The Hindu Business Line : The Great India-Bharat divide

`India' is a notional entity, largely Anglicised and relatively better-off, which obtained the legacy of colonial exploitation from the British; while `Bharat' is largely rural, agricultural, poor and backward, and is subjected to colonial-like exploitation even after the end of the Raj, says Sharad Joshi, explaining the dichotomy in the economy.

"The Government is determined to bridge the divide that separates `India' and `Bharat'," screams a news item, quoting the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee. I wish I had taken out, in 1978, a copyright on the `India vs Bharat' syndrome. I could be getting substantial sums by way of royalties and I would not need to slog for wages and honoraria.

In 1978, some years after I became a practising farmer in the small village of Ambethan in Pune district of Maharashtra, I had put forward the idea of a neo-colonial exploitative relationship between the two notional entities `India' and `Bharat'. Since then a large number of people have used that expression often to mean things they had not intended.

I made it clear right at the outset that these were not geographical entities, and had no territorial frontiers. `India' and `Bharat' are notional entities and I tried to define them as clearly as I could, at that point of time.

`India' is that notional entity, largely Anglicised and relatively better-off, that had obtained the succession of colonial exploitation from the British; while `Bharat' is largely rural, agricultural, poor and backward that was being subjected to colonial-like exploitation even after the end of the Raj.

Many have erroneously interpreted the expression to denote the urban-rural divide. That was far from my mind. In fact, I made it explicitly clear, even in those early stages, that the relatively opulent segment of the rural society that derived its incomes from non-agricultural activities under state-protection were a part of `India' while the slum dwellers and the footpath occupants of cities were, in fact, refugees from `Bharat' to `India' in search of livelihood.

The basic purpose in enunciating the `India vs Bharat' was to do away, as suggested by Michael Lipton (Why Poor People Stay Poor), with all traces of geo-political character from Marx's Town and Country Divide", German Ideology, as also Mahatma Gandhi's diatribe against the Townspeople who, he said, will have to answer before God for their sins against the rural people while bringing out, as starkly as possible the dual character of Indian society and wide chasm between the agricultural sector and the industry in British India. Like Ambedkar, I needed to bring out the iniquity of the Hindu caste system without driving them to ferociously anti-Hindu Islam.

Chaudhary Charan Singh's `Asli Bharat' had a predominantly budgetary connotation. He brought out assiduously, with the data compiled by the Secretariat, that the budgetary allocations for the countryside had been, over a period, extremely unfair and unjust. The step-motherly treatment of the countryside by successive Finance Ministers has resulted in low income levels and poor infrastructure — roads, railway network, telephones, post office, medical services, schools, electricity and all in the countryside. Charan's `Asli Bharat' is essentially a budgetary concept, quite different from the `Bharat' in the `India-Bharat' syndrome which is based on skewed trade relationships enforced through draconian laws.

It is more than 25 years since the idea of `India-Bharat' was put forth and became the basis of today's farmers' movement in India. Now that the Prime Minister has specifically referred to the `India-Bharat' contradiction, it is worthwhile clarifying what made me formulate this expression for dualism in the economy.

By 1978, I had come close to the realisation that, despite hard work in my chosen vocation, my academic and administrative background as also the considerable funds I had drawn from my UPU Provident Fund, I was fighting a losing battle and was sinking, season by season, into losses and possibly into debt. I had not still fully realised the deliberate viciousness of the anti-farmer price policies of the Indian state.

It was at the time, that a young boy who worked on my farm at the then prevailing minimum wage rate of Rs 3 per day managed to get a job in a Japanese collaboration factory Dai-ichi in nearby Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial area. At the end of one month, having received his first salary packet, he came to see me, eyes full of tears. "Here on the farm, I slogged from morning to evening, had hardly any time for a sip of water and I got 3 pieces per day. In the factory, all of us smoke bidis behind the machines most of the time and I get at the end of a month ten times as much! What kind of a phenomenon is that?," he wondered.

