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Correspondent

21 August 2024 at 10:20:16 am

Tearful Harvest

Despair once again prevails in Maharashtra’s onion belt as angry farmers have launched protests across Nashik, Sambhaji Nagar and Solapur in wake of onion prices crashing to absurdly low levels. For cultivators who spent months battling erratic weather, rising fertiliser costs and mounting debt, the arithmetic is devastating. At such prices, farmers are unable even to recover transportation costs, let alone repay loans or sustain their households. In the past, Governments in Delhi have risen...

Tearful Harvest

Despair once again prevails in Maharashtra’s onion belt as angry farmers have launched protests across Nashik, Sambhaji Nagar and Solapur in wake of onion prices crashing to absurdly low levels. For cultivators who spent months battling erratic weather, rising fertiliser costs and mounting debt, the arithmetic is devastating. At such prices, farmers are unable even to recover transportation costs, let alone repay loans or sustain their households. In the past, Governments in Delhi have risen and fallen over onion prices. In 1980, soaring onion prices contributed to public anger against the Janata Party government. In 1998, the BJP lost the Delhi Assembly elections amid voter fury over onions becoming prohibitively expensive. Few commodities possess such emotional resonance in Indian politics. Yet there is a cruel irony in India’s onion economy, namely that while consumers revolt when prices rise, farmers suffer when prices crash. Farmers in Maharashtra are demanding procurement at Rs. 32 per kg, while the state government has announced an assured procurement price of Rs. 1,580 per quintal. Leaders of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi have openly challenged the Mahayuti government to show where procurement at those rates was actually taking place. Yet the crisis illustrates a larger structural failure that no emergency meeting can fully conceal. India’s onion economy remains trapped in a cycle of volatility. When production dips, governments rush to ban exports, impose stock limits and flood markets with imports to calm urban consumers. But when production surges, farmers are abandoned to market collapses. The result is a deeply distorted agricultural ecosystem where cultivators bear the risks while political actors chase short-term electoral optics. Maharashtra, which accounts for a substantial share of India’s onion production, has witnessed such turmoil repeatedly. The protests of 2018, when farmers dumped onions on roads in Nashik after prices crashed below cultivation costs, should have served as a warning. They did not. Nor did earlier agitations led by the Shetkari Sanghatana in the 1980s and 1990s, which highlighted the asymmetry between urban-centric policymaking and agrarian realities. The present crisis is especially troubling because it strikes at a moment of already fragile rural sentiment. Farmer indebtedness remains acute. Climate variability has made cultivation increasingly precarious while input costs have risen steadily. Against this backdrop, a market collapse becomes a social issue, feeding anger, migration and, in the worst cases, suicides. The answer lies not in episodic procurement announcements or reactive subsidies, but in deeper reforms. India requires better agricultural storage infrastructure, predictable export policies and decentralised food-processing networks that can absorb production gluts. Most importantly, policymakers must stop treating farmers merely as electoral constituencies to be placated during crises. The onion has often moved governments because it affects the urban middle class. But a republic that ignores the tears of those who grow it risks a far deeper reckoning.

Selective Outrage

India’s left-liberal media has long prided itself on being the torchbearer of secularism, dissent and moral rectitude. In the aftermath of ‘Operation Sindoor,’ the precision military strike launched by the Modi government against Pakistan-based terror camps, it has revealed its not a principled commitment to peace or truth, but a disturbing penchant for ideological prejudice, performative sanctimony and selective outrage.


The operation itself was a textbook display of calibrated force and geopolitical prudence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, often caricatured as ‘authoritarian’ by the ‘liberal’ English-language commentariat, chose patience over provocation. He consulted opposition leaders, held detailed discussions with defence chiefs and took key international stakeholders, notably the United States and Russia, into confidence before authorising limited military action. The symbolism of ‘Operation Sindoor’ was also carefully crafted: a pointed reminder that the attack’s real victims were Hindu women widowed by Pakistan-sponsored militants in Kashmir. The government’s briefings were also strategic and symbolic as two ranking female officers, one of them Muslim, were made the public face of the mission, underlining a new Indian confidence that blends military muscle with democratic pluralism.


But this was unacceptable for India’s entrenched ‘left-liberal’ press, steeped in academic jargon, Western validation and a knee-jerk hostility to anything remotely ‘Hindutva.’ That a Muslim officer briefed the nation on ‘Operation Sindoor’ was branded ‘tokenism’ by such commentators. Others crudely alleged that the April 22 Pahalgam massacre was the logical culmination of reported atrocities against Muslims since Modi came to power in 2014.


The semantic nitpicking over ‘Operation Sindoor’ was maddening. An editor of a prominent magazine dubbed the operation’s name as ‘patriarchal’ and coded in Hindutva tropes. In a bizarre case of moral inversion, sindoor was likened to symbols of ‘honour killings’ and gender oppression, ignoring both its cultural resonance and the cruel reality that these women had lost their husbands in cold blood. For years, India’s ‘secular’ commentariat nurtured a preordained binary: the Congress may be flawed but was at least ‘secular’ while the BJP was an inveterate ‘fascist.’ Thus, the 2002 Gujarat riots are always focused upon but the Congress-backed pogrom of the Sikhs in 1984 is either downplayed or rationalised. Terrorism in Kashmir is tragic, but state retaliation is ‘jingoism.’ A strong Muslim voice in government is ‘tokenism’ but its absence is ‘exclusion.’ Even journalistic rigour is selectively applied. When Pakistan claimed to have downed Indian jets, some Indian outlets rushed to amplify the story before verification, inadvertently echoing enemy propaganda.


Dissent is vital in any democracy. But when its becomes indistinguishable from disdain, when editorial choices are dictated by ideological conformity, then the press becomes a caricature of itself. Ironically, many of these journalists enjoy robust free speech and loudly lament India’s supposed slide into ‘fascism’ from the safety of their X handles. Yet they turn a blind eye to Putin’s repression, Erdogan’s purges or Xi Jinping’s camps. In their eyes, Modi remains the greatest threat to democracy even as they broadcast their outrage freely, without fear of censorship or reprisal. ‘Operation Sindoor’ was a statement of cultural self-confidence. That confidence has rattled those who have spent their careers gatekeeping Indian discourse. Today, their monopoly is over. The people are watching and they no longer believe that the emperor has clothes.

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