‘To Live and Die’ in Punjab: What Rhymes with Indian Farmer Suicides?
Lessons from Farmers and Punjabi Hip Hop on the Impact of Contract Farming
On 21 September 2020, Punjabi hip hop artist Khaab Khosa released ‘Kisan’ (farmer) on YouTube. The song protests the three 2020 Farm Bills that not only remove the safety of a minimum support price (MSP) for farmers, but also institute contract farming (CF) — a practice known to favor large-scale farmers, pass risks to small-scale farmers, and deprive communities of their local wealth. This last characteristic of CF is a direct threat to youth and any hope of a viable future.
Khosa, aware of this threat, turns to hip hop in an effort to use what he describes as a ‘trendy medium’ to get youth to pay attention to the new policies that will devastate entire ways of life. In an interview, Khosa shares his own childhood experiences. ‘I’ve watched inflation rise day-by-day all my life’, he says, ‘but the crop prices are not going up’. Khosa elaborates on this deviation: ‘businessmen will continue to make money but not kisan’.
In Khosa’s embrace of hip hop, he inherits its roots as a political and radical form of expression. Not unlike Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ (1982), which tore apart the American dream by giving an oral account of the despair inherent to its ghettos, Khosa’s ‘Kisan’ (2020) dismantles the idea of India as a country that protects and supports its 263 million cultivators and agrilabor.
‘Kisan’, directed by Harry Bhatti, opens with seven different shots of older farmers protesting. While the images feel familiar from decades of farmer protests, the Punjabi voice-over offers a new perspective to consider: the people who have nothing to do with farmers or even farming, the man’s voice says, are not going to pay attention to the protests because they are only interested in watching famous people. The video then cuts to Khosa — the artist and the son of a farmer — walking through a wheat farm with the sun setting behind him. With this edit, it is clear that this song is meant to wake people up to what is happening to farmers in India.
Khosa and Bhatti released ‘Kisan’ the day after the new agriculture legislation passed through the upper house of the Indian parliament. This was also four days after passing through the lower house on 17 September 2020. The goal of this timely release was to amplify the protests that erupted as India was nearing 100,000 COVID-19 cases. Committed to maintaining a state of oblivion, President Ram Nath Kovind approved the three agricultural bills on 27 September 2020.
But Khosa’s ‘Kisan’ continued to play — and continued to stir up protest energy — reaching over 300,000 views on YouTube in the past two months. Khosa and Bhatti have, arguably, achieved their goal: today, as farmers from Punjab march to India’s capital, Delhi, it is become increasingly impossible to turn away from what Modi’s administration has willed upon an already impacted community. In this ‘Dilli Chalo’ (Let’s go to Delhi) march, Punjabi farmers are being met with support from communities offering food and supplies as well as violence from police barricades.
Now more than ever, it is necessary to turn to Khosa’s lyrics. In ‘Kisan’, Khosa calls for people — across the world — to wake up and realize that their milk, wheat, potato, and rice come from the hard labor of farmers and do not just ‘fall from the sky’. Joining the tradition of political hip hop to speak up against state-sanctioned violence, poverty, and exclusion, Khosa’s ‘Kisan’ demands listeners to consider the politics of farming labor when they are calculating the nutritional value of their food. The song suggests that in addition to consuming calories and calcium, we are also devouring death and desperation.
The song’s hook — ‘don’t kill the farmer’ — oscillates between sounding like a command, as he reprimands his audience with his index finger while staring into the camera, and an aggressive plea. A plea to the people because not only does Khosa bring his palms together with his fingers pointed to the camera (as opposed to the sky in prayer), but his hook is followed by one of the most powerful verses to make its way into hip hop history. Khosa makes the request to just kill the farmers all at once, rather than submit the entire community to yet another phase of torture and suffering.
Hardship is not new to Indian agrarian communities. For nearly two decades, suicide has plagued India’s agrarian communities. Monetary debt, honor, and insecure social standings have all been identified as potential causes for the farmer suicides that some studies show occur at a rate of 1 every 30 minutes. Some research finds that nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in Punjab since 1997; if this is true then the the more recent studies revealing a steady 10,000 suicides a year have had very little improvement for the past 23 years. The cause, however, has been the continuous lack of regard for farmers in Indian policy, not isolated incidents of debt as we are asked to believe.
With each new legislation the same message is sold: this policy will bring economic empowerment to our country’s farmers. And the same protest song is sung: ‘stop killing us’.
Khosa has remixed this farmer slogan a bit, from Firozpur he says: ‘don’t kill us’. The difference between ‘stop’ and ‘don’t’ is a direct response to what contract farming can and will do; its damage has already been witnessed across the world, from the U.S. to Sub-Saharan Africa, contract farming has killed the small farmer. For India, where 80% of its farmers operate less than 2 hectares of land and produce a limited surplus for markets, CF will be disastrous.
Contract farming (CF) is a land control scheme that puts smallholders at high risk with supply contracts. In an agreement between unequal parties (such that the farmer become subject to a monopsony employer), farmers — without any negotiating ability — enter a predatory arrangement that leaves the farmer obligated supply an agreed upon quantity and quality of crops within a designated time period in return for a predetermined price. In these ‘agreements’, there is no account for the general uncertainties that all farmers face; this includes things like weather, pests, yields, accidents, and illness.
CF has the same effect as land grabbing, just without the actual expulsion of a person from their land. Like land grabbing, CF dispossesses a person of the power to control their land and, therefore, the land’s benefits and outputs. With CF, the ‘owner’ of the land is turned into a hired hand on their own land, farming according to the will of the market and the demands of the contract. Arguably, CF can be more profitable and less of a burden than an outright land grab. In the expulsion of a farmer from their land, a company accumulates land without labor. CF allows the company to gain the outputs of land, without inheriting any of the risk that land-ownership includes; this is a control grab.
A business or finance degree is not required to understand the anti-farmer economics of CF, or any control grab for that matter. The logic of CF is akin to telling women they have freedom and equal political rights, but then denying them access to reproductive health care. In other words, giving someone the right to own their body or a piece of land means nothing if they have no right to control its (re)production.
Farmers across India are quite aware of their pending plight with Modi’s new scheme and, during the current pandemic, they are rushing to the streets to protest, despite the obvious health risks.
Khosa made it a point to mention in an interview that farmers are often taken advantage of due to their lack of formal education. ‘They make farmers into fools’, Khosa states. The lyrics of ‘Kisan’, however, are not meant to educate farmers of thier plight— they are meant to educate the formally educated that these market-focused theories that are developed in universities and on Wall Street do not work in practice on the fields. ‘Kisan’ attempts to inform the world of what the farmers already know, that food does not fall from the sky — it comes from labor, the labor of a kisan.