At about the same time, I saw, in a literacy night class I ran for those who worked on the farm, a little girl who had put her slate in her lap and was trying to copy the alphabets I had written on the blackboard, with utmost seriousness, serenity and concentration. The very next day I happened to visit a festival organised in my daughter's school. It was all fun, fanfare, games, shopping, refreshments, balloons, festoons, fire-crackers making in all for extreme hilarity. Little children were throwing away rupee notes as if they were scraps of paper. "Which was the true India I had returned to from Switzerland?," I asked myself. "The one in which the little girl was trying to learn her first alphabets in a dimly lit squalid room in Ambethan or this festival in Pune that an English-medium Convent school was organising?"

It suddenly dawned on me that Ambethan and other villages, on the one hand, and Pimpri-Chinchwad and Pune, on the other, were worlds apart and had little in common between them. Countryside people migrated to cities in search of jobs exactly as the non-resident Indians settling abroad for quantum hikes in remunerations. Not a bit of funds that was wasted on festivities in urban schools could become available to provide blackboards in village schools.

I had tried to explain what was churning my mind to my wife who in her enthusiasm mentioned the crass inequity of the situation to her sister, an affluent urban socialite. The reaction of the latter was simply stunning. "But, you know sister; these farmers do not mind living like that. They are so used to it, you know!" That clinched the thing for me.

Not only was there the horrendous cleavage between the two notional entities, but there was further, a wall of apathy, indifference, unconcern and insensitivity. The predators had hardened their hearts to the miseries of their preys. It was this lack of sensitivity that convinced me that for all practical purposes the two notional entities were two separate nations, in spite of the fact that they shared a common flag and national anthem.

I have put the genesis of the `India vs Bharat' expression to bring out all the dimensions of the divide. Since 1978, the chasm has further widened in, at least, two more dimensions added. First, the Digital Divide is keeping the informatics revolution in the field of communications away from the countryside. Second, the government is deliberately blocking the flow of technology, particularly bio-technology, into agriculture while allowing it to reach the urban sectors almost without any restrictions.

The Prime Minister has not spelt out what specifically he intended to do to bridge this divide between `India' and `Bharat'. The Budget day is fast approaching and the debate on the Kelkar Committee report has included serious suggestion of an agricultural income-tax. It would be crassly unfair if one tries to suggest that the Prime Minister would be thinking of endorsing agricultural tax to put `Bharat' out on a par with `India'. That would be ridiculous since the respectable farm community has always wanted the pleasure and the privilege of paying income-tax as also an income to pay them on.

If the Prime minister is contemplating increases in the budgetary allocations for infrastructural development or development plan projects such as the Rural Road Development Plan or Linking of Rivers, he may not be able to go far because the fiscal limitations of both the Central and the State governments would make progress in that direction extremely tardy. The incremental budgetary allocation can be nowhere near the net losses inflicted on `Bharat' through negative subsidies The measures that are really required to be taken for removing the `India-Bharat' divide, as I highlighted it 25 years back, will be as follows:

1) Abolish all restrictive and monopoly regimes in agricultural sector including both the access to inputs and the post-harvest treatment of agricultural produce;

2) Abolish the Essential Commodities Act, the Food Corporation of India and the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC);

3) Pending reparations to farmers for damages caused them over the last 20 years on account of anti-farmer trade policies estimated by the Task Force on Agriculture at Rs 300,000 crore, put a moratorium on all coercive recoveries from farmers on account of loan recoveries, electricity dues, etc.;

4) Improve budgetary allocations for a day-to-day networking between `India' and `Bharat' including roads, waterways, railways and electronic communications.

Measures of this type will take far more courage for the Prime Minister than what was required to do a `Pokhran'. The Hindutva front has been far too much preoccupied with the Partition; it has shown little concern for the `India-Bharat' divide which happened at about the same time. Now that the Prime Minister has shown an awareness of this reality, will he be able to muster the necessary courage to do his second `Pokhran' that will blast most post-Independence socio-economic and political institutions to theirfoundations?

(The author is Founder, Shetkari Sanghatana. He can be contacted at sharad@mah.nic.in)

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