Farmers’ Mann ki Baat

           SUKUMARAN C.V.

"Rulers who neither see nor feel 

nor know

But leechlike to their fainting 

country cling..."

—P.B.Shelley (sonnet England in 1819).

Two centuries ago, the great poet

Shelley told the Peterloo protesters,

Who were agitating for greater 

Reforms and who were confronted

By the charging cavalry of King George:

“Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many- they are few.”[i]

Oh! Farmers, you feed the nation,

But the nation heeds not you;

If you cultivate not, the doctor 

And the engineer will starve to death;

But the doctor and the engineer live

Better lives and you live miserably.

If you cultivate not, the ruler and

The bureaucrat will starve to death;

But the ruler and the bureaucrat live

Better lives and you live miserably.

If you cultivate not, contractorss and

The brokers will starve to death;

But the contractors and brokers live posh

And you lead a life in misery.

You feed everybody and nobody

Listens to you and sees your woes.

We are taught to be proud of being

IAS and IPS people; never we are

Taught to be farmers, not even to 

Appreciate them and their toil,

Which enables us to have our posh style.

Everybody wants to be bureaucrats;

And nobody wants to be farmers.

Yet, nobody can live without farmers!

And when you walk together to

Meet the Maharajas and tell them

Your woes and your problems,

They dig moats across roads to 

Stop you reaching around their City.

They know not you are the children

Of the soil and you can metamorphose into

A placid yet turbulent river whose flow

Their moats and barricades can't stop.

You left your villages and formed the river,

That flowed and flowed and breached 

The moats and barricades and knocked on 

Their City gates and put the City under siege.

Then the Maharajas put forth conditions;

And you said to hell with the conditions.

The rulers are not, but the people are

The authority to put forth conditions.

You taught them the bitter truth;

And it will be better for them;

If they are wise enough to learn the truth.

And they will be wiser, if they learn it.

I feel proud of you when I see you

Walk and cook and sleep on the roads;

While the north Indian winter is unbearable,

Even if we have a roof above our heads.

I feel proud of you when I see you

Stand united not by caste and creed;

But by your economic woes whose

Creators the corporate-friendly rulers are. 

I feel proud of you for telling the Maharaj

You are bored to hear his mann ki baat, and

For forcing him to listen to your mann ki baat.

And I wish to be with you, to flow 

With you, to walk with you and

To confront the Maharajas

With you and to tell them that the

World goes on only because you are

There to saw and reap and feed it.

And I wish to be with you to tell you:

“Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many- they are few.”

Oh, No; We are many, they are few.

---

[i] Quoted from Shelley’s poem The Masque of Anarchy. [On August 16, 1819, cavalry regiments of King George III attacked the 60,000 protesters who were agitating peacefully for political reforms assembling in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, led by the radical orator Henry Hunt. In the cavalry charge, around twenty people were killed and hundreds were injured. This incident is known as the Peterloo Massacre. Shelley wrote the poem lambasting the authorities. But it was published only after his death. Shelley lambasts the combination of power (God, and Law, and King) that oppresses the people. The fascinating and salient feature of the poem is its eloquent portrayal of non-violent resistance. And Timothy Bloxam Morton says in his essay "Receptions" included in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley that the poem has played an important role in inspiring Gandhi. See how beautifully and powerfully Shelley delineates  non-violent resistance in the 79th, 84th, 85th and 86th stanzas of the poem:

Stand ye calm and resolute,

Like a forest close and mute,

With folded arms and looks which are

Weapons of unvanquished war. (Stanza 79)

And if then the tyrants dare,

Let them ride among you there;

Slash, and stab, and maim and hew;

What they like, that let them do. (84)

With folded arms and steady eyes,

And little fear, and less surprise,

Look upon them as they slay,

Till their rage has died away. (85)

Then they will return with shame,

To the place from which they came,

And the blood thus shed will speak

In hot blushes on their cheek." (86)

'Bomb-eaters' of Kerala

 SUKUMARAN C.V.

[Humans] are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.—Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels).

