John Dayal is a noted social activist and human rights defender who is at the forefront of the anti-fascist and anti-communal activism. He is an articulate TV debater and a profound writer catering to a variety of issues related to human rights, politics and social issues in India. He started his career as a journalist and covered extensively the tumultuous politics of the 70s, 80s and the 90s besides being witness to a host of watershed events like the 1975 Emergency and the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. In this in-depth conversation with Shabir Hussain, he dissects the Hindutva ideology, its divisive and often violent politics and talks about its fallouts as its grip on India gets tighter by the day.
Very few people understand the RSS, its psyche and its modus operandi the way you do. Please throw some light on the all-male Hindu nationalist organisation that mothers hundreds of extremist subsidiaries, not just in India but across the world now.
The RSS is really one of the simplest organizations to understand. All that is required is to read the literature. I would say the copious literature that its founding fathers produced.
Savarkar, Golwalkar and Hedgewar between them wrote on every minor point and technique which could be used to produce the dream of a Hindu Rashtra, a homeland for the Hindus patterned almost exactly on the Zionist understanding of Abrahamic God YHWA’s covenant with the ancient people of Israel in the Book.
The problem of course is that the Hinduism that these three gentlemen practised is a polytheistic system of philosophy and worship. It is not a monotheistic faith that either of the world’s two largest populations or communities, the Christians and the Muslims, practise with their belief in a divinely revealed order.
I think it is quite clear that the leaders of this new religious nationalism project have not reckoned with the impossibility of its total success. That accounts for the desperation one sees, the hurry, the need for political power to force a false unity.
Before the partition and Independence, India technically covered the entire land mass extending from areas bordering Afghanistan, which never really were conquered by the British or even the Sikhs who consolidated their control for a brief period in history.
In the East, the Sangh (the Hindu nationalist collective) discovered the benefits of the British Empire which extended the Raj all the way to Burma, and even Ceylon. And in this was born the dream of the larger India or Virat Bharat, or as some of them call it, Akhand Bharat, the Unbroken India, or the Greater India.
But dreaming of a landmass as a nation is one thing and trying to construct a single homogenous population which speaks one language, practises one faith and can be identified as one culture is an impossibility.
And the Sangh’s frustration, and therefore its aggressiveness, is because it’s now realising this for the impossible dream that it is.
For not only are North India and South India linguistically so different and so different in their political growth after independence, in their political experiences with each other, the North eastern parts of India are also both ethnically and culturally a different people group.
It would be sedition these days even to describe them as a sub-nation within the larger Indian concept, the political concept of a nation.
In the collected works, for instance, of Savarkar and Golwalkar, they speak of many bizarre experiments in the building of a common people. They speak approvingly of the ‘race improvement’ the old Kerala Nambudiri practised when their men could cohabit with married or unmarried Nair community women using the might of their caste and their land and money.
In the mindset of the Sangh, and I suppose of the Nambudiri groups, nobody ever asked or took the opinion of the women concerned. In the Sangh’s scheme of things, it was an excellent classic experiment in improving a lowly race by inseminating it with superior genes of the Brahmins.
This was the new India where they could control the weaker, inferior masses. There was no mention of equality, or empowerment of what we now call the other backward communities. And absolutely there was no mention of the equality of women entering the political park, or anything else.
As a matter of fact, the Sangh remains a totally male organization and its ruling hierarchy consists of a club or group of bachelors.
Naturally in a system where their fellow Hindus find no place of honour and women are not to be equals, their attitude towards Muslims and Christians can be easily understood.
Savarkar and Golwalkar, the more prolific of the founding triad, were quite clear in their mind what they wanted to do with members of the Abrahamic faith in India, who they deemed to be aliens, foreigners and invaders.
The trio spoke quite approvingly of Adolf Hitler, and the manner in which he dealt with this question of aliens in his own country.
Obviously there would be no support for liquidating India’s vast pre-Independence population of Muslims and Christians and the gas chambers were out of fashion after the Second World War. But concentration camps apparently are not ruled out, as we see in recent developments in the country.
Their immediate solution to the pesky aliens was written quite clearly in the founding documents: If Muslims and Christians still wanted to live in India, it would have to be as second class group of citizens with no agency in governance and even no franchise to be able to choose their representatives.
