Gunwant Patil grew up in a family that rebelled against imposition.
When he was younger and his head of hair fuller, his parents often stepped out for demonstrations. His father wore white, his mother took along her walking stick, and they dressed in cotton, the code of the Shetkari Sanghatana. Both of them took part in the Sanghatana’s campaigns in Mukhed, a Maharashtra district where they lived, meeting with farmers to build the case for free trade and protesting controls on what farmers produced. His oldest brother joined them in time, followed by another.
In the 80s, during an agitation over the price of cotton, his parents were in a group that surrounded an inspector and his car. Outnumbered and frightened, the officer pulled a gun on the crowd and fired. Nobody died, Patil said. Lived experiences were currency among the movement’s farmer members, who took pride in their resistance against government. There was a saying in the Sanghatana. A beating by the police qualified you to become a senior member.
When I met him, in late April 2015, Patil was the Sanghatana president.
Eastern Maharashtra had strange weather — a baking haze one day, cold rain on another. “The suicides are not because of poverty,” Patil said. “It’s because the farmer is depressed. He is getting less for what he does. He sees that there’s a big difference between what hard work gets and what easy work gets.”
The weather had created its own problems. “There were three fixed seasons, and farmers were safe. There was no struggle. Now because of global warming there are challenges. There are more sudden changes. This year hailstones fell twice. It’s happening everywhere. Vidarbha, Marathwada, Nashik. It’s like, chun-chun ke maroonga. The rain used to be in June. Now it’s moving to July. We did not prepare for this.”
Patil realised that, as Sanghatana president, he was expected to travel widely and meet people often. So he got out of the electronics repair business he had started and frequently travelled outside Nanded, his home district. Patil was a trainer. He tutored farmers, landowners, and the organization’s workers in liberal thought, and helped them understand what a liberal economy could do for them. The leitmotif was always fair price. “We used to explain to them that if we took a bag of oranges to Singapore, we could make enough money to buy a television.”
Across the state, landowners and farmers wanted to talk with and listen to him about the fickle weather, about prices and, lately, with more urgency, about the government’s attempts to introduce new rules for land acquisition. The proposed law would leave landholders without a say in how their land was acquired, and at what price. The farmers often asked Patil, disbelievingly, how something like this could happen. The question played out at several of the sixteen stops he made in towns and cities over sixteen days in April.
The day after an eventful press conference at Yavatmal, a small town where posters went up but rarely came down, Patil sat in his car surrounded by the morning’s local editions. He had purchased them in bulk, eager to know what the papers thought.
The journey to Amravati from Yavatmal would take hours across a landscape of gentle green mounds, sparse fields, eucalyptus and teak trees, and abandoned rail lines. Both his phones rang all morning. The callers were Sanghatana men from other districts, inquiring about his Yavatmal visit. “It came in Dainik Bhaskar that there’s no difference between Nehru and Modi,” he said. “Good. So yesterday’s controversy was of some use.”
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The previous evening, Patil had arranged a meet at the local press hall, a room on the ground floor of an unoccupied and unpainted building. His aim was to share a four-page note about the evolution of land acquisition, and to then say something irresistibly caustic about the new land acquisition bill. The note, prepared by one of the Sanghatana’s senior members, was thick with facts. Patil would leave the dossier with the presspersons but before that, he would bring them to life as real stories. That was the plan, anyway.
A local journalist hijacked the plan with questions about the Sanghatana’s founder, Sharad Joshi. Patil’s family, like other Sanghatana members, had deep reverence for Joshi. They believed he had done more for farmers than Mahatma Gandhi. Joshi had studied commerce at Sydenham College in Bombay and worked with the United Nations before urging farmers to fight policies that restricted their ability to trade. He had likened their condition to that of indentured laborers. In a heavily regulated time, he told them, “Process your own products without waiting for licenses,” according to Economic and Political Weekly. “Don’t pour milk into the ground when there’s too much to sell to the cities. Don’t let the government confiscate your land.” The rebellion became folklore.
Any questioning of this foundational narrative didn’t sit well with Patil. From his place in the second row the journalist, an all-knowing sort with white hair and a half-smile, asked questions about Patil’s idol.
“Joshi said he would not enter politics, so why did he?”
“Why did he betray farmers?”
“In Parliament, he did not ask any questions.”
The tepid smile on Patil’s lips disappeared. He first scowled, and then jerked forward to snarl at the questioner. “You want proof? I have the documents and evidence to prove that you’re wrong!” The reporter shook his head, and his peers in the front row smiled.
“That guy was saying anything that came into his head,” Patil said later, once he was outside. “He’s with the communists. They don’t know anything. Communist, saala. I get very angry when people don’t ask proper questions.”
