By Matters India Reporter

New Delhi: Farmers are planning nationwide agitation against the federal government.

Farmers across the country are planning to launch a sustained agitation against the policies of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that they believe have added to rural distress and threaten their livelihoods.

About 200 farmers’ organisations from around the country will hold a nationwide protest on August 9, the day the Quit India movement was launched 66 years ago, said Vijoo Krishnan. This will be followed up by another round of pan-India protests on September 5. More protests are planned close to the elections in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, where outcomes are bound to be influenced by the growing unrest among farmers, Vinoo Krishnan said.

Krishnan was speaking at the launch of ‘DISMANTLING INDIA – A 4 YEAR REPORT’ edited by John Dayal, Leena Dabiru and Shabnam Hashmi, published by Media House.

The Book was released at a function at Constitution Club on 14 July 2018. The writers include Aruna Roy, Admiral L Ramdas, Syed Hamid, Colin Gonsalves, Harsh Mander, Arun Kumar, Mani Shankar Aiyar, John Dayal, K Satchidanand, Ashok Vajpeyi, Usha Ramanathan, Souradeep Ray, Subhash Gatade, Gauhar Raza, Surjit Singh, Karen Gabriel, Mathew Jacob, Vijoo Krishnan, Kavita Krishnan, Vidya Bhushan Rawat, Paul Divakar, Juno Verghese, Goldy M George, Rakhi Sehgal, Hartosh Bal, Nikhil Dey, and Rakshita Swamy.

The National Democratic Alliance completed four ears of its five-year term in May 2018, but it is almost five years now since the Bharatiya Janata party chose Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat for 12 years, as the man who would lead it into the general elections. The elections, with Amit Shah as the party president and Modi’s lieutenant, saw possibly the most acrid and divisive electoral campaigns in the history of democratic India. The Modi-Shah leadership polarised the people, but Modi also appealed to the emerging ‘millennial’ generation with a promise of development, employment, and a decent life, codified in the word “Achhe din” (good days).

In the four years that the BJP-led NDA-II has been in power with Modi as Prime minister, the Achhe Din has turned has failed. Achhe Din has turned into an unending nightmare. What has exacerbated is the hate, the fear on the ground, and the targeted violence. ‘Lynching’ is the new word heard in a country where fraternity and secularism were the bywords of governance and life. ‘Demonetisation’, ‘Gau Rakshak’, and “Anti-National” are the omnibus terms which spell the devastation of the economy, the new non-constitutional cadres enforcing a private law, and how the ruling dispensation looks at political opponents, academics, students and civil society. Promises to end corruption to set up a Lok Pal have been forgotten in encouraging crony capitalism and diluting environmental laws. This government is selectively creating and modifying data to project its own narrative.

“Anti-national” is the most heard word in India today, the Report says. Union ministers and party leaders use it to describe members of the parliamentary Opposition, as well as men and women in trade unions, students and teachers in universities, dissidents and independent thinkers in Academies of Art and Literature, and the few who dare write speak in the Media.

Activists, who in 2017 and 2018 travelled through the country meeting victims of targeted hate and the families of those lynched by Gau Rakshaks and others look at the brutal aftermath of this frightening phenomenon which was unknown in the past, but has now burst on the scene in some virulent, omnipresent form. Its impact is felt by most by the Muslims, and the Dalits. The alienating hate Campaigns in which government, party and Sangh have been complicit, triggered it. The internet, the smart phone and the Apps, signs of modernity, became instruments of the targeted hate and the ensuing bloodshed.

The Report cautions that the shrinking democratic and civil spaces and the new trend of silence and acceptance, directly and indirectly, injected by the State, pose a danger which has implication, not for India alone. They re-define ‘nation’ to homogenise it, directly threatening India’s secular and ethnic fabric.

The conquest of the Constitution by an ideology has manifest itself in the speed with which it has penetrated the delicate educational, cultural and intellectual ecology. It is important to see the process of saffronization of education, not just as a matter of changes in textbooks and syllabi, although these are certainly the most immediately evident signs of it. It is about producing students who are receptive to being saffronised even outside the walls of the school, or college, or university, where in fact, their actions and beliefs have a much bigger role to play. It is not just about promoting the Hindutva imagination, but about making it familiar, unremarkable, and is willing to accommodate it as the norm, even when not subscribing to it directly.

This is also exemplified in the daily spectacle in the field of culture. Major institutions, national and public, have been forced to organise events on some of the pet projects of the Government. Similar events in favour of the government are organised by the media, under duress or a self-accepted obligation, a sort of price to pay for survival, a religious tax.

This Report rests best in its analysis of data in the public domain, a reality check of the claims of the prime minister whose electoral victory also partly engined by his appeal to the emerging aspirational class, and the educated youth of employment, prosperity and a better life. In 2016-17, actual jobs created were 4.1 lakh as against the BJP’s electoral promise of creating one crore jobs annually. The CMIE-BSE surveys said by April 2018, the unemployment rate had risen above 6%. The situation is worse for the female workforce. The rate of unemployment among women has reached nearly 8.7%.

The Report exposes data management or data manipulation used by the government to mislead the people. Statistical measurement tools to gauge economic development have undergone dramatic changes over the past 4 years. New GDP series based on 2011-12 pushed the GDP growth rates too much higher levels than the 2004-05 series, the continuous flip-flop over the back series has resulted in a complete lack of evidence on the comparative GDP growth rates for pre-2011-12 years, making it impossible to compare the new growth data with the growth before 2014.

After opposing the logic and implementation of the Aadhar project when it was an opposition party, the BJP has turned 180 degrees making Aadhar one of its biggest projects. As Gopal Gandhi said – conceptually Aadhar is the opposite of the RTI. While the RTI gives every citizen the right to watch every act of the state, Aadhar will give the state the right to watch every transaction of every citizen. At the same time, the centralised biometric authentication system has resulted in the exclusion of lakhs of poor people. In Rajasthan, for instance, more than 20% eligible beneficiaries with Aadhar cards have been unable to draw their rations for more than a year. That is more than a crore of the poorest people of the state.

The Report has a comprehensive set of tables covering the impact of the regime on most segments of life. This included communal and targeted violence against religious minorities. This data has not been released by the National Commission for Minorities, or by the National Crime Research Bureau, and in fact there seems reluctance to document many hate crimes, especially lynching fuelled by communally charged hate campaigns over social media. It has been a painstaking work by organisations working amidst the communities and researchers.

The Report, in an A-4 format in hardcover and soft cover bindings, has 356 pages and is available on Amazon.