So, here we have an RSS which is religious and nationalist, but with no understanding of universal franchise or modernity, which is patriarchal and racist and undemocratic to boot. The dream homeland tracing its roots to an age of mythology, would construct a modern dictatorship which would be militarist in nature and confine governance rights to a chosen few.
The organisation which will in four years be a 100 years old and whose political face has actually ruled independent India for a total of almost 13 years – the first 7 with Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee as Prime Minister and now 5 and a half years in Mr. Modi’s single-man system of governance.
The results are for the world to see. We have a nuclearized neighbourhood and alienated friends, and America’s enemies are now our enemies.
We have significantly eroded the constitutional freedoms that we won at the time of independence and put in our Constitution.We have built half a dozen crony capitalists, but have destroyed public wealth and institutions.
We try to subjugate our own people and in the process ruin their lives and the future of their children, so that they now see the state not as a friend but as an enemy. We have imprisoned our brightest minds.
We have silenced our most articulate and compassionate thinkers. We have suborned the law of the land.We have infiltrated institutions of higher learning and communalised our police forces.
And now with the new education policy, we are preparing to turn the future generations into an army of obedient technicians and trained labour force for the global market, possibly reserving the higher realms of the sciences, literature and philosophy for a select few.
This is what Manu – the author of the ancient Hindu legal text Manusmriti – dreamt of: education as a preserve of a few. The outcast would be punished very harshly if they tried to imbibe knowledge.
Apart from the 1975 Emergency, you also covered the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. We all know the role of Congress leadership and its foot soldiers. How much of a role did the RSS play in the massacre of Sikhs in 84?
There is a national amnesia and government indifference to fixing any blame on the Sangh Parivar. Even the Congress was loath to do it, willing to suffer all blame heaped on Rajiv Gandhi.
The killers were not politicians. Almost 99 percent of them belonged to a particular community – enraged, goaded, encouraged to take revenge on hapless Sikhs, many of them Dalit Sikhs who lived in areas such as Trilokpuri in clusters and could be targeted. The police connived. What was the common thread? Not politics, but identity.
Professor Shamsul Islam has quoted extensively from letters written by RSS ideologue Nana Deshmukh (posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award, in 2019) justifying the 1984 Sikh massacre and reports in the magazine edited by George Fernandes. In a more sensitive court of law, that would be evidence.
Please also remember the buildup to the military attack on the Golden temple, Operation Bluestar. Sikh extremism and the terror they unleashed on unarmed people of Punjab is well-known. Hindus were the victims for long. Buses were stopped, the passengers sorted out by faith, and one group shot dead.
If you see the Hindi newspapers of Punjab and Delhi of that time, you will see how almost complete was the polarization.
The support for crushing the movement went more than of subduing or arresting the terrorists. The mood was to teach a lesson.
This was apparent in the massive victory of Rajiv Gandhi in the elections following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, his mother. He won more than 400 seats. Any psephologist or analyst will also tell you this is possible when there is a massive religious polarization in the community. It is not confined to a sympathy vote. By that logic, Narasimha Rao should have got a similar vote, though Rajiv Gandhi was not in power when he was killed, and his death came during the campaign. The total vote of the BJP mobilized by the Sangh was transferred to Rajiv Gandhi in 1984. But only for that one time.
English dictionary defines ‘fascism’ as a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism. Is India on the verge of becoming a fascist state overwhelmed by the Hindu right or has it already become one? Please elaborate.
The main bulk of the people who support the BJP-RSS did not support the freedoms struggle, did not participate in it. The main financiers are a feudal overlord that forms the core group, the heart of the Sangh.
Mid-century European history, and for that matter even ancient Rome, teach us that dictators have popular support on their way to assuming those powers. But the same history also shows that dictatorships have a shelf life, an expiry date. Dictators themselves never learn from the history, so they do not know what their date with their nemesis is. But they meet their nemesis. In electoral democracies, the test comes every four or five years and the best laid plans often go awry.
For us in the Indian republic, it is critical to understand how the wounds of a partition have been assiduously kept alive by some political forces and in fact even international relations have become a binary to this. What we call communalism is no religious tension between communities, for such tension exists between religions, cults, denominations. Communalism is a political reality. In many ways, its roots can be said to be in the concept of caste itself, which is the mother of “us” and “them.”
