Village memory bank prefers ‘miracle’ pond to suicide tag

Amaninder Pal     

Tribune News Service

Chotiaan (Sangrur), January 29     

Around a dozen men sit in front of the thai (common- place for village elders); four play cards and the rest watch. “What is special about the village?” I ask. Septuagenarian Jeevan Singh, a retired school teacher, comes out with two reasons: “Talai, which is a small pond that can cure skin diseases, and a place associated with Baba Gajjan Shah frequented during the annual Lohri fair.”

The third that he misses out is the reason why researchers from even Harvard University and Indian Institute of Technology have spent time here: suicides.

With 66 recorded deaths, Chotiaan is among the five villages worst affected by debt-related suicides in Punjab. Home to around 700 families, the village experienced waterlogging for around two decades in the 1970s and 1980s. “Canal water would hardly reach here. But people would not commit suicides even in those tough times,” says Leela Singh, village president of Bharti Kisan Union (Ugrahan).

“In those years, we could easily buy over 100 litres of diesel by selling a quintal of wheat to keep our irrigation pump engines running. But things have gone from bad to worse in the past 15 years or so. Today, you can’t get 30 litres by selling the same quantity of wheat,” he says.

The first to highlight the plight of Chotiaan was an NGO, “Movement Against State Repression (MASR)”. Headed by eminent activist-cum-philanthropist Inderjit Singh Jaijee, MASR surveyed and found that 66 farmers and labourers committed suicide in this village since 2000. 

Leela Singh feels the count is higher. “We have several homes where more than one person has committed suicide in the past 20 years. I cremated two sons of my real brother in my own fields. Both had hanged themselves due to debt,” he says.

Jeevan Singh adds that the worrisome aspect of suicides is that in the past few years, labourers have also begun ending their lives due to mounting debt. His worries appear true. Of the 11 who committed suicide in the past five years, six were from Dalit families.

Jaijee says that so infamous is the village for suicides that in 2008, a scholar from Harvard University stayed here for 45 days to study the reasons for such a high rate of suicides. “She found that 45 villagers had committed suicide by 2008,” Jaijee adds. As recent as last year, scholars from IIT, Kanpur, surveyed the village. 

On what is driving Chotiaan men to take the extreme step, villagers come up with reasons that every marginal farmer’s family in Punjab is familiar with. Some committed suicide after the crops failed, others after failure to repay debt. 

What everybody agrees on is that farming today has become “unviable”. “No matter how many resources you put in, farming eventually fails you. There are families in the village who can’t repay the debt despite bumper crops. A good crop output only ensures smooth running of their debt cycle. A single crop failure forces them to end their lives,” says Mohinder Kaur, widow of Kishan Singh, who committed suicide in 2013 after the moneylender refused to lend him more money. 

However, Jaijee throws light on another important aspect. “Besides other reasons, one crucial fact is that the cluster of villages, including Chotiaan, is located at the tail-end of Laad Banjara minor. For the past 25 years, these villages have never received sufficient canal water to irrigate fields. This led them to pump in more and more money to dig deeper tubewells. This is one of the several aspects that has broken the economy of marginal and small farmers in this cluster.”

Unlike surrounding villages, which were controlled by feudal lords before 1947, Chotiaan was dominated by Mahants, descendants of Baba Gajjan Shah.

Legend has it that for several generations, Baba’s descendants peacefully retained control of village land, which sharecroppers (village farmers) would till. Then suddenly, peasants became owners of the land. But hardly anybody knows how this transformation to a debt-ridden, suicide-prone village took place.

Unlike Kishangarh, located just 15 km from here, where the peasants’ challenge to feudal lords caught the imagination of everyone from activists to academicians six decades ago, Chotiaan has nothing to showcase that can epitomise resistance. All that its inhabitants consider of recall value is the talai, their “miracle” pond, and Baba Gajjan Shah. Suicides, they have learnt to live with, surrendered to. Much like the rulers of the day have.