Wardha, Maharashtra: Maharashtra state BJP president Devendra Phadanvis hit the nail on the head while explaining just what leads about 80,000 people to brave the oppressive afternoon sun to gather for a rally addressed by Narendra Modi.
The hailstorm-affected villagers of Maharashtra have been doled out another relief package, he said. But after two consecutive drought years, farmers already know what that means. "Either the money will never come, or the farmer has to grease somebody's palm to get his rightful due. Or he could find himself in the shoes of Sonba Bawne, a local farmer in Wardha district, who got a cheque of Rs 80 as relief for his destroyed soybean crop. He went to the bank to cash his cheque, where he was told he must deposit Rs 100 and open an account first."
Narendra Modi. AFP.
The thousands who attended the BJP prime ministerial candidate's rally in Wardha, 80 km from Nagpur town, did not care for the symbolism of the Gujarat chief minister's visit to the Gandhi ashram in next door Sevagram, the village the Mahatma made his home after the Dandi march.
It did not matter that Modi's speech was a blend of ideas and barbs that have become a little stale now, having been repeated at rally after rally since November 2013.
What mattered is this, Modi was reflecting their opinion that years of consecutive drought and crop failure, the mounting suicides of farmers in the Vidarbha region and now the hailstorm in February had yielded no sustained efforts from the state government. Dattu is a 70-year-old rural daily-wager with a meager plot of his own.
"I have earned nothing from my land in the last five years, the losses keep mounting," he says. He's at the rally to understand if a vote for Modi might change that. Did he make up his mind? Well, he at least knows what we have suffered, the weather-worn old man replies.
Apart from the hundreds of BJP karyakartas wielding party flags and screaming 'Modi Modi' at periodic intervals, much of the crowd at Thursday's rally were there for the same reason. Droughts will continue, government changes notwithstanding. Can Modi do anything different?
"Pack off this government that only announces relief packages," Modi said, to cheers and raucous applause.
He had hit an emotive point: Relief packages have been announced periodically by the Maharshtra state government and the Centre, but nobody is quite sure just what the impact of this intervention has been -- no official study, no data to report the precise results of the thousands of crores spent between one drought or calamity or crop failure and the next.
In January last year, the government announced a Rs778-crore package under the National Disaster Relief Fund, even as chief minister Prithviraj Chavan promised to tour Jalna, Beed and Osmanabad districts to assess the impact of the region's agrarian crisis. Only a few months previously, in the monsoon session of legislature, the government had announced a Rs 2,625-crore package for water supply, irrigation schemes and water conservation programmes in drought-hit areas.
Experts said it was a "sequential drought phenomenon" in Maharashtra, meaning back-to-back agricultural drought. The kharif crop of 2011, the rabi crop of 2011 and kharif crop of 2012 and now the Rabi crop of 2013 had been hit.
A report of the state's Relief and Rehabilitation Department to the Centre after a serious drought in 2003 had even admitted that long-term measures need to be put in place. "The enormity of the drought conditions in these parts of the state calls for intervention on a more prolonged basis than what is being done at present," the report said. There appears to be no sign of those long term measures from government and the relief money sometimes ends in stories like Sonba Bawne's.
Does Modi have the solution?
"There are no farmer suicides in Gujarat," Nitin Gadkari said contentiously, lauding river-linking projects. Modi's ideas themselves were more generic -- the five-F farm to exports formula, goods trains for farm produce and the use of technology.
But he got a thunderous response when he asked if the government of the day was only running its electoral schemes while announcing relief packages, when he said Lal Bahadur Shastri's jai jawan jai kisan motto must be revived and when he said farm -centric policies must be developed carefully.
Is any farmer safe in this country, he asked. "No!" The chorus went up. But the biggest, most thunderous cheer was reserved for the end, when he promised, "The BJP will ensure no farmer ever has to go to a moneylender."
For the landless labourers in the crowd, that ugh the a good enough promise to vote for.
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