Kissa kursi ka

JUG SURAIYA

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In a parched area, two farmers are hopefully looking up at the sky for elusive rain clouds.

1st farmer: They say the monsoon is going to be late this year as well.

2nd farmer: So what’s new?  When is the monsoon never late?  But the good news is that even if the monsoon rains don’t come, there are plenty of other things raining down on us.

1st farmer: No kidding.  What kind of things are raining down on us?

2nd farmer: Sarkari freebies.  Except, they don’t call them that.  They call them rural relief schemes. On its very first day in office, the new sarkar announced a big juju of rural relief scheme for farmers.  

1st farmer: What’s the sarkar going to give us this time? 

2nd farmer: Well, according to the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme announced in the interim Budget 2019-20, 15 crore farmers will be given Rs 6,000 a year in three instalments.

1st farmer: That’s cool.  But tell me one thing.  Why is it that, after more than 70 years of Independence, we, all the time, need relief to prevent ourselves from committing suicide, no matter how many farmers beneficial schemes are announced by the incumbent sarkar. I mean, we’ve long had the minimum support price for what we grow, we have subsidised fertiliser, free bijli for irrigation, then there came the national rural employment guarantee programme, or NREGA, and now this new PM-KISAN scheme.  So, how come, after all these years, and all these various yojanas and schemes and what have you, we still remain distressed and in need of constant relief? 

2nd farmer: Beats me.  You’d think that by now some sarkar, or the other, would have been able to do something to solve, once and for all, the recurring problems of farmers who make up the bulk of the country’s population.

1st farmer: Right.  But even after the so-called Green Revolution of wheat farmers, so-called White Revolution of dairy farmers, the different land reforms, the dams that have been built and the other irrigation projects undertaken, we still remain so collectively distressed. Do you think being perpetually distressed is part of our karma, and there’s nothing to be done about it?

2nd farmer: Maybe.  But for what it’s worth we can take consolation from one thing.  

1st farmer: Yeah?  And what’s that?  I could do with a bit of consolation right now.

2nd farmer: We can take consolation from the fact that, thanks to our ongoing, chronic distress, successive sarkars have been able to devise all kinds of relief schemes for us. 

1st farmer: Yeah, but all those different relief schemes don’t seem to have given us much relief if we continue to depend on more and more relief schemes.

2nd farmer: Well, maybe that’s the whole point of all these relief schemes.  They’re designed not so much to give us relief, as to give relief to whatever sarkar happens to be in power and ensure that it remains in power.  

1st farmer: I see what you mean.  We can always bank on the sarkar to provide relief from our distress…but thanks to our distress, the sarkar can vote bank on us to stay in power…