SPOTLIGHT SUICIDE Sourav Banerjee
Folks, arise, awake ….
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It’s a mystery to me/We have a greed with which we have agreed/You think you have to want more than you need/Until you have it all you won’t be free/Society, crazy indeed/I hope you’re not lonely without me
Quietly, I sang this Eddie Vedder lines … and put on the noose and upheld myself to die hanging from a tree branch. In the heavy presence of the public, the media and the police…. The people around me urged me on. Yes, they did.
The timing, it appeared to me, was perfect. The AAP government in Delhi with its messianic leaders like CM Kejriwal and deputy CM Sisodia was holding a farmers’ rally at Jantar Mantar in the heart of the Capital. April 21. I heard that they were holding a protest against the anti-farmer-pro-corporate Land Bill of the NDA government at the Centre. I must be there, I thought.
I knew that, like me, you too are the victims of so many such promising legislations and policies. Governments come and go, green promises are made, while we suffer in silence, commit suicide, or die like ants, everyday, in every corner of the country. Both our pain and the pain-killer go unreported; unnoticed by the caretakers of the land.
I wasn’t a fool, I must confess. I read Albert Camus’ ‘Rebel’ too. Really. I wanted to rebel, but contrary to Camus’ idea of rebellion, I chose to kill myself. Why target others when I am available in life and blood?
So, I chose the Capital as the stage to register my protest aloud and reach all your ears and eyes. I came to Delhi all the way from a small village in Rajasthan, to expose before the world how a nation drives its feeding hands to die one after another. I had decided to put the ruling class as well as all you the citizens in shame, and teach all a lesson. My protest was against the rulers because they left me to die; it was against you fellow countrymen because you never ever cared to see what was happening around you.
I knew my sacrifice won’t go unnoticed in the melee of that huge event. I was right. The electronic media celebrated it like a great circus show. But, to me, more amusing was the way the leaders fought in parliament over my death and shed crocodile tears for the Indian Farmer. They vied with each other to literally hijack the publicity from my death and they literally touched my frozen body.
You and I know that India being the agrarian economy, a death of a debt-ridden farmer in full public glare has a huge potential to garner public ire. So did Somnath Bharti, the law minister of Delhi, who smelled a rat in my suicide and tweeted vigorously as if he was waging a political war. Vasundhara Raje, my very own CM, outdid Bharti and put the blame squarely on the jhaddu people. Soniaji and Co pointed a finger at Modi sarkar. I was amused, I must say. Carry on, you crazy!
Leaders found their way to my home. Some of them shed tears. They offered money to my family. Suddenly, all attention was on a poor farmer’s family.
We, the farmers, have been through it all for too long. Remember the Vajpayee era? As many as 46 farmers were committing suicide in our country a day those days. More than 600 farmers have killed themselves in Vidarbha, in recent times, right under the nose of the BJP-ruled Maharashtra. I know these because, unlike many other farmers, I had the bad habit of reading newspapers. May be, that was what did me in; I would not have been so upset had it not been for all the news I read of late.
Folks, you must be knowing that I am a very very sensitive farmer. I could not bear with all what I saw happening around me, near and far. What I could not stomach, however, was a statement made by UP chief secretary Alok Ranjan. “There is no conclusive proof that any of the farmer suicides had something to do with unseasonal rain or crop loss,” he said. To my knowledge, as many as 73 farmers have committed suicide, like me, in his Bundelkhand region in recent times.
Yes, I penned the plot, but still it wasn’t a theatre. My anguish was real, a reflection of a truth that poor farmers and labourers are getting more impoverished every day while the state, the media and the middle classes remain completely untouched. Our lives and pains are so alien to tech-savvy Indians. There is little wonder, then, that they fail to see how my death was actually a murder by the state. I plead with you, do not call it a simple suicide. It was murder, murder most foul.
I am ashamed of the land I was born in. Let us accept the fact that as a civilization we are barbaric, a collective failure. So, again, let us rebel, rebel against our own leaders who have eyes but eyes that look the other way.
Folks, arise, awake. It is about time we organise ourselves, change our politics and change our value systems. If we do not act now, then my kid, that little one, too would someday commit suicide. Do not turn around and say then that “it is in the family” – a tendency to commit suicide.
Lal Salaam! Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan!
Gajendra Singh
