Farmers' anger rocks Shivraj Chouhan's chair

BHOPAL: Shivraj Singh Chouhan appears vulnerable for the first time since becoming Madhya Pradesh chief minister in 2005, and it's his core constituency of farmers that is threatening to become his nemesis. A farmers' agitation that led to six protesters being shot dead by the security forces in the state on Tuesday seems to have done what the Vyapam scam, involving bribery charges relating to the state exam for professional college courses and government recruitment, failed to do. Many in the state BJP believe that now is the time to push for a change of leadership if Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah wish to retain Madhya Pradesh, which goes to the polls in November 2018. Chouhan has survived many crises, including the sinister deaths of many Vyapam witnesses and huge corruption scandals. But anger among farmers is not easy to wish away even for a chief minister who has been winning the top agriculture prize in the country for the past five years. The current agrarian crisis owes not to any natural causes but to bad political and administrative management. This is the second year running that the state has had a bumper onion crop. Throughout May, many farmers were forced to sell their produce at Rs 2 to Rs 3 a kg as the Chouhan government delayed announcing the procurement price, of Rs 8 a kg, till June 5. In Indore, farmers had left truckloads of onions on the streets in protest. According to one estimate, one-third of the state's onion crop has rotted away because of inadequate storage facilities. The otherwise prosperous farmers from the Malwa and Nimar regions went on the rampage five days after launching their protest on June 1, demanding a minimum support price and loan waivers. The demand for loan relief has spread across several north Indian states after the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh fulfilled the BJP's poll promise by announcing a Rs 36,359-crore waiver. Chouhan, confident of his farmer-friendly image, appeared to be taking matters lightly. He avoided the farmers' main demand - a waiver of their Rs 39,000 crore worth of loans. Around the same time, his cabinet cleared the 7th Pay Commission's suggested pay scales for state government employees, putting the exchequer under an additional burden of Rs 4,500 crore. Once the new pay scales are implemented with effect from January 1, 2016, the burden would zoom to Rs 8,000 crore. Some farmer leaders like Shiv Kumar Sharma of the Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangh have been openly asking how the son of a farmer (Chouhan) could be more concerned about government employees than the far larger number of survival-threatened farmers. At a political level, Chouhan went on holding secret negotiations with the Sangh-affiliated Bharatiya Kisan Sangh. Two days ago, state BJP chief Nand Kumar Chouhan had announced a felicitation for the leaders of the Kisan Sangh for "successfully calling off the farmers' agitation". But other farmer organisations stepped up their agitation. Shiv Kumar Sharma, for instance, was deeply upset that Chouhan had not invited him and other farmer leaders for talks although his organisation has the largest following among the state's farmers.The prices of pulses too have fallen sharply in Madhya Pradesh. While the central government has raised the minimum support price of tur dal from Rs 4,500 to a little over Rs 5,000 a quintal, the state's agencies have failed to procure any significant amount of the produce at the assured price. Many farmers in Madhya Pradesh have sold their tur dal at less than Rs 3,000 a quintal. On Monday, Chouhan had tried to provide succour to onion farmers, offering to procure the crop at Rs 8 a kg till June 30, and announced a farm price stabilisation fund with a Rs 1,000-crore corpus. Chouhan also acknowledged that the state had witnessed a bumper production of tur dal and promised to buy the produce for the minimum support price. He further promised to allow 50 per cent of the transactions at the state's 750 mandis to be carried out through cash and the rest through bank operations. Since the demonetisation last November 8, cash transactions had fallen by 70 per cent at the mandis because of the liquidity crunch, causing hardship to the farmers. But Tuesday's conflagration, which led to the deaths, showed what the farmers thought of the sops.