"Bulldozer died," the news channels reported. Buldozer was a mozhayaana (male elephant without tusks) who gained the name because he used to destroy the huts of the tribal people at Sholayur in Attappadi. The elephant has been wandering for over a month without eating anything, as his mouth was shattered by a bomb hidden inside the coconuts or pineapples he had eaten. As Attappadi is just 43 kilometres away from my home, I travelled to see the dead body of Bulldozer. The sight was really painful. Its mouth was competely shattered, festered and filled with worms. The hapless creature has shrunken into a skeleton. The tribal people whose homes have been demolished by him were seen crying standing in front of him and performing his last rites. It means that they are not the ones who hid bombs in the eatables to harm him. Who did it? We are not going to know it, because Bulldozer was buried and no case is registered for the unnatural death of the elephant. Some months ago a female elephant who was six months pregnant was killed in the same fashion. The poor animal, to escape from the flees that were being attracted to its festering, worms-filled mouth, stepped into a river and stood submerged in water. It was in the death throes and died standing in the water.

Imagine your hunger is a crime that warrants painful death. Imagine you are hungry and you get the food items you like very much. Imagine you put it in your mouth between your teeth and bite and it explodes and shatters your mouth. Imagine, not only your hunger was not quenched, but also you are badly injured and you can never eat food! Imagine you wander with the excruciating pain. Imagine your mouth festers and worms are crawling in your mouth and cheeks and throat. Imagine it was done to you by a species that encroached all your lands and considers you as a pest in your own lands stolen by them. And imagine this species is the one that boasts itself of being the most civlised species in earth. 

The number of elephants are decreasing in our country that venerates the elephant as God Ganesha or Vinayaka. In 2012 there were 29391 elephants in India. According to the all-India Elephant Population Census Report released on August 12, 2017 by the Ministry of Environment, there are only 27312 elephants. 

The latest data released by World Wide Find for Nature reveal more than half of the wildlife in the world was eliminated during the last forty years. There are only one animal whose population is increasing day by day and that animal is called Homo sapiens. 

Wild animals are generallyg very gentle beings. They never attack humans unless they are provoked or cornered by the humans. Elephants are the most gentle animals. I have been face to face with a wild tusker in the Nelliyampathy forests while I have been working at the Nelliyampathy office of my department. After office hours I used to walk into the forest and in my forest walks, I have seen Malabar giant squirrels, wild boars, gaurs, barking deer and wild elephants in close distance. The gigantic trees and the exotic music of the forest winds, wild birds and wild crickets and the occasional sightings of the gentle animals used to take my mind into an unearthly peace and contentment.

Once when I was returning from the forest after my usual forest walk in the dusk, I felt that I was being watched unseen and when I turned around, saw a wild boar with huge tushes observing me standing still. When the boar knew I saw it, it gently turned back and disappeared into the forest. It could easily have attacked me for being an intruder in its home or territory. But animals are too gentle to do so.

In another occasion, I met the gentle tusker and I could even capture many photographs of him on my mobile. What an ecstatic experience it was! He was having his food standing inside the dense thickets under the trees. Having heard the sound of twigs being broken, I knew it was an elephant having food, and very cautiously went to the spot and could see the elephant only when I reached a mere twenty metre distance away from him. The elephant felt my presence and started to come out of the thicket and now we were face to face! I was walking back capturing his photographs on my mobile and he was walking ahead in my direction, slowly, gently and calmly, enabling me to enjoy his majestic gait and to capture his photographs in different postures. When he came fully out of the thicket, I retreated with respect, and he disappeared into the deep forest. 

Two of the many photographs I have captured on my mobile standing hardly fifty metres away from him face to face.

The captive elephants shackled by chains and controlled by knives and spears and canes have never captivated me as the wild, free roaming tusker has.

A forest, even if it is filled with boars and gaurs and leopards and elephants, is more peaceful than our cities which is filled only with humans. Even if the humans are intruders into their abode of calmness, the animals always try to skip the humans instead of attacking. They live in the wild, but they are not wild.

The tragic death of Bulldozer and the pregnant elephant indicates that the humans are wild even if they are not living in the wild.

                           ****

The inhumanity of the humans against the wildlife is a pan-Indian phenomenon. 

In the chapter titled "Failing Our Gods" in Prerna Singh Bindra's book The Vanishing: India's Wildlife Crisis, the author says: "In India, the elephant is god: Ganesha, the lord of good fortune, remover of obstacles....But today, as human populations continue to skyrocket and habitations edge into elephant territory...Homo sapiens are locked in conflict with the lord's earthly avatar, Elephas maximus... As a conservation journalist, I have been aware of the conflict. The horror stories from across the country keep trickling in: Villagers in Assam riding a baby elephant that was accidentally left behind when her herd was chased away, then beating her to death as the police and media looked on... 

