Page:Sharad Joshi - Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage.pdf/195

 villagers were unconcerned with the clashes between the rulers. So long as their lives were not disturbed, it did not matter to them whether the kingdom was under a Muslim Sultan or a Hindu Raja. They were occupied with their own routine life; until the aggressor attacked. ‘Mahatma Jotiba Phule had called Muslim aggressors as “vimochak” (emancipator) and in doing so he had expressed the feelings of common villagers. Even after English rule came, his view was, “English rule was better than the Brahmin rule which opposed social progress and revolution.” ‘This must have been the feeling of common people at the time of aggression. The only difference between Ramdeorai, the Hindu ruler of Devgiri, and aggressor Allauddin was that the earlier one would take away their crops every year, whereas the later one would come only once in a while.’ The same looting, albeit in different format, continued even during the British rule, according to Joshi. They took away raw material like cotton from us at the lowest possible price and dumped the cloth manufactured by their textile mills at the highest possible price in our vast market. The same exploitation went on even after the British left. Industries procured the raw material, including farm produce, from the rural areas at the cheapest price and sold their finished products at the highest price. The situation was similar to the one that prevailed in Britain during the seventeenth century when the “Town versus County” debate was fiercely waged. In their country, they rectified the system in due course to minimize the inequality and avoided the revolution, but in our country the system continued unchanged. Joshi believed that most of the developmental activities undertaken by the government ostensibly for the benefit of agriculture in reality benefitted industries more than the farmers. For instance, the loans given by the government for the purchase 182

Q

Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage