Talking to an Empty Room

Description

He got the hang of his audience very quickly and then decided how high the pole-vault bar was to be set; and his audience ranged from the at-post-level villagers to international experts in fields of political economy, philosophy, culture, media and sometimes literature...

His speeches may not have won acceptance of the policy-makers but they must have been eye-openers to those who listened. He comes out, consistently, as a secular, radical liberal who believed that world can be changed and we should not stop at defining the change but become the change by shunning our glass-houses/ivory towers.

 

Sujets

• Sharad Joshi
• India
• Parliament
• Rajya Sabha

Informations

• Publié par: MediaNext Infoprocessors Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 11 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788193830338
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Talking to an Empty Room
Sharad Joshi in Rajya Sabha

First Release:
12 December 2018

© Shetkari Sanghatana
Regd. No. E-6966 (Pune)
Angarmala, Vill. & Po. Ambethan, Tal. Khed, Dist. Pune 410 501


Publisher / Printer:
Anand Agashe,
Menaka Prakashan, 2117, Sadashiv Peth,
Vijayanagar Colony, Pune – 411030
Phone: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Website: www.menakaprakashan.com

Cover design:
Kiran Velhankar

Layout:
Rahul Phuge

Production Head:
Amit Tekale


ISBN (E-Book) - 978-81-938303-3-8

Price: Rs. 350/-

For online purchase:
www.menakabooks.com

The text, images and any other matter included in this book cannot be photocopied, reprinted, translated or converted to any other medium without the permission of the copyright holder. Any attempt to violate the Copyright Act would attract penal action.


To All the Valiant Soldiers in the Strugle for Farmers’ Freedom


Acknowledgements:
1. Rajya Sabha Secretariat
2. Shetkari Sanghatana (Trust)
3. Menaka Prakashan, Pune



Financial Support:

1. Anant Deshpande 2. Darshini Bhattji
3. Dinesh Sharma 4. Hemant Borawake 5. Rajeev Basrgekar 6. Shamrao Pawar
7. Shashank Jewalikar
8. Sureshchandra Mhatre
9. Vaibhav Kashikar 10. Vinay Hardikar


A leading public intellectual from Maharashtra (India), Vinay Hardikar wears several hats with great elan. His socio-political activism has spanned more than four decades, twenty-five years of them in association with Shetkari Sanghatana leader Sharad Joshi. Never scared to swim against the tide, he speaks his mind on a wide range of subjects including politics, role of civil society, farmers’ issues, literature, music and journalism. He enjoys proficiency in six languages – Marathi, English, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Sanskrit, and is conversant with Bengali and Tamil.
Janancha Pravaho Chalila , Vinay’s path-breaking book about his experiences during the dark days Emergency, bears testimony to his keen observations, original thinking and incisive analysis clothed in precise words. The attributes are evident in his other books as well. Born in 1949, he is an avid trekker and a motor-cyclist. Vinay takes out time from his teaching engagements to deliver lectures, and write for many periodicals on topics close to his heart.



PREFACE
The Square Peg and the Round Hole
Marx got ideology right; but his economics was wrong. Gandhi got economics right; but his ideology was wrong. Shetkari Sanghatana (sic Sharad Joshi) has got both right.

Sharad Joshi in 1985

During my Narmada Parikrama I met a Sadhu who said that the farmers of India were paying for the sins of their past lives and doing anything for them was pointless. I wonder if he had a point.