That is why sooner than later, most issues become a question of Hindu versus Muslim, and then inevitably Muslims are targeted, subject to all sorts of ignominy and eventually violence.
This is where the sort of fascism that exists in India, a combination of entitled castes and entitled religions, is more dangerous than the one begotten by Mussolini. It is more dangerous than the worst form of tyranny we may have seen in wayward communist regimes. It entrenches political fascism with the trappings of religion that makes it seep deeper on the psyche of people, cementing it.
When regimes change, new governments form; sometimes they too want to cash in on this. But we hope when elections come and there is a new government in four years or so, steps will be taken to root out the evil, bring about immediate changes in education, employment, police and administration. That is both my hope and my wish. It will require awakening the people about the self-destructive nature of fascism and communal dictatorships.
India will never become a fascist state – or a communist or a Hindu state – because of its cultural, ethnic and political geography, the individual histories of its many peoples’ groups, and collective participation, to an extent, in the freedom struggle. What may seem Brahminical, may actually be the relics of the feudal superstructure which the British so cleverly used to rule India. The Scindias are now totally back in the BJP, by the way, as are most of the former rajas.
South India and the North-east have a different political growth and cultural history, apart from the issue of language and land reforms.
The BJP and RSS have in the last six or seven years tried to undo this derivation, but have not succeeded beyond a small, marginal and perhaps cosmetic impact in some states. Islamophobia alone cannot bring the country totally in the BJP fold.
The all-pervading Hindutva forces have completely dominated the power corridors, corroded the institutions, roped in the media completely and it seems they’re going to be in power till eternity. Do you see any hope of a recovery in the near future? How do you think it’s going to come about? Should the opposition and other democratic forces wait it out or start standing up to it?
This is the deepest thrust that the BJP RSS – and I always club them together – has made into the heart and psyche of India, as I have explained earlier. The bleeding is visible, but the more massive damage is currently invisible at this time. That is where the current period cannot be compared with the Emergency. The constitutional fiddling by Indira Gandhi could be corrected with one stroke of the pen, so to say. The institutional damage – apart from exposing the cowardice of vested interest, industry and the media it owned, bureaucracy with its insecurities of employment and the judiciary with a mindset to be for the state always – was in retrospect superficial and was corrected in the next two years. Indira Gandhi’s second coming after the Emergency saw the country near normal, apart from the crisis simmering in Punjab.
The judiciary and even the laws may well be corrected and brought back to normal sometime in the seeming distant future, but how can you reverse mindsets? The infiltration into the police, magistracy and all other uniformed services is going on at a very rapid pace. It will take one and a half generations of fresh recruitment-retirement-recruitment to weed out every contaminated mind.
The damage done through communalized education goes even deeper into the future. One generation of young people, beginning from this year, will have their minds contaminated, if I may use the very harshest of language. Parents and teachers are complicit. Text books are being changed.
The very definition of nationalism and patriotism will be burned into the minds of the very young. The damage will be permanent, or almost permanent.
That is how racism persists in the West, and anti-Semitism too.
Many scathing reports have equated the pro-Hindutva Indian media with Radio Rwanda. It’s the media, news channels in particular, that sets the tone for the Hindutva narrative and then goes after those who are seen as opponents or enemies.
Other than a very few channels which are owned by the anchors, the other channels of Radio Rwanda are owned by big businesses. They will change their tune according to the government in power.
Social media however has unleashed a demon which will be very difficult to put back in the bottle. It is being monetized in that those who tweet and put poison on Facebook and Twitter are benefitting from it in a material way. Many have made a profession out of it and are getting pay packets and political benefits.
Crazy channels may well close once it is all over. But the hypocrisy of the business houses needs to be exposed.
The othering of Muslims at the beginning of Covid-19 spread is a case in point. The way an entire community was brazenly targeted was for everyone to see. It led to a number of hate crimes against Muslims across the country. And most of these allegations against a particular organization that were employed to target Muslims were totally off the mark and it was later established that the audio used to buttress the argument was doctored.
The Covid scare brought out the worst in the Indian psyche. The targeting of the Indian Muslims, especially calling the Tablighi Jama’at the super-spreader of the epidemic was government sponsored, using the media as the main weapon. Of course, it was not true. Even major temples were equally guilty, and many political leaders too.