... I came accross a photograph... The image was of an elephant, lying lifeless in a pool of its own blood in a field in Assam. Scrawled on the carcass was 'Dhan Chor Bin Laden'—Paddy Thief Bin Laden. The message was disturbing: God had morphed into a thief and a terrorist. 

The human tragedy, of course, is monumental. ... Crop damage can be crippling. ... But what is the elephant to do, where does it go, what does it eat, with humans having flattened and invaded its forest? The 'Bin Laden' photograph was from Sonitpur (Assam), the district with the highest rate of deforestation in the country. The elephant reserves in Sonitpur-Kameng were massively encroached post 1990s. ...

It is we, Homo sapiens, who are at fault...It is not the elephants who are the problem. It's us. Elephants are wise, intelligent, peaceable beings with a heart and a conscience. We have wreaked havoc in their lives, taken their home, their food, blocked access to water. We have killed their families, destroyed their society."

It is high time we, the Homo sapiens, collectively learnt what Prerna Singh Bindra says in the Prologue of The Vanishing: India's Wildlife Crisis: "When we ravage nature, we are threatening our future. When we war with wildlife, it is a war against ourselves."

In the name of a virus

SUKUMARAN C.V.  

The other day when I called my friend who is a gram panchayat secretary, he told me that he has been a Covid-19 'patient' and the panchayat office where he works has temporarily been closed. 

Generally, I have a feeling that the manner in which the virus is being handled in India, especially in my home state Kerala, is terribly problematic. But till I called my friend, I have had no idea that it is traumatic too. As the president of the panchayat, where my friend works as secretary, tested positive for nCoV, all the employees were home quarantined and my friend tested negative in the Rapid Antigen Test (RAT). But the doctor asked him to have RT-PCRT (Realtime Polymerase Chain Reaction Test) and in which he tested positive. He was taken away from home in an ambulance. His wife, son and daughter, who is a Class VIII student, were put under home quarantine. Notices informing the people that the home is of a Covid-19 patient and the family members are under quarantine/observation were pasted in front of their home. Five days later his wife and children were taken in an ambulance for testing. The daughter who never before has gone anywhere without her dad has been in trauma ever since he was taken away and she fell unconscious when she was taken to the ambulance. Nobody tested positive, but everybody was traumatised and the girl was terribly. 

My friend spent ten days in a CFLTC (Covid First Line Treatment Centre) and on the tenth day tested negative in RAT and reached home. He was not a 'patient' even when he tested positive and the 'treatment' is, being asked to swallow multivitamin tablets once in a day. He could simply have done it sitting in his home too. And it must have spared both him and his family from the unnecessary mental trauma they have been forced to suffer. Most of the Covid-19 patients are like my friend who is as healthy as a nut both before and after being tested positive. And the greatest irony is that my friend, who first tested negative in the RAT, was forced to have RT-PCRT and was taken to the CFLTC. And he was released when proved Covid-free through RAT! Then why was he who tested negative in an antigen test forced to be a Covid-19 patient only to be proved negative by another antigen test? Many such  questions remain unanswered in the 'fight' against the virus. The end result was the irreparabe trauma the people like my friend and their family members like the teenaged girl have to go through. This is the general picture statewide.

The total collection of viruses in and on the human body is called human virome. It is said that 'the human virome is a part of our bodies and will not always cause harm. Many viruses are present in the human body all the time. Viruses infect all plant forms; therefore the bacterial, plant and animal cells and material in our gut also carry viruses.' 

The effect of the novel coronavirus in India cannot be called a lethal one. The first positive case in the country was reported in January 31 and so far the death toll is only 50000. We should bear in mind the fact that the population of the country is 130 crore. The virus needed exactly half an year to cause the death of around 50000 people out of this 130 crore. And of these 50000, many have already been suffering from other serious ailments. That means the virus has failed to have its killing spree in India as it has succeeded to have in Europe, the U.S. and Brazil. Hence, the fear-psychosis created in the name of the virus is quite an unwarranted one. 

In India, it is not the virus that terrifies the people, but the method of the governments that handle the virus, I presume. If a hardly 15 year old girl falls unconscious due to the fear-psychosis created in the name of a virus in this age of freedom and democracy, it is bad; quite bad. The virus did no harm to her father or her; but the unscientific method of transforming a healthy person into a patient and transporting him to 'treatment centres' where there is no treatment except making such 'patients' virtual prisoners, really traumatises both the 'patients' and their family members.

It is high time we treated the novel coronavirus as an ordinary virus, one of the many viruses that exist in and around human body; instead of being terrified by its presence and terrify the people in the name of its presence.

LAJJA and SHAMELESS

SUKUMARAN C.V.

It was more than 25 years ago, in 1994, I bought my own copy of Taslima Nazrin’s LAJJA and virtually devoured it. No other contemporary work of literature has shaken me as LAJJA has. The following lines she wrote in the preface of LAJJA reveal how true a secularist Taslima Nazrin is: “I detest fundamentalism and communalism. This was the reason I wrote Lajja soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. Lajja was published in February 1993 in Bangladesh and sold 60,000 copies before it was banned by the government five months later—their excuse was that it was disturbing the communal peace. In September that year a fatwa was issued against me and there have been marches on the streets of Dhaka by communalists clamouring for my life.” 

While the so called secularists and communists use secularism as a political tool to secure votes and thus to cling on to power giving all kinds of freedoms for the religions to kill reason and secular way of life, the real secularists and humanists like Taslima Nazrin lead the life of a refugee, hunted by fanatics and discarded by the so called secularists.   

And now, Taslima Nazrin wrote SHAMELESS, a sequel to LAJJA, in 2017 and its English translation was published in this April. 

Taslima Nazrin is the wonderful writer I love and respect as I love and respect no other contemporary writer. She was forced to be in exile for writing LAJJA, for her uncompromising stand against religious fundamentalism. 

LAJJA tells the story of how Suranjan, a staunch secularist, had to leave Bangladesh as his sister was raped and killed in the communal riots errupted in Bangladesh as an aftermath of the Babari Masjid demolition.

Suranjan left Bangladesh for India because, as Taslima Nazrin writes in the last chapter of LAJJA: “There was absolutely no one to depend upon. He was an alien in his own country.”

And it is really painful to read in the “Author's Note” at the very beginning of SHAMELESS: “I had lived in Europe for over a decade after I had to leave Bangladesh, and was now settled in Kolkata. The state government was putting pressure on me to leave West Bengal. Where would I go leaving my home in Kolkata behind? Which country could I call my own?”

These same questions haunted Suranjan and in SHAMELESS, Tazlima Nazrin meets Suranjan who tells her:

‘I am Suranjan. Don’t you recognize me? You wrote a novel about me.’

‘A novel?’

‘Yes, a novel. You called it Lajja. Don’t you remember?’

Taslima Nazrin uses novel techniques in fiction. LAJJA was written uniquely. It can be read as a novel, as news reports and as history. However we read it, it is engrossing. And in SHAMELESS, we have the wonderful experience of the character meeting the writer and the writer too becomes character.

The author-character Taslima tells Suranjan in the first chapter of SHAMELESS: 

‘The religious fanatics were furious with me because I criticised Islam. All religions are a roadblock to women’s freedom.’

Taslima Nasrin categorically revealed this truth in LAJJA, two decades ago. She had to leave her country for writing the novel. 

And two decades after, Taslima Nazrin is still unflinching in her stand against patriarchy and religious fundamentalism, the two sides of the same coin. Apart from ripping apart fundamentalism, in this novel she treats communism too as it deserves.

The author-character Taslima asks Suranjan in the fifth chapter of SHAMELESS: 

‘You used to believe in communism once. You haven't joined the CPI(M) here?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘There's no communism anywhere in the world. They are more capitalist than capitalists themselves.’

‘Everything evolves.’

Suranjan smiled. ‘That's just an excuse, claiming to be marching with the times when all you're doing is protecting the interests of the rich.’

Why can’t you breathe, George Floyd?

                                        SUKUMARAN C.V.

George Floyd, an innocent African American, was killed in the night of May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, by a white police man pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck. Floyd was not even the suspect the police man suspected him to be!

On 26 June 2011, in Mississippi, a group of white teenagers savagely beat up James Anderson, a middle aged African American, and then they ran over him with a pick up truck and killed him.

It is believed world over, or rather the world is forced to believe, that the U.S. is the greatest democracy in the world where the citizens are entitled to have all kinds of freedom. But history tells a different story.

Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published in 1852, said: “So this is the little lady who made the big war.”  The big war was the American Civil war. Mrs. Stowe says in the preface of the novel that none of the incidents she portrayed in the novel is fictitious! The following scene from the novel is one of the many such unimaginable ones delineated it: “A slave warehouse is a house where every day you may see rows of men and women, an abundance of husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, and young children to be sold separately or in lots, to suit the convenience of the purchaser. ...Susan is sold! She goes down from the block, stops, looks wistfully back,—her daughter stretches her hands towards her. Susan looks with agony in the face of the man who has bought her, “Oh, Mas’r, please do buy my daughter!” “I’d like to, but I am afraid I can’t afford it!” said the gentleman...” The thing happens every day! One sees girls and mothers crying, at these sales, always!” (Chapter 30—The Slave Warehouse). 

The origin of the perpetration of genocide as it is known today can be attributed to the white settlers of the Americas, especially North America. The hordes of white settlers who swarmed the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries first eliminated the Native Americans en masse to rob their lands—two whole continents. Millions of Native Americans perished. The next victims were the African Americans, who were caught from Africa and brought to the United States as slaves packed as fish in the slave ships. Even after slavery was legally abolished after the Civil War ended in 1865, 3446 African Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1968. Their bodies were seen hung from electric posts and trees.

See how the forefathers of the African Americans were brought to the United States: “The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his helplessness in the face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles, with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of every five blacks died. On the coast they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold. One John Barbot, at the end of the seventeenth century, described these cages on the Gold Coast: ‘As the slaves come from Fida from the inland country, they are put into a booth or prison near the beach, and when the Europeans are to receive them, they are brought out onto a large plain, where the ship’s surgeons examine every part of everyone of them, to the smallest member, men and women being stark naked. Such as are allowed good and sound are set on one side, marked on the breast with a red-hot iron imprinting the mark of the French, English, or Dutch companies. The branded slaves after this are returned to their former booths where they await shipment, sometimes 10-15 days.’”

If such was their condition before they were ‘shipped’, see what it was after they were shipped:

“Then they were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, chained together in the dark, wet slime of the ship's bottom, choking in the stench of their own excrement. Documents of the time describe the conditions: ‘The height, sometimes, between decks, was only eighteen inches; so that the unfortunate human beings could not turn around, or even on their sides, the elevation being less than the breadth of their shoulders; and here they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs. In such a place the sense of misery and suffocation is so great that the Negroes are driven to frenzy.’ On one occasion, hearing a great noise from belowdecks where the blacks were chained together, the sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves in different stages of suffocation, many dead, some having killed others in desperate attempt to breathe. Slaves often jumped overboard to drown rather than continue their suffering. To one observer a slave-deck was “so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house.” Under these conditions, one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…’” (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Chapter 2—Drawing the Color Line).

Jacob Frey, the Mayor of Minneapolis, rightly says in his FB page on May 27: “If most people, particularly people of color, had done what a police officer did late Monday night, they would already be behind bars.”

On May 26^th, the Mayor wrote in his FB page: “Being Black in America should not be a death sentence. For five minutes, we watched a white officer press his knee into a Black man’s neck. Five minutes. When you hear someone calling for help, you’re supposed to help. This officer failed in the most basic, human sense.”

The United States of America always reminds me of mastiffs and wolfhounds. The Native Americans (whom Columbus called the Red Indians) had been eliminated through many unimaginable cruelties since the arrival of Columbus. One such cruelty is setting ferocious dogs loose on the hapless people: Ward Churchill, the well-known Native American activist and academic, writes in his book Since Predator Came: “In Central America, a new innovation, “dogging,” made its appearance. This had to do with setting vicious mastiffs and wolfhounds—raised on a diet of human flesh—loose on hapless natives. A properly fleshed dog could pursue a ‘savage’ as zealously and effectively as a deer or a boar. To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to rip apart their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts.” (Chapter 4—Genocide in the Americas: Landmarks from “Latin” America since 1492).

Such were the cruelties by which the forefathers of the U.S. citizens built this nation. Therefore I don’t think the incidents like the tragic killings of James Anderson and George Floyd will cease to happen in this nation whose driving force is racism and the deep-rooted belief in white supremacy. As the people’s historian Howard Zinn says at the very beginning of the aforementioned chapter, ‘there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of “the color line” as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, is still with us.’

And yet, I wish to see the bright rays of hope, the light of future, in the words of the Mayor of Minneapolis. I like to think, as Howard Zinn says in A People’s History of the United States, “Our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”