Parliament set for 'zameen wapsi' row over land bill, but here's some bad news for Modi and Rahul

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi finally returned to the public sphere after a near two-month absence, launching his party’s ‘zameen wapsi’ movement against the proposed land bill at a farmer’s rally at the Ram Leela Maidan in Delhi on Sunday. He was more articulate and pointed in his attacks, perhaps because the Congress party seems to have finally settled on its anti-Modi weapon of choice, ie the land acquisition bill.

As Parliament session begins today, the BJP is bracing itself for political fireworks over the controversial ordinance, with Congress leading the charge. But lost in the heat of the rhetoric are some inconvenient truths about the bill itself, more so, the farmers themselves. Forests that both Rahul and Modi seem to have missed for the political tree.

Rahul was all fire and vigour on Sunday as he went after the Modi government and the BJP, warning the farmers against the land acquisition bill, saying they would lose both land and livelihood.

“I’ll tell you how Modi ji won the election. He took loans of thousands of crores from big industrialists from which his marketing was done. How will he pay back that loan now? He will do it by giving your land to those top industrialists. He wants to weaken the farmers, then snatch their land and give it to his industrialist friends. Through the Gujarat model, Modi ji showed that he can snatch the land of farmers quite easily and convinced the industrialists that he can do the same in the whole country. This is Modi’s model – weaken the foundation, then attach a ladder to the building, paint it and show to the world that the building is shining”, he said.

But Rahul may have been surprised to know that the land bill was not in fact the core issue at heart for the many farmers who had gathered for the rally. They had other more pressing concerns to worry about.

“I am not aware of any changes to any law. I came here because my crops have been destroyed", one farmer at the rally was quoted as saying by the Indian Express . Another had said that he had travelled to Delhi to let the government know about the plight of farmers in his state after unseasonal rains but had been unprepared for the contents of the speech.

But amid the fury over the land bill and vows that the “Congress will firmly stand with farmer and workers, wherever their land is being snatched”, surprisingly, Rahul’s speech did not make any reference to the rains and hail that has caused so much distress to farmers across the country.

He instead kept referring to ‘drought’.

As pointed out on NDTV by Ashok Malik:

In some senses, Rahul seems not to have recovered from the defeat of 2014. Listening to him, there was this inescapable feeling that he was in a time warp. It was not helped by the fact that he referred repeatedly to his experience of visiting drought-hit farmers some years ago. The crowd he was addressing was of north Indian farmers worried by a spell of unseasonal rain that has damaged a crop ripe for harvesting.

His mother, in her speech, took care to recall the unseasonal rain and the labour of harvesting, which the farmers had set aside to attend the political meeting. Did she have a better speech writer or simply better political judgement?

The references to drought did not go unnoticed on Twitter either:

Rahul Gandhi went on talking about drought in todays farmers rally, actually problem they r facing right now is unseasonal rain #PappuFarce

— Shailesh (@ShanaShailesh) April 19, 2015

This is a gaffe by any standard. For many farmers, a proposed new legislation is the furthest thing on their minds. And while it can be argued that the Congress can play a key role in educating farmers about the provisions of the new land bill, what looks like complete detachment from their current predicament completely takes away from the credibility of the Congress campaign.

Not that Rahul is the only one to be caught out of step with the farmers in this regard.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Mann ki baat in March was devoted almost entirely to educating farmers on the finer points of the land acquisition bill, at a time when farmer suicides were making headlines. He too was roundly criticised for completely overlooking the immediate and urgent concerns of the very constituency he was promising to help. He focused instead on telling his audience that he was ‘fixing lacunae’ in the existing bill and specifically referred to the consent clause issue.

Pointing out the omission  in a column for Firstpost , MK Venu wrote_:_

If you are addressing farmers reeling under the worst income collapse in possibly a decade, how do you completely avoid talking about it? This shows a certain psychology of self denial that Modi may be generally suffering from. Modi was telling farmers, many of whom on the verge of bankruptcy, that he would use land acquisition law to build roads, hospitals, housing etc near rural habitats. Many farm households who don’t know how they will pay the next few months’ bills for electricity, fertilizer, school fees, or interest to money lenders would have found Modi’s talk a bit insulting.

Rahul had a clear opportunity here to show the farmers that he was aware of their current predicament. That he was more in tune with their sufferings than the current BJP government. By not doing so he has not only lost out on a good opportunity, but he has also effectively reduced to platitudes like ““I will stand with you. Development is required but farmers are also needed. We do not want an India where few people get everything and farmers get nothing. Congress will fight for you.”

We can expect a lot more rhetoric on the same lines from both sides of the political aisle today, even as the looming– and more immediate – crisis facing farmers is lost in the furore.