It was aggravated because the epidemic came when the hate campaign for the second term of the Modi government had not fully abated. As in 2013-14, the 2018-19 campaign was also very poisonous and sonorous. Its reverberations just merged with the panic and confusion created by the pandemic. China was blamed and Muslims too. It became a surrogate of the China-Pakistan adversaries India sees in the neighborhood.
Is CAA-NRC a threat to the existence and livelihood of people?
India has porous borders in the east and inevitably at all times there is economic migration. There is also a huge internal migration and the Indian labour works internationally too.
The question never really was about Muslims injuring the economic prospects of Hindus in Assam or Bengal. It was always political, about xenophobic fears that the Hindu parties would not be able to win in Assam, or even in Bengal, unless they polarized the illiterate.
Even without the Muslim issue, the northeast is in a state of continuous ferment for many other reasons, of which underdevelopment and tribal identity has always been a major factor. The Bodo agitation is a case in point. The student movement on the so-called Bangladeshi migrants was set up and fueled by political forces with power as their agenda. No more, no less.
The NCR-CAA is a threat to everyone, though its immediate target are the Muslims. It changes many definitions of Indian identity, including that of being Indian by birth. The laws that were passed in its wake including accepting refugees from neighboring Muslim majority countries are absolutely communal and single out Muslims as the one community to be excluded from the patronage of the law. This is vicious.
What’s the future of the minorities – Muslims in particular – in India? There is a widespread fear, anger and disillusionment among Muslims and the BJP regime has done nothing to alleviate it. In fact, it has only aggravated it by its anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies.
India is the land of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees, Baha’is, animists, Christians and Muslims. It is mother to us all. If Muslims are not safe in India, no one else can ever feel safe, certainly not Sikhs, Dalits, tribals and Christians. In absolute terms, it is as simple as that. There is no India without its religious and ethnic minorities in it as equals.
It has been a while since we heard of any lynching incident, which could be largely because of the lockdown. But even in the middle of the lockdown videos of gangs attacking Muslims surface regularly. In some of the recent incidents, we also saw Sikhs and Christians at the receiving end.
Lockdown has not meant an end to any form of violence, including lynchings. It has meant a limit to news being published or getting out. And news has once again started getting out. We hear of lynchings of Muslims and Dalits, of rapes of Dalit women, of terrorizing of Christians. It is back to the ugly normal.
Muslims are fleeing from Hindu dominated areas and relocating in those with sizable Muslim populations for safety. What does it portend for the Indian democracy, if anything of it is still left?
Ghettoization is a reality and it impacts poor Muslims the most. It is not good for the community and it is not good for the majority either. It is an economic disaster and it will impact employment, production, land prices and the supply chain. How can communities live in isolation from each other, protected by high walls for physical security and then look for mutual economic development. We have seen the disaster that is Ahmedabad after the 2002 violence and ghettoization.
The Hindutva forces have not only captured power, they also seem to have captured the hearts and minds of the majority community on whose vote they came into absolute power. Do you think there are still enough Hindus left in India who can see through the Hindutva politics and are willing to stand up to it if led and guided properly along with the persecuted minorities?
I have answered this in some detail earlier. My own argument is that this is a reality for the moment. And it will be the task of future regimes, which are not led by the RSS surrogates, to ensure that correctives are taken, that young people are again taught the values of coexistence, cooperation and secularism.
Who will guide and lead them? The opposition has been bullied into silence. They just send out statements which the media spins to corner them and further supplement the Hindutva narrative. The opposition or the civil society groups don’t appear to be doing anything concrete about it. They can’t just sit it out and relax and rely on an occasional press statement. Can they? Anti-CAA protests that were stalled because of Covid-19 lockdown seemed to have rattled the government and the Hindutva gangs, but they were restricted to a few Muslim majority areas.
Cometh the time, cometh the man! The political forces needed for a democratic and peaceful regime change through elections. We have seen this more than once in the past seventy years. Modi himself came in a democratic election, but one rooted in and fueled by hate. Such polarization will generate its own corrective. We see the beginnings already. Faint, but they are palpable.
