Activists opposing farm laws say: Exploit us, not farmers

By Ravi Shanker Kapoor New Delhi, Oct 4 : Opposition to the new farm laws, which are aimed at freeing the farmer from archaic legislation and hazardous rules, reveals the intensity and ubiquity of hypocrisy both in the political arena, public discourse, and society at large.
It is a well-known fact that experts, both within and outside government, for decades have been calling for meaningful reforms in agriculture. The Economic Survey 2012-13, for example, said: “In order to bring about reforms in the (organised marketing) sector, a model Agricultural Produce Marketing (Development and Regulation) (APMC) Act was prepared in 2003. Though the process of market reforms has been initiated by different state governments through amendments in the present APMC Act on the lines of Model Act, many of the states are yet to adopt the Model Act uniformly. It is therefore necessary to complete the process of market reforms early in order to provide farmers an alternative competitive marketing channel for transaction of their agricultural produce at remunerative prices.” Yet, the Congress, whose government brought out Economic Survey 2012-13, is opposing the reforms it was advocating earlier. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh is worried about farmers “falling into the clutches of the monopolistic big corporates (sic)”. DMK President M.K. Stalin wants Chief Minister K. Palaniswami to “apologise” to farmers for supporting the “pro-corporate” laws. And, of course, there are communists and fellow-travellers who are aghast that the sector employing half the country’s workforce is being opened up.
Worse, decades of indoctrination of socialist principles in our schools and universities and by our academics and intellectuals have ensured that lies acquire a verisimilitude of veracity, the biggest of them being: corporations exploit the poor, and now they will fleece farmers.
Worse still, many apolitical common people are also against the farm laws. Public discourse and folklore in India is generally against corporations – or corporates, as the ugly Indianism has it. Our intellectuals never tire railing against big corporates. We are told that these companies exploit their employees, bribe politicians and bureaucrats, break or mould rules and regulations, evade taxes, and don’t care a hoot about the environment.
Yet, if you ask anybody, intellectual or otherwise, if they would like to work with a big company – or if they want their children to be employed by it – the answer would be a big “yes”. For everybody knows that big companies pay well, have a better working atmosphere, and are not run by the whims and fancies of small, proprietary firms-at least, at the lower and middle levels. They are happy working with big companies.