Hunger: The longtime driver of Indian policy

Sweet potatoes don’t seem like a particularly political food. No one riots over lack of the starchy tubers and “Shakarkhand Shortage” never made it as a headline on newspapers or TV.Yet in 1949, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru took pains to tell his fellow Indians that he had started living on rotis made from a mix of wheat and sweet potatoes: “Speaking from experience, I can say the mixture (25% sweet potato and 75% wheat) is excellent.” Untitled Carousel 73618911 73615398 73617916 He even had the lawns of his residence at Teen Murti planted with sweet potatoes, along with groundnuts, millets, maize, bananas and several vegetables. This sudden enthusiasm for sweet potatoes had a serious cause — an acute shortage of rice and wheat, India’s favoured carbohydrates. Despite ambitious plans for independent India to become self-sufficient in food in just a few years, Nehru was facing a shortfall in food production that was embarrassing for him — but a gnawing agony for the thousands of Indians actually suffering from starvation.So switching from apparently intractable problems of production, Nehru tried to control consumption. If there wasn’t enough rice and wheat, then people should eat less of them, compensating with carbs from plants like sweet potato, which could even be grown at home. His sweet potato eating was meant to be a personal example, as were the tours his daughter Indira gave of the Teen Murti vegetable garden.This anecdote is from historian Benjamin R Siegel’s Hungry Nation: Food, Famine and the Making of Modern India, a book that makes a stark point: independent India was born in hunger, hunger lay at the roots of much of its public policy in its early years, and over 70 years later, we are still a hungry nation. The nature may have shifted a bit — malnourishment rather than stark famine is the real problem today, but at a basic level, this is still a country that struggles to feed its people adequately.It was perhaps inevitable that starvation would cast a shadow over independence. Famines had stalked India for generations, and influenced politics before. The British argued they proved the weakness of Indians and the need for strong imperial government; nationalists countered that famines proved how India’s wealth was being drained and its people starved from callous, Malthusian policy.But it was the Bengal Famine of 1943 that tipped the balance in this argument — the fact that it occurred at the time of maximal British control, under the regulations of World War II, and that supplies were being sent from India for the war effort, even as Bengal starved, made even Indian apologists for the value of British rule concede that it had failed and could no longer be used to deny Independence. 73618417 While the importance of the Bengal Famine is well known, Siegel suggests that its impact on Independence is underestimated. This might be because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the Indian National Congress giving us Independence — its leaders were mostly locked away due to the Quit India movement, and had little involvement with the famine.But Siegel also points to how a highly diverse nation managed to unite to support Bengal, first by fighting British attempts to suppress news of the famine, and then by providing relief.Siegel points to the efforts of women journalists like Vasudha Chakravarty, Kalyani Bhattacharjee and Ela Sen who travelled to Bengal to report on the famine first-hand, in particular highlighting its devastating effects on women and young girls, many of who were forced into brothels to survive. The availability of cameras allowed photographers like Sunil Janah to provide vivid, authentic images of the famine. Poets and writers from South India to Sind wrote about suffering Bengal, and aid even arrived from the Indian community in Kenya.Most impactful of all was KA Abbas’s 1946 film Dharti Ke Lal, one of the first Indian social-realist films, which showed how films could spread a message. Abbas had tried filming in Calcutta, but was stopped by the military police, so finished it in Dhule in Maharashtra, an area where famine was all too familiar. Abbas screened it in Shimla during the Cabinet Mission where Congress politicians flocked to see it, getting a strong reminder of how hunger would be one of the main problems they would have to tackle soon.Siegel also suggests that the famine exacerbated the divides that made Partition inevitable. The Muslim League ran Bengal’s government, and the Minister of Civil Supplies was HS Suhrawardy, later notorious for his role in the 1946 Calcutta riots. His response to the famine was to raid alleged hoarders of grains, which further drove away supplies from the market. “Bengal’s political opposition was livid at Suhrawardy’s unwillingness to declare a famine”, writes Siegel, which would have forced the government to provide relief. SP Mukherjee of the Hindu Mahasabha used this to accuse the League of “conspiring with the imperialists to starve Bengal.”Siegel doesn’t mention another incident, the Royal Indian Navy mutiny in 1946, which has also been suggested as having an underestimated impact on the British decision to leave India. This too involved hunger, with the naval ratings first agitating over the poor quality of food being given to them, and then escalating it into full mutiny. While the details of this (and a similar action in the Indian Air Force) were not widely known, it added to the sense of a dangerously hungry nation at Independence. 73618441 The interim government led by Nehru, which took power in September 1946, knew the horrors of hunger facing it, and put Rajendra Prasad, soon to become president of the Constituent Assembly (and then, on January 26, 1950, of the republic) in charge of food and agriculture. Siegel describes how on August 15, 1947, one of the first things Prasad did was to raise the flag at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, declaring “India’s most pressing task would be to conquer that dread evil – hunger.” 