It’s been almost 50 years since Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri gave India the slogan “Jai Jawaan, Jai Kisaan” (Hail to the Solider, Hail to the Farmer). The father of our nation, Mahatma Gandhi famously said that “the soul of India lives in its villages”. Yet, today, every 30 minutes a farmer commits suicide. It is estimated that more than a quarter million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—”the LARGEST wave of recorded suicides in HUMAN HISTORY”. Millons more whose ancestors tilled the land and fed our country are being pushed off the land and displaced, so that they end up as slum dwellers and squatters in metros uprooted, devoid of their livelihood and their dignity.
It’s true that we have come very far from the nation that “hailed the farmer”. Today, the hands that feed us are cheated, robbed, mutilated, crushed, and brought to the brink of destruction. To these farmers, death is the only way out. Yet after they die, their bodies are desecrated. The same corrupt system that exploits their simplicity and capitalizes on their miseries, dishonors them after death.
This video is an attempt to give you a glimpse of what happens after these farmers die. In the indignity of their death, may you find an understanding of the anguish of their lives.
And may we stop for a moment and ponder over this thought, “One can tell the morals of a culture by the way they treat their dead.” If such is true, then what does this video say about us as a culture?
To learn more, read:
INDIA: The Mockery of Post-Mortems: A Threat to the Criminal Justice System