Why we remain unmoved by farmers’ plight or by workers buried in Uttarakhand

In all my years as a journalist, I know there are two things which make people’s eyes glaze over. One is agriculture and the other is the environment. Even how one minor star changed the colour of her nail polish from light pink to lighter pink is more enthralling to readers. To viewers of news, all that counts is high-intensity hatred and lots of shouting. They belong to another category of human.

But look at where we are now. Agriculture and the environment are top news. Admittedly, it will not last long. India’s farmers have been on the streets for close to three months, and their peaceful protests and their pain have been on display for much longer. And the Uttarakhand disaster has brought home once again how destroying nature indiscriminately for the sake of “development” will have a high cost.

There’s more of this, so leave now if you want to get outraged on an invented fight between various Hindu deities to win an election in Bengal or if the exact shade of pink eludes you.

Meanwhile, over 200 farmers have died during this protest. And the number is close to that in Uttarakhand given that as more time passes, the less chance there is of rescuing anyone alive.

The boredom angle we feel is also connected to class, caste and other social divisions that thrive amongst us. Farmers are rural: they are either exotic or tedious to the urban mind. The complications of mandis and private sector hegemonies are complicated. There is confusion over past policies and current intentions. And the more you buy from a supermarket, the less you look at a vegetable as something someone grew. All wrapped up in clingfilm with a polystyrene foam backing, it could have been made in a factory.

If you care, you buy organic. Which means you go to a boutique shop and pay 40 or 400 times what the farmer got. And if you go to a “farmer’s market” every Sunday, you belong to an even smaller elite class that wants to be as good as possible in the best way you can even if you drive an SUV. It’s tough.

But it’s not impossible. The farmers themselves are vocal and lucid about what they want, why they want the farm laws repealed and why they are apprehensive about trusting the government’s assurances. Tied up with all this are the problems of the crops grown, the public distribution system, the cost in terms of water and soil conservation. If only someone had listened to the farmers about their needs and fears before passing a set of bills to “help” them… Ah, well.

Intransigence escalates. And here the onus falls on a government more bothered its carefully calculated image rather than ground realities. In which it is despicably enabled by sections of the media and society “thought leaders”.

And then, the environment. The glacier melt, and the subsequent damage caused to two hydropower stations and to the land around the river, cannot conveniently be blamed on Nature alone. An earthquake is the Earth’s mantle shifting. That’s Nature. So far, you cannot stop it though you can take precautions. But. A glacier that melts because of changing climate conditions, dams that are built without bothering about their impact on the environment, fragile mountains that are destroyed to build roads for tourists, trees that are cut in the name of development… All this is human-made.

Intention does not matter when the extent of your actions have not been well-studied. Or worse and most likely, when you knew the results and went ahead anyway. The people who have died are villagers and migrant labour. For forever in India, such people have been statistics. They are not real. They have no human worth, no social capital. No families, no loved ones, no hopes, dreams, aspirations. In a week, they will be forgotten.

We have been told by those worthier than us that it is unfair to blame “development” for “accidents” like this. Is it? In the second decade of the 21st century we know very well that unfettered development has consequences. We know that the destruction of that delicate balance of the Earth’s systems for the sake of a new airport or a fancy highway can be catastrophic. And it has been in Uttarakhand, even though the people who died have no names, faces or celebrity status.

You can wake up now. I’ve finished. Go back to the hate. Is it Durga or Ram? And the nail polish. Was it pink or pink?