His displeasure ebbed, and he grew anxious. Had his aggression been necessary, he wondered. Chasing down a trusted local journalist, he asked, “Do you think it went well? Were they offended?” The man gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze, and said he shouldn’t worry.
Necessity demanded that Patil suppress his feelings about journalists. Especially the ones at local Marathi editions who, he said “report the news in one line, and then write about who else was there and what they ate”.
In the towns he was visiting, people read newspapers. These days the papers featured stories about Nitin Gadkari, the Federal minister for road transport and highways, who was travelling across Maharashtra extolling the benefits of the land acquisition bill. Patil’s journey was the reverse of Gadkari’s in purpose. He wanted everyone to know that the government’s land acquisition plan was bad for landowners; he saw journalists, underpaid and cynical and smart and clueless, as agents who could effectively spread his counter-narrative. Still, his minuscule role in the current conversation kept him on edge. The minister’s chief concern was about being misreported, while Patil worried about whether his words would appear at all the next morning.
In the car on the way to Amravati he opened paper after paper, grinned, and said – in the gora Bollywood villain’s accent he deployed when happy – “Yes! Three papers, three news! Hattrick!” And then, “Four out of four! Yes! This is what you call press!”
Gadkari was on the front page of one paper. Patil laughed dismissively while reading the article, and said Gadkari was wrong. “He says ‘We need to make houses, so give us land. Where else will we get the land from?’ What a thing to say. You can’t tell them they’ll get money?”
He was fond of Gadkari, who he thought a good man, but said, “He’s a self-centered man, and all he talks about is what he’s done. Look at how smart I am, look at how many roads I have made. Me, me, me, I changed the structure of Nagpur, the roads of Maharashtra, the bridges of Mumbai are from my time. He doesn’t talk about the party.”
And later: “Yeah! I’m on page 17, with a picture! Today I’m going to shampoo the press and say, ‘Stop being pimps for land. Don’t send agents like Gadkari here’.” His laugh was a harmonica at low register. “Until you pick a fight with a big person, it’s no fun. Now the fun starts.
“Never pick a fight with someone lesser than yourself,” Patil said, his philosophy of fight-picking quite sorted. “A rickshaw driver, a taxi driver. Never. If you have to compete, aim higher. Then there’s a controversy. Say, something happens between me and Nitin Gadkari. I’m a small guy. I’m not a minister, or a member of the assembly. But if I pick a fight with a minister, I’m not dealing with his assemblymen anymore, and they become small change. If I win, all of Nitin Gadkari’s energy comes to me. I reach Nitin Gadkari’s level.”
For 16 days, Gunwant Patil travelled across Maharashtra to rally farmers. I followed him for four of them (click the red points for more detail)
One morning in March this year, the leadership of the Shetkari Sanghatana met at the Inspection Bungalow, a knot of low buildings at the mouth of a picturesque lane shaded by thick old trees. The locale was a landmark government property in Pune, and quiet enough for the men and women of the farmers’ movement, most of them over forty, to plan a campaign against the government’s new land acquisition bill.
The movement was bound in the pursuit of economic freedom for farmers. The land acquisition bill, if it became law, would mean there would be no discussion before land was taken, and the government would pay a price far below the land’s real value. Dinakar Nissan, a farmer member of the Sanghatana who owned four acres, told me in frustration, “The land acquisition bill that they nearly passed in Parliament says they will pay us four times the price of our land on the basis of the official rate. The market rate around my plot is five lakhs an acre. But the government’s rate for my land is one lakh an acre. So what will I get? Four lakhs.”
The Sanghatana had invited Barun Mitra, the director of the Liberty Institute, to speak to them that morning. “We seek out people who think like us and see what we can learn from them,” Patil said to me. Barun’s interests overlapped with those of the Sanghatana’s. He had a passion for studying land. He thought keenly about how it was traded, how its worth was decided, and how it was acquired. Like the Sanghatana, Barun believed that states messed up most things, and had no business acquiring land and then selling it to private parties.
The right to land and property had been diluted, in time, from its place as a constitutional right. Seven decades of revisions to the original law had left a convoluted system of transaction that encouraged corruption any time someone wished to buy or sell land. A simpler process was more moral, Barun thought, which is why the current government’s ideas for land reform grated on him.
On the last day of 2014, acting on months of consultations with revenue officials, the central government passed a land acquisition ordinance to reduce procedural difficulties in acquiring land. The challenges were created by an act passed by Parliament in 2013, which gave landowners the power to turn down acquisition attempts. The states’ officials had called for new legislation to remove the mandatory “social impact assessment” – a requirement that, they claimed, would stall decision-making for months.
