Keeping faces of crisis in frame of mind

Amarjit Thind     

Tribune News Service

Sangrur, January 24    

They are done with tears. After all, how much and for how long can a person cry? They get to live, they might as well get on with it.

In the case of Hardev Kaur, all was hunky dory till one day she realised that Mukhtiar Singh, a level-headed farmer, husband and father, was acting strange. For a simple housewife in patriarchal Malwa, confronting him was out of the question but when he tried to hang himself from a neem tree in front of the house, her worse fears were confirmed: debt would take a toll on her family without a doubt, it was just a matter of when.

While his first attempt to hang himself was foiled by neighbours, the second in the cattleshed of his home was carried out in the dead of the night. The family only came to know of it in the morning.

Unable to come to terms that he had three college-going daughters, a teenage son and Rs 18 lakh in debt, he sold 5 acres but the debt still stood at Rs 8 lakh. The only way out, he felt,  was suicide. And he gave up.

Flanked by her daughters, Hardev today is still trying hard to reconcile. As she asks her daughters to carry on with the household chores, she looks at me and wistfully remarks, “What will become of them? If this is fate, then Gods must be cruel.” The fact that they have only 1.5 acres and a couple of buffaloes for survival is not lost on her. 

For all the rhetoric of a progressive, resurgent Punjab, the chilling fact is that farming is no more a viable proposition. And this is proved in village after village in the hinterland. Take the case of Ajaib Singh of Chotian village. The family owned 6 acres and life was good as per their living standards. Then the crops failed and the debt piled up to Rs 13 lakh. Seeing the insurmountable odds, his younger brother Charanjit Singh consumed pesticide.

True to the idiom that when it rains it pours, Ajaib one day fell into a tubewell bore and broke his back. This was six years ago. Today, he is dependent on his son and nephews to perform even daily ablutions. His wife too left him after this incident.

Today, the house can at best be described as a hovel. That the family is living from hand to mouth is testified by the absence of doors and windows of the two dilapidated rooms in this bone-numbing chill. The saving grace is that women from the neighbourhood provide for meals.

Bed-ridden Ajaib laments that his fate is worse than his brother, “who had the courage to take his life”, but he cannot even do that because of the kids. The family sold 3 acres but still has Rs 4 lakh as outstanding debt to a bank and a commission agent. They make do with whatever they grow on a 1-acre patch, which is not much as there is no tubewell connection.

The plight of Baljit Kaur of Chotian is no better. She lost her two sons to indebtedness. Given her loss, she is a picture of stoic restraint. Balwinder and Mohinder consumed pesticide. The family owned 11 acres but repeated crop failures meant they had to sell 5 acres to settle their debt. Today, the old lady survives on 2 acres given on lease and a couple of buffaloes. She also has to take care of the widow of her elder son. 

“They were hard-working boys but the djinn of debt devoured them. Who says Punjab is a prosperous state and all the people are happy? Ask me, a mother who had the misfortune to see the pyres of her two sons being lit in front of her eyes. But then, it is the will of the Almighty,” she says, as she wipes tears. 

But in the die-hard spirit of Punjabis, she does not  tea. That really tugs at your heart. The condition of the house of Jwala Singh, who swallowed celphos tablets in 2012, is even worse. His widow, Mohinder Kaur, a polio victim, hobbles her way round the small courtyard of her one-room dilapidated house, asking her son Beeru (11) to change his school uniform. She points to her cluttered room with an apology and pulls out a rusty trunk to show us a picture of her husband. “Not that we were well off but till he was here, he made sure that we had two square meals a day. I make do with Rs 5,000 a year that I get as lease money from 2 kanals that I own. Rest is on the generosity of the villagers.” She also mentions that she gets Rs 1,000 each for her sons from Guru Nanak Educational Society run by philanthropist IS Jaijee.

If this is the state of affairs of farmers, the plight of landless labourers can be well imagined. And none signifies it better than Pyaro (70) of Sangatpura village. Her whole world is centered round her two grandchildren — Mangu (9) and Rajji (12).

Her son, Gurjant Singh, and daughter-in-law Paramjit Kaur consumed celphos to break out of the debt trap. Two deaths later, the family still owes Rs 1.5 lakh to a moneylender. Her husband, Basant Singh, a daily-wager, too ended his life two months ago, unable to bear the daily ignominy of a debt-ridden life.

With a pleading look, she asks us whether her grandchildren too will meet the same fate. That’s a question for all of us to ponder.