You’re a great proponent of the free speech. Noted lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan was recently held guilty of contempt by the Supreme Court of India based on an opinion he expressed about Chief Justice of India in a couple of tweets. Indian judiciary has been in the news over the last few years for all the wrong reasons. Many students, activists and others have been thrown in jails without a proper investigation or a fair trial. Would you like to throw some light on that?
The decline in the judiciary is alarming. But once again, there is hope to be had from a look at history. The emergency demolished the Constitution and with it the right to life. Once the Emergency was over, the Constitution was corrected. More than one former judges of the Supreme Court have told me that course corrections will come, and soon. I too believe this despite the fear and gloom of the present.
In the short run, the judicial decline has reflected most in the Babri series of judgments. In a judicial first, the court ruled that three crimes had been committed, each of which the evidence proved without a shadow of a doubt. Two statues had been surreptitiously introduced into the locked mosque in the 1950s, the character of the building had been changed into a Hindu place of worship, and the structure was finally razed to rubble in acts of vandalism that had been captured in tens of thousands of photographs and hundreds of documentary films.
But faith, as all religious people know, is stronger than fact. The land went to the ones with the older faith line. The presiding judge progressed to the Rajya Sabha, with a future chief ministership held out as further hope. Opprobrium of civil society and peers in the justice system does not really weigh heavy in this blind balance.
Criminal cases are not based on faith, fiction, mythology or even future political postings. They are supposed to be based on facts, forensic science, evidence and witnesses. Or so it was believed. The judgment of the special court of the Central Bureau of Investigations, Mr SK Yadav, late last month chose to disregard every bit of visual evidence, eye witness accounts and self-confessed statements of the accused to hold every one of the 32 accused innocent of charges of criminal conspiracy to destroy the 500 year old mosque on 6 December 1992.
The demolition had left thousands dead in bombings, riots and retaliatory violence that followed and was in fact preceded by as many killings in the wake of Mr Lal Krishan Advani’s Rath Yatra movement to stake a claim to the birthplace of Rama and revive the fortunes of the Bharatiya Janata Party which had almost sunk when Rajiv Gandhi rode another majority anger wave to triumph in the 1984 general elections.
Mr Advani, his colleague Murli Manohar Joshi, the then UP chief Minister Kalyan Singh, the Hindu nun Uma Bharati, herself later chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, were among those now heaving a sigh of relief.
As The Hindu’s reporter who translated the judgement, written in Hindi narrated: “The court rejected the charges of criminal conspiracy leveled by the CBI against the accused, observing that the charge sheet did not have any evidence to show that they ‘got together in common intent’ with a group of ‘hooligan kar sevaks’ to bring down the mosque. It observed that a group of ‘arajak’ (hooligan) kar sevaks from the main crowd ‘suddenly got agitated’ and indulged in violence even as senior VHP leader Ashok Singhal appealed to them to retreat that fateful day. All evidence in the charge sheet was examined. The crime alleged against the accused could not be proven.”
According to the learned judge writing his 2,300-page verdict that evidence submitted by the CBI in the form of newspaper clippings, video cassettes, tapes, printed material, speeches, and witness testimonies, “it is clear that there was no moment when the accused persons gathered in a room to plan the scheme to demolish the structure….None of the witnesses have clearly named any of the accused to say they were demolishing the disputed structure.”
The CBI judge’s ruling flies in the face of the more voluminous findings of the Justice Liberhan commission which grilled everyone from the sleeping prime minister, Mr. PV Narasimha Rao and the main suspects, journalists and police officers, to reach a conclusion that the accused were guilty as charged. Interviewed after the judgment of the CBI court, the now very old Justice Liberhan reiterates his belief and his finding that the group led by LK Advani did indeed have a hand in goading the mobs to destroy the mosque in a drill that had been practised to perfection.
Long ago, after the assassination of Gandhi at his prayer meeting in New Delhi, the courts had found Nathuram Godse guilty of possessing a handgun and pulling its trigger thrice, but had found reason to let off the others initially charged with hatching the conspiracy of which the enthusiastic assassin was, in retrospect, but a small part.
The parallels that many have drawn are not without reason. Political expediency rather than the rule of law and the impartiality of justice have been the hallmark of court decisions all too often in recent Indian history. Underlying this is a fear of rousing the silent majority – the so-called keepers of the National Conscience and national Consciousness on which many nefarious judgments have been based in the Supreme Court and the high courts. It has something to do with the fear of mass violence, rioting as it is called. Though, that fear is very real. The mass murder of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and of the Muslims in Belchi (Bihar), and more recently in Gujarat in 2002, of Christians in Kandhamal in 2008 has shown that targeted violence against minorities, seen as aliens in the religio-cultural landscape, lies seething just under the surface.
It has also something to do with electoral politics. Much as we want to believe in Muslims as a vote bank, or even Dalits, no election can be won with just one or the other of these minority vote groups. It is the vast majority, divided into classes and castes but united by strong religious and cultural links, that really counts.
Not surprising that all but the Left want to keep on the right side of the majority. Not surprising that they are willing to sacrifice their belief in justice for this overwhelming reality. No one will be surprised if the nation ‘moves on’, forgetting that in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri masjid, far bigger things than a historic mosque have been eradicated – a part of constitutional guarantees, a faith in national institutions and a belief in justice itself is a thing of the past. Babri will be just a hiccup. It’s dead, not even a statistic. Alas, it will not end targeted and communal violence. Those roots run deeper.
Hate, lies and fake news, whether it is spread through social media or mainstream media, is central to the Hindutva propaganda. Recently a syndicate of 265 news websites was exposed internationally. Your take, please.
Let us fight these politically. Oppose fake news by unearthing the truth. But anything that provokes people to violence is not speech, it is an incitement. And there are laws to deal with that.
What’s the future of India in view of what we see today? Where do you see it headed?
India is more than its borders, its internal divisions of states, languages, subcultures and religions. It is the idea of India that Nehru dreamt, with all his faults that are pointed out. It is about cooperation, collaboration, coexistence for mutual and collective good. That holds true. India will survive the RSS, and certainly it will survive Narendra Modi.
The economy is in bad shape, there’s is an internal strife and discord, unemployment is on an alarming rise, there is a gag on free speech, foreign policy is in real bad shape. India has a problem with almost every country in its neighborhood and China seems to have neutralized whatever little influence it had in the region. Yet, most of the people seem to be OK with it. Is the majority community so blinded by religious bigotry that BJP and other Hindutva organizations get away with everything, even if it jeopardizes the very foundation and wellbeing of the country?
The people are no longer OK with that. The lockdown threw a crore and half people out of their jobs. The economy will take at least two years to recover, and five to come on an even keel. Agriculture has not declined, so at least food is available, but the farmer is angry. Religious polarisation cannot paper over the reality of economic backslide. If for nothing else, for economic revival, the government will eventually have to put its political agenda, its communal politics, on the backburner. I think we will start seeing this in less than six months.
On August 5 last year, BJP regime struck down Article 370 and Article 35-A of the Indian Constitution that guaranteed J&K’s accession with India and gave the erstwhile state, now reduced to two union territories, a special status. It was preceded and followed by a martial law-like siege and a communication blockade which continues partially to this day. Every claim that the BJP government makes on Kashmir has been debunked. Your opinion, please.
I was not born in Kashmir, but my first two or three years were in Kashmir. As an adult, I have been going to Kashmir as a reporter and in recent decades as a peace, democracy and human rights activist. I am also associated with several initiatives on and off. For Indians outside Kashmir, the issue has been warped out of all proportions. Civil society has its task cut out. There are no easy solutions. But it is clear that the political agenda of dividing the state has not brought about the fruits that Modi expected. It remains to be seen if future governments will have the courage and the numbers to reverse it.
What do you make of the anger and protest of the farmers against the Farm Bills? How do you see this move of the government that it projects as some renaissance of sorts for the farmers of India?
A genuine crisis. Land reforms remain incomplete in India. The weather cannot be really predicted. And the feudal system of middlemen has a life of its own. The farmer is at the collective mercy of these enemy forces. Genetically modified seeds make the crisis worse. The farmers’ suicides were the earlier result. The bills have brought the anger onto the roads.
India needs land reforms, rational cropping policies, modernization, not forced dependence on genetically modified seeds that help only multinational seed producers. The ban on cattle trade has also very adversely impacted agriculture economy. The anger of the farmers is the result of all these factors.