The December 31, 2014 ordinance did away with the assessment for certain categories of projects, including private hospitals and educational institutes. More significantly, the ordinance also did away with the consent required in cases of acquisition for private companies and public-private partnership projects.
“This is a so-called market-friendly government,” Barun said, chuckling. He had expected comprehensive land reforms, but found the open language of the bill an invitation for misuse. “They are creating arbitrariness by debating exemptions.”
Land policy couldn’t be random because it would hamper individual rights, he thought. “The only difference between the laws of 1894, 2013, and the bill of 2015 is the scope of what they cover. It’s doubtful that this legislation will be accepted by the public.”
He hadn’t heard Mann ki Baat, the prime minister’s fortnightly radio address, the previous day. For the better part of a Sunday morning hour, Narendra Modi had made the case for forcible land acquisition gently, with each word ending in a whisper. Addressing listeners as his “dear farmer brothers and sisters”, Modi appealed to their humanity. He spoke about the plight of a fictional village that needed a road on land that belonged to a neighboring village. “…tell me, will the villagers willfully give land for road till the other village? Tell me, will they give their consent? So what sin have the people of other village committed?”
As he waited for the Sanghatana to gather, Barun slumped in a chair with a laptop perched on his thighs. “Mann ki Baat,” he absently said. “Monkey baat.” Barun had short black hair and a trim white beard. His hunch was gentle when he stood, and absent when he walked briskly, usually from activity to activity.
Dr Shyam Ashtekar, an economist rooming with him at the Inspection Bungalow, discussed a part of the bill that alarmed both of them. A kilometre of land could be acquired on both sides of a designated rail line or road if the government wanted to build an industrial corridor. Barun frowned. “No, no, one kilometre on both sides is a ridiculous idea,” he said. His voice, pitched high, echoed in the empty room. “Just imagine, Indian Railways has 68,000 kilometres of rail lines…”
Ashtekar corrected him. “It says designated rail lines.”
“No!” Barun said. “Designated railway is today. Tomorrow the same formula will apply to another designated area!”
Agreeing, Ashtekar pivoted to compensation. “Where will they give the money to the farmers from? They will notify land and that’s the end of the story. They will forget about the payment, for generations.”
“None of these public-private projects will be able to generate that kind of revenue stream upfront,” Barun said. “They will not be able to do it.”
The discussion then swerved, as it invariably did wherever it took place, to the real reasons behind the new laws. The concerns were of endemic corruption and insider trading, of connected people getting to know of land to be acquired before the news went public, and buying it up for cheap before prices rose.
The government’s proposals and promises were picked apart, one by one. Barun believed quick clearances couldn’t happen because they depended on environmental impact studies, and whether they made economic sense. “How are those issues going to be solved?”
He was dismayed by the idea that government would bear the risk in its partnerships with private enterprises. “If the government bears the uncertainty, how different is it from what the public works departments did before? So industry is happy because the government becomes a contractor. Unlike the past, where you invested the money and then recovered it, here the money is coming from somewhere else. So why did we move away from the works department model in the first place?”
The Sanghatana’s members were ready to meet, and Barun and Ashtekar were summoned downstairs. After the room filled, the doors opened once again, for Sharad Joshi. Nearly eighty, Joshi walked in slowly, with a cane for support and an attendant in tow. He was the tallest man in the room. The people inside stood up to hail him, and took their seat only after he sat down. Nearly all of them were dressed in white, with the round red badge of the Sanghatana pinned to the chest.
Barun sat beside Joshi. They knew each other; a few days before, Barun had a hand in editing a piece Joshi had written comparing Modi and Jawaharlal Nehru: “The major points of discussion in the present debate have been, 1) What percentage of land owners should approve the acquisition? and 2) What should be the amount of compensation?” Joshi regarded the points as irrelevant. The discussion should have been framed in terms of individual rights, he believed.
The leaders, including Patil, spoke first. And then it was Barun’s turn.
“We’ve been talking about land for a long time,” he began. “But in the last 15 or 20 years, there’s been a change. There’s not one place in India that hasn’t seen conflict over land. I come from Bengal. The Singur matter caused the downfall of the Left Front. As an issue, land is deep in people’s consciousness. I’m here because no other farmer’s organization has spoken about farmer’s rights and demanded free markets for as long as you have. The second thing is, land is your biggest capital. Industrialists have money, and you have land. But industrialists can raise money from anywhere. The market’s open to them. But farmers can’t sell their land. This is an opportunity for you. You’ve been talking about freeing farmland for years. Now you can make the discussion about land itself.”