Sharad Joshi in 2006


History has thrown up a number of ‘religious’ individuals who adhered to no religion; Sharad Joshi, similarly, was a politician who did not care for politics. Always correct and consistent in economics, he was always wrong and inconsistent in politics. No wonder that he came to parliament (Rajya Sabha-RS) some twenty years after his time. Yet, as was his habit, he took part in the proceedings with commitment, zest and depth. A collection of his speeches in the RS should therefore be useful to both his admirers and critics.
Joshi was a RS member from 2004 to 2010. True to form, both the timing and the method of his election were wrong and awkward to all but more particularly to himself. He was 69, absolutely spent after over 25 years of ceaseless effort to liberate the farmers of India from the slavery imposed on them by state policy in the nehruvian era which had continued four decades after Nehru. Not just that, he had in a way struck a bargain with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lead by the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for this membership and, at great embarrassment to himself, campaigned for NDA -mainly for BJP and Shiv Sena nominees- whom till the mid-90s he vociferously criticised; his vehemence reflect in the phrase ‘communalist vultures’ he had coined for them. There is reason to believe that Vajpayee had warmed up to him, that Joshi expected the NDA to be back at the centre and he assumed rightfully (not rightly) he would get the Agriculture Ministry and would be able to effect decisive revamping of state policy for agriculture-making in Farmer-centric instead of consumer-centric as it had been all along, free the farmers from the trap of permanent indebtedness and open the gates of both inland and world trade where Indian farmers would show that their poverty so far had been due to state policy and not due to the causes popular with economists and state certified expert advisers—traditional methods of cultivation, small holdings, apathy to new science and technology blah blah blah…
Good intent without doubt but based on totally wrong reading of how the political winds were blowing. The cradle and the baby both came down. For the first time the country found a qualified pro-liberation and globalisation economist in Dr Manmohan Singh who in the first year as PM provided Rs 71000 crores for waiving agricultural loans- admittedly it was haphazard and uncouth in that it divided the farmers into small-big and played obsolete leftist tunes in the era of the New Economic Order. Be that as it may Joshi was reduced to thoughts of what might have been.
In a way his presence in RS was like a generalship without a war because the parliamentary battleground had shifted to Lok Sabha-LS long back. Constitutionally RS was conceived as the Upper House (House of Lords or Senate) to accommodate capable individuals-cream of society-who would not have ‘elective merit’-a most abused term- yet could contribute to policy making by striking a balance between the politically convenient and the desirable; the expedient and the lasting; the short term and the long term. It was supposed that political parties would identify such individuals and bring them to RS. This idealism was under threat even when Nehru was there but it went totally out of the window when Indira Gandhi took over and RS was reduced to a reserved space for never to retire seniors who had got a son/daughter elected to LS, party functionaries and cronies who knew too much about the leadership, conmen and power brokers, big players in industry, trade who could buy nomination by obliging political parties and/or party bosses and finally, for face saving, politically correct media persons, popular figures from sports and films. While the LS sessions were vibrant and ‘newsworthy’, RS continued in its stupor- waking up only when a bill that was passed by LS needed to be thwarted or at least stalled. The centre of gravity of parliamentary debate was never in RS during Joshi’s stint. One wonders whether the ex-bureaucrat in him—always looking for surety of tenure—had dominated his choice. Reading these speeches is enjoyable for the substance, logic, steadfastness of the argument; the piquancy of diction is unmistakable but who was Joshi talking to? How many were present and of them how many really grasped what he was saying?
* * *
If LS was the right arena for Joshi what stopped him from going there? Admittedly, compilers-editors-analysts have the benefit of hindsight and can question the decisions of influential leaders but during his last years even Joshi would concede that things need not have gone the way they had. His best chance to win a LS seat was back in the mid-1980’s when the Shetkari Sanghatana (also SS, one of the ironies of politics?) had taken the state of Maharashtra by storm by rapid successful mobilisation of onion, sugarcane, tobacco and cotton growing farmers. Another feather in the SS cap was the Shetkari Mahila Aghadi (Women’s Front) which was by far the largest women’s body in the country with thousands of women joining their men-folk in agitations. Joshi had convincingly argued that the nehruvian economic model which handed over the definition of development as well as implementation of development agenda to the State (sic bureaucracy) was the real culprit in the undermining of agriculture and political parties without exception had farmers’ blood on their hands. He had exposed the sins of the Agricultural Price Commission in fixing prices of farm produce way below the cost of production and demanded Raast Bhav (judicious, just, fair prices, not ‘remunerative prices’ as misrepresented by his critics) and appealed to the farmers of ‘Bharat’ that they could lose their chains by choking the supply to the cities-‘ India’ in his parlance. The SS spread like wild fire in 2/3s of Maharashtra and was powerful in north-Maharashtra, Vidarbha and Marathawada.
Joshi had also declared the Congress-I as enemy number one of farmers and had invited the opposition parties to form a joint front against the Cong-I, assuring them of SS support in the assembly elections of 1985. This was his ‘double summersault’ theory- joining hands with oppressor No 2 to fight No 1 and possibly toppling both in the melting pot of politics. In addition he had developed a new Marathi idiom for SS cadres and followers. His masterly strategies of Rasta Roko and Rail Roko had baffled the state- till then used to take farmers for granted. Wonderstruck, farmers small and big, irrigated-non-irrigated, educated-half/uneducated, young-old flocked to listen to him. The media watched him in awe.
The opposition was quick in seeing Joshi as the general to defeat Cong-I. The BJP offered him direct entry as national vice-president and Shiv Sena promised him chief ministership. Only the incorrigible socialists and communists wer