The Release of Farm Laws Report
The long overdue report on the farm laws submitted by an expert Supreme Court-appointed panel to the Court in March 2021 has been released a year later. The report comes in the wake of the repeal of the three farm laws and more than a year of farmers protests at the borders of Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. It was released in the public domain by one of the four members of the SC-appointed panel, Anil Ghanwat.
According to the report, the farm laws “endeavor to create an ecosystem to facilitate private investments in well-oiled supply chains to cut down logistics, add value and reduce food losses.” They were “intended to align the agricultural policies with the structural requirements of the sector for enhanced access to agricultural markets and incentivize crop diversification”.
According to the report, the committee had invited 266 farmer organizations, including the ones protesting at the periphery of Delhi. It ended up interacting with 73 such organizations, which represented 3.83 crore farmers.
As per the findings of the report, “[O]f these 73 Farmer Organizations, 61 Farmer Organizations, representing 3.3 crore farmers, fully supported the Acts — a majority constituting 85.7 percent of the total farmers. But 4 Farmers Organizations, representing 51 lakh farmers (13.3 percent), did not support the Act. Another 7 Farmer Organizations, representing 3.6 lakh farmers (1 percent) supported the Acts with some suggestions for modifications. 1 Farmer Organization, representing 500 farmers, was not clear on the implications of the Farm Laws.”
Further, the committee found that,
- Only 42.3% of respondent farmers sell their produce through Agricultural Produce Market Committee [APMC] mandis and are mostly concentrated in Punjab and Haryana.
- Two-thirds of the respondents felt that the laws “would give more choice to the farmers beyond the APMC mandis, and would enable farmers to get a better price for their produce.”
- Around 58.2 percent of the respondents were not worried about the acquisition of their land by the corporate sector, while 28.7% were unsure and 13% felt threatened by it.
- The report also stated that the economic cost of the Food Corporation of India for acquiring, storing and distributing food grains is about 40% more than the procurement price.
The findings of the report should come as a wake-up call to the apologists of the farmers’ protests. Though the farm laws were withdrawn in ‘national interest’ by the Prime Minister and rightly so, the subversive political elements that had funded these protests in the name of famers should be held to account by the people for spreading unrest, communalism and falsehood in the country and vitiating the national atmosphere.
Sri Lankan Economic Crisis
Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since 1948. The crisis was mainly a result of the downturn in the tourism sector – on which the Lankan economy is critically dependent – due to the COVID19 pandemic since the last two years. It has also suffered due to dependence on lucrative foreign remittances which were not forthcoming due to the COVID19 pandemic. The Rajapaksa government’s decision to ban all chemical fertilisers in 2021 and shift to organic farming also hit the country’s farm sector and triggered a drop in the critical rice crop.
Prior to the pandemic, the crisis was in the making due to governmental mismanagement of the economy over the last few years, leading to mounting twin deficits – current account deficit and a budget shortfall – wherein the country’s national expenditure exceeded its national income, and its production of tradable goods and services was inadequate.
This was compounded by the deep tax cuts enacted months before the COVID-19 pandemic, which wiped out parts of Sri Lanka’s economy.
As a result of the state of the economy, the credit rating agencies downgraded Sri Lanka and the country lost access to overseas markers. In turn, Sri Lanka’s debt management programme, which depended on accessing those markets, derailed and foreign exchange reserves plummeted by almost 70% in two years. As of February 2022, the country was left with only $2.31 billion in its reserves but faces debt repayments of around $4 billion in 2022.
The dire economic situation has led to a livelihood crisis in the country, where there is extreme shortage of food and fuel, rising inflation, and, extreme power crisis which has forced small shops and businesses to shut shop. Massive protests have taken place against the government, and emergency was imposed (now revoked). The entire cabinet of the government was dissolved due to mass resignations by ministers.
India and China have sought to help Sri Lanka. India has extended an additional $1 billion line of credit in March and has signed several projects with Sri Lanka. Talks of India extending another $1 billion line of credit are in pipeline.
The Kashmir Files – A Movement
The release of the movie, The Kashmir Files, marks the rise of a new and consolidated India. The response received by the low budget movie – made with a budget of just 15 crore rupees – has been overwhelming. The movie traces the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits at the hands of Islamic fundamentalism through the episode of the 1990 exodus and genocide of the Pandit community in Kashmir. Making this episode the centre-point of its narrative, the movie also delves boldly into critiquing the present intellectual culture and education system – a pawn in the hands of anti-India forces – that has had a creeping role in poisoning young minds as well as distorting history and facts.
Making a distinction between exodus and genocide, the movie – which is really more of a documentary, based on more than 700 real-life interviews and meticulous research – argues that the events that occurred with the Pandit community in Kashmir during 1990 were not a voluntary exodus, but a genocide committed in the name of Islam. It showcases how the Pandit genocide was distorted and marginalized by historians and media, the plight of the once-rich Pandits as they languished in suffering in unhygienic and poverty-struck camps and how terrorists responsible for the gruesome murders were, in real life, felicitated and accommodated by the Indian establishment.
The movie adopts a clear approach towards the question of Muslim fundamentalism. Without mincing words, it shows how the genocide was not simply the work of Pakistan-inspired terrorists, but was also enabled and actively propagated by ordinary Kashmiri Muslims and their hatred for a Hindu India. The genocide was, thus, not only a political episode to teach India a lesson by separating Kashmir from India, but was an Islam-inspired project.
While Indian politics and academics has humored itself by justifying that Kashmir is a political problem, in reality, it has always been a religious issue. The movie showed that the poison is not only limited to the terrorists, but runs in the veins of even most common Kashmiri Muslims and just needed to be activated under the ideal circumstances.
The reception to the movie – due to its brutal showcasing of the truth of the genocide – was poignant and surpassed all expectations. Most often, people were seen either coming out of the theatres crying or else recharged with vigour against the collective injustice meted out to Hindus in an episode that was deliberately wiped off our history. More than the Islam-inspired fanaticism, the public opinion was spewing venom at the Indian intellectuals, who the movie factually exposed as being hand-in-glove with terrorists.
As a result of its reception, the emotions generated by it and the demand for the movie, the movie expanded at a phenomenal pace. Having been released on only a few thousand screens, the movie was subsequently released across all the screens in the country and abroad. Its special screenings were also held across the country by various community groups, while the government – the BJP-ruled ones – put their might behind it. It was also one of the rare movies – the first one in two years since the pandemic – to become an unparalleled commercial success, crossing 300 crore gross collection. The movies released alongside it – despite having much more famous actors – failed to make an impact. It was also a box office hit in countries like US, UK, Canada, and Australia. It was released across many other countries as well.
Separately, its success also gave rise to a vociferous political debate across the country. The Opposition, instead of being tactful, revealed its anti-national colours by ridiculing the movie and playing a blame-game over who did what for the Pandit community. AAP convener, Arvind Kejriwal, crossed all limits of decency in the Delhi Assembly when he crudely made fun of the events in the movie, implying them to be false. The intellectual community’s reactions to the movie’s success appeared to suggest as if they had swallowed poison.
Thus, in no time at all, the movie had gone from being mere cinematography to being a truly national – and international – movement of sorts. The revolutionary fervour it had instigated was something never seen before, especially in the context of a movie. This was when the movie had barely scratched the surface of the gruesome history of Islamic fundamentalism. What it had shown was just 1% of what had actually happened. In many ways, this movie was a beginning. The pandora’s box it has opened will not be shut down so easily and the rising national consciousness of the people will compel the breaking-up of the intellectual-secular ecosystem that has tried its best to keep India handicapped.