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To people in the room who wanted free markets but were concerned about their effect, he said, “This doesn’t mean that everyone will go sell their land. In any market, you don’t find more than 5 or 10 percent of people. Why should you sell your home? You might have a dispute, or you might need money, and so you sell it. They say that farmers are illiterate, and want to sell their land. I don’t buy that. It doesn’t work that way anywhere. Since India’s liberalization, farming has had the least benefit. And land? There’s been no liberalization here at all. This is an opportunity for you, for farmers, to change the discussion, because there is a consciousness about land.”
Barun digressed here, telling them about the work he does. “In 2006, a new law said that tribals could apply for a patta” – an official chit with property details – “for their land. We’ve been in Gujarat and Orissa, in 400-500 villages, measuring land plot by plot, helping them enter the right information in their applications. These villages are backward, and isolated. This is not normal agricultural land, like yours,” he said, looking at the leaders and farmers, “there’s not irrigation either. But there’s not one man, not one woman, who doesn’t understand the value of the patta that tells people who owns this land.
“We have to come together. We can’t be people who sit in a room, or go to conferences, and talk about land. I’m here to ask you if we can come together. According to the economic survey this year, only 10-12 per cent of projects are stalled because of land acquisition. The rest are because of market reasons. What happened in Singur? Tata didn’t leave Singur because the law was wrong, or because courts said something against it. It was the atmosphere, and the insistence of people, that forced them to leave. I’m asking you to open your horizons and make the issue bigger. Make it about land itself. This is a great time.”
Barun spoke for an hour, detailing the difficulties farmers were already experiencing. This was partly to let them know that he understood, and partly to share his experiences. “In Singur, when they wanted to acquire the land, the government decided to pay three times the price. But outside the area they wanted, the price of land increased ten times. We need to make industry understand that they will get stuck, because people are thinking differently.”
Joshi listened, without saying a word. After Barun finished, he rose, and left. The session ended. The small bare-walled room had twelve attendees at the beginning. By the end, there were almost four times as many.
Patil caught up with Barun outside, and engaged him animatedly. “That’s where the bottleneck is,” Barun told him. “There’s demand for land. And the supply is there, so why can’t they meet? Because of the law. Only the land mafia can profit from it. Landowners can’t.
“I’m going to write articles based on your strategy,” Patil told him, grinning. He teetered a bit, making no attempt to hide his awe.
“I think it’ll work,” Barun said.
“Yeah. It’ll work. And I want to do more work on this. I’ll put the germ of this idea in people’s head about how to measure their land.”
Barun showed him the tool he used to plot the GPS coordinates of land in Orissa and Gujarat, a black and yellow Garmin handheld device. “It’s easy. Click here, and here, and here. That’s it. Even people who don’t know how to read can use it. I’ve made entire Google maps for villages, called people over, and told them to come and see if their measurements are correct. It’s all in the open. People will do it. In one village, they even decided to build a village toilet. They’re not waiting for Modi. They’re building it with their own money and labor, and when it’s done, they’ll go to the collector for money.” Barun told him. “This is self-sustaining.”
Both of them were critical of heavily funded pilots designed to make the case for a project’s feasibility. They attracted media attention, but were unsustainable. “It’s easy to do a pilot project,” Barun said. “But how do you take it forward? Where will the money come from?”
“Sharad Joshi tells me that processes have to be natural,” Patil said. “It’s only then that they become viable.” Barun nodded his agreement.
A member of the Shetkari Sanghatana was so moved by Sharad Joshi, the organization’s founder, that he created and sang a song. Gunwant Patil carried a recording of it on his phone.
The doors to the Agricultural Produce Market Committee building in Hinganghat were locked, and there was no one in sight. Gunwant Patil tugged at one door, then another, opened a metal window grill, said “hello?” to an empty room, and tried a door again. He sighed and looked into the distance with a frown. The white shirt he had worn since the day before, the one with a small hole at the right shoulder blade, was wet. A cold downpour pelted the market’s aluminium roofs.
This was his twelfth pit-stop in thirteen days. An invisible organizational machine held together by phone calls and WhatsApp messages between the Sanghatana’s district leaders had carried him seamlessly from one place to the next. When he stepped out of his car, there were always people waiting. They filled his days with farmers, gaunt or wealthy, his evenings with journalists, and his nights with home-made meals cooked with ingredients that told him he was cherished.
On his way back to the local government lodge after a body-altering dinner of dahi kadhi, pakoda, roti, dal, chawal, achaar, four kinds of papad, sugared-up aamras, and noodles on a large thaali, Patil somehow summoned the strength to talk about food. “They take care of me. They really love me,” he sighed. “A few days ago we were invited to someone’s home. They made one dal for me. It looks like a flower, and a kilo costs 600 rupees.”
