"Everybody loves a good drought," goes the title of the Indian journalist P Sainath's classic book about rural distress in India. To judge from the unseemly clamour of India's political class in the Indian capital, New Delhi, over the last day, everybody loves a good death too.
The Indian farmer Gajendra Singh Kalyanwat was one of a few thousand people to attend a rally organised on April 22 by the Indian political outfit the Aam Aadmi Party, which runs the state government of Delhi. Like many of the parties in opposition in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, the AAP had in the last week been trying to drum up resistance among India's peasantry to the Land Acquisition ordinance, a forerunner of a crucial bill that Narendra Modi's government had been trying to pass into law in the current session.
The bill, which the opposition parties have painted as a "pro-corporate" conspiracy designed to allow big business easy access to the lands of small farmers, had also run into some literal rough weather in recent weeks.
Unseasonal rains in north India had grievously damaged maturing crops, leading the media to focus (as it does intermittently) on the long-term crisis in Indian agriculture, which over the last two decades has resulted in thousands of farmer suicides. Full story...
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The Indian farmer Gajendra Singh Kalyanwat was one of a few thousand people to attend a rally organised on April 22 by the Indian political outfit the Aam Aadmi Party, which runs the state government of Delhi. Like many of the parties in opposition in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, the AAP had in the last week been trying to drum up resistance among India's peasantry to the Land Acquisition ordinance, a forerunner of a crucial bill that Narendra Modi's government had been trying to pass into law in the current session.
The bill, which the opposition parties have painted as a "pro-corporate" conspiracy designed to allow big business easy access to the lands of small farmers, had also run into some literal rough weather in recent weeks.
Unseasonal rains in north India had grievously damaged maturing crops, leading the media to focus (as it does intermittently) on the long-term crisis in Indian agriculture, which over the last two decades has resulted in thousands of farmer suicides. Full story...
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