried to use more seeds, more fertilisers, more pesticides. They took loans at 30-36% interest from moneylenders and stopped paying their insurance premiums. They turned to water diviners to locate aquifers. They migrated. They sold their kidneys. Even death was not the end of the trouble. It only led to a macabre after-death industry as the orphaned families had to spend money to get suicide certification in order to access the government’s relief.
Naidu’s defeat in 2004 brought out in relief the misguided policies he pursued, egged on by an indulgent elite and gullible press, wrote Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in Business Line. “It would be inaccurate to look at the support that Chandrababu Naidu received as something borne out of sheer naivete. This section of the Indian elite genuinely believed he was a role model for the country's future politicians. Yet, all the money that Chandrababu Naidu received from New Delhi by arm-twisting the outgoing National Democratic Alliance did not help him win the support of his people.”
Read his analysis here.
On most indicators, Chandrababu Naidu ran the worst performing state in the south of India for nearly 10 years. Yet, the more damage he did, the more his media standing grew, wrote P Sainath, whose reportage of the distress years remains the most referred resource on the policy muddles perpetrated by Naidu and his friends in the NDA government at the Centre. In this withering analysis, he documents the role of international and national media outlets in the manufacture of the Naidu mythology.