Patil waited beneath a parapet. Someone unlocked the door from inside, surprising him. He bounded upstairs to a room where farmers were sitting on a heavily darned green rug that covered the floor, listening inattentively to two senior women from the Sanghatana. “Are you prepared to challenge the government?” one of them asked. A few farmers looked at her, but the rest did not. They were not evasive, just unmoved.
Patil took a seat at the head of the room. The farmers spoke first. A man dressed in a white kurta-pyjama, with his hair neatly parted, said to the leadership, “The [government’s] market value is 25 per cent of the land one month. Sometimes it’s 20 per cent. Sometimes it’s 15 per cent. Why can’t we find the rate by ourselves?”
“You have no right to,” said the district head, who was on the other side of the room.
“I know this,” the farmer said.
Someone else said, “Has development stopped because you couldn’t get land? Why take away my human right?”
One of the leaders, Saroj Kashikar, a former MLA from Pulgaon, said, “Modiji is showing us a dream. If we have to give him our land dirt cheap, where will we go? That’s why I don’t think he speaks for farmers. He’s adding laws that will create more irregularities.”
Patil listened. And when he spoke, it was to their fears. He told them of the ways in which the government could take their land. Many of them didn’t know about the land acquisition bill. (A CSDS-Lokniti survey on the state of Indian farmers revealed that only 27 per cent of the respondents claimed to know what the land acquisition act was about.) He theatrically stroked the knee of the man beside him, pouted, and said, “Arey arey. Nahi beta, nahi munna, don’t rely on god and don’t rely on the government.” He ended it with a kiss. The men roared at this dramatization of Nitin Gadkari’s widely circulated statement from a week before.
In the middle of this prepared talk, he inserted a development he had learned of just a few hours earlier. “People are protesting. Farmers are protesting. One lakh of them will be protesting in Bangalore. The government has reserved a kilometre of land on each side of the railway line between Bangalore and Chennai. That’s why so many of them are turning up there,” he told them. “Tell me, in your zilla, how many talukas are there? Eight?” He did a quick calculation, a little performance before the punchline he was about to deliver. “Can’t we get three lakh people together? Of course we can.”
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This may be difficult, given rapidly changing priorities. Jagdish Bonde, a former leader of the Sanghatana, told me that support for the organization “from this generation” had been lukewarm. “They’re occupied in looking for employment, and they don’t think about farming. It’s been a bit of a setback.”
“We were huge once, in ‘85-‘86,” Patil told me. “It was a proper movement. We were walking on air. One lakh, two lakhs attended our meetings. We didn’t call anyone. They came by themselves. ”
I asked him what happened in the quiet years. “Awareness of problems grew. As awareness grows, movements sometimes ebb. It was a bad time for movements,” he said. “Movements are not fixed. They’re on a graph. Up. Down. Up. Down. We’re going to talk to people. We won’t call on them to protest. When the time is right, they’ll do it themselves. It’ll happen by itself.”
When I asked how his ambitions for economic freedom sat beside the caste discrimination and honour killings prevalent in villages, he shook his head and scolded me. “There’s a small-mindedness in people about what liberalism is. They say, ‘if you do this and this, you’re a liberal’. But they don’t understand that you can’t do it all at once. Right now, before we die, we plan for life in heaven, so of course we plan for who our grandkids are going to marry. Open up markets, let people trade anywhere, with anyone, and they’ll become liberal by themselves.
“We have said that government is not necessary, but we are helpless because we don’t have a better option. The government should be out of banks, out of railways, out of public transport. Remove their influence from the judiciary. Keep them in defence, law and order, and a little health. We say all restrictions are nonsense. Look, you can only think freely when you have no restrictions.”
One morning, as we drove from Nagpur to Hinganghat, Patil was telling me his ideas about civilization and progress. “China progressed at the barrel of the gun. We don’t need to. When man emerged from the jungle, he talked about protection. But now we don’t need protection. Problems are solved by words, not swords.’ He paused. “Our path to progress leads through Wall Street, not Moscow.”
Patil’s philosophy of government and liberty ran deep. But he was a man of this world with all its imperfections too, and so it was surprising, if only at first, when he tried his luck a little later by telling an uncertain toll booth attendant outside Nagpur to let his car pass without paying 85 rupees.
“This car belongs to the Farmers’ Organisation,” he said, counting on the goodwill people had for them.
The attendant studied Patil’s business card, and pocketed it.
He raised the barrier, allowing Patil unfettered access, at a throwaway price, to a vast stretch of land in the Vidarbha countryside. All for the greater good.