73618483 But the scales were already loaded against India. Partition had taken its main wheat-growing area in Punjab, and rice-growing areas in East Bengal (and Burma, which had supplied huge amounts of rice to India, was already severed away), while landing it with millions of refugees to be fed. Any hopes for easy trade with Pakistan was blighted by the bitterness of Partition. And other sources of grains were scarce in a world recovering from the world war. Siegel records the humiliating search Indian representatives had to make for food from as far as Argentina. India was born hungry in a hungry world.Nehru’s challenges were formidable, but his responses were faulty. One was a rash promise made in March, 1949, that “we shall live on the food we produce after two years or die in the attempt.”But with no clear and convincing plan on how to do this, the government fell back, as politicians always seem to do, on publicity and pleading, in the rather magical hope that by saying something enough they can will it into reality. The sweet potato praise was part of this, as were media campaigns and restaurants where people could learn how to make substitute foods for unavailable grains. Not surprisingly, these went nowhere.A second failure was, to some extent, imposed on Nehru. Mahatma Gandhi had fervently advocated the removal of all controls on food, allowing a total free market. Gandhi’s reasons were complex, and could be justified — it could bring greater returns to farmers over time, while also making consumers realise the real costs of food. Food activists have long argued lack of awareness of these costs – to producers, the environment, to health and more – allow consumers to carry on with poor food choices, and it would fit Gandhi’s wider philosophy, of understanding real issues and making moral choices, that this was what he intended.But free markets inevitably cause price disruptions that lead to short term pains, and it is hard for consumers, or politicians who answer to them, to look beyond these. The early experiment in India quickly backfired so badly that the government, obviously happier with statist solutions, swung to the opposite extreme, and imposed the system of ration cards that we still follow. Later on, further interventions would bring in minimum support prices and purchase by government corporations which, while well intentioned, have also resulted in our current situation where huge amounts of grain languish in government warehouses, while consumers still go wanting. A particularly big failure was over land reform. The new government inevitably came under huge pressure to force land redistribution to farmers who had leased their fields from landlords. But this seemed likely to exacerbate the fragmentation of holdings that had been identified as one of the main problems with raising agricultural productivity. It would also have exacerbated divisions with rural communities since it was almost guaranteed that more powerful castes would amass lands at the expense of Dalits. 73618462 There was probably never any good solution to this – globally, land consolidation has always happened either by unfair appropriation of lands from natives or with smaller farmers being driven out by markets or environmental change. But Nehru’s preferred solution was particularly bad. Influenced by his admiration for the socialist economies of Russia and China, he suggested collective farming, and forced the rather more reluctant Congress to come out with a formal resolution in Nagpur in 1959 declaring this as a goal.Collective farming was already failing in Russia and China at that time, but this was carefully concealed by their propaganda operations. (Even in Israel, whose kibbutz farms, Siegel reveals, were studied by India, problems over collective management would eventually undermine the movement). Small farmers in India instinctively distrusted the idea, while larger farmers and landlords successfully used these fears to fuel political opposition to land reform. One result was the Swatantra Party, formed in response to the Nagpur resolution. Another was increasing attention paid to the Jan Sangh, led by a persuasive young leader named Atal Bihari Vajpayee. 73618471 All these tangled narratives of food policy in the 1950s have been largely forgotten because of what followed: the crop failures of the 1960s which forced the government to adopt the technology driven solutions of the Green Revolution, and the abundant returns it resulted in.But Siegel shows that this story was never as simple as it seems, with agricultural advisory programmes funded by the Ford Foundation and others (often operating directly against the wishes of large US farm corporations which would have preferred just to export produce to India) working with Indian scientists from the late 1950s onwards to create the programmes whose use became almost inevitable after the failures of the 1950s.This point matters because if there is any lesson that could be drawn from Siegel’s book it is that the problem with food policy is not a particular ideology, but the idea that any single ideology could work. Throughout the book Siegel recounts how Indian citizens ranging from industrialists to housewives to farmers and even an astrologer in Dombivli near Mumbai kept coming up with ideas they were sure would solve India’s food problem. And none may have been entirely wrong, except in thinking that any single solution would work. The same goes for Green Revolution and stories of its all-conquering success – and the equally fallacious, yet equally fervently held idea that it was absolutely wrong. But no single, simple solutions were ever likely to solve a problem as intractable as hunger in India. Only a range of solutions, each adapted to local needs, and informed by local feedback, from producers, consumers and intermediaries, might have some chance to succeed.This is worth remembering at a time when ideologies again seem to be trying to impose themselves on reality. Whether it is the Zero Budget Natural Farming which the Central government is promoting, or more creative means like the Shiv Yog Cosmic Farming that a Goa government minister advocates, or the idea that the basic economics of dairy farming can be abandoned for the sake of cow protection or even the way we are being told, all over again, that we must eat sweet potatoes and millets for reasons ranging from diabetes management to gluten-free or keto diets, there is no shortage of schemes.And each may have some value, but Siegel’s history is a reminder that policymakers might need to remember that hunger in India always seems able to assert its own authority in the end, and perhaps all they can do is respect its power and adapt in each case and every time.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/38F118k