'Majya Setkari Bhavana Mai Bahini No' by Sharad Joshi

Summary

This Marathi-language volume collects twenty-nine speeches delivered by Sharad Joshi, founder of the Shetkari Sanghatana, to mass gatherings of farmers across Maharashtra and beyond between 1981 and 2009. Published in 2010 by Janshakti Vachak Chalwal of Aurangabad (edited and brought out by Shrikant Anant Umrikar) as the tenth volume in their ‘Samagra Sharad Joshi’ series, the book traces twenty-eight years of Joshi’s evolving argument that the Indian farmer’s central problem is not poverty, drought, or backwardness but the systematic denial of remunerative prices by a state structure that taxes agriculture to subsidise urban industry.

The opening speech, ‘Bhakti, Yukti, Shakti ani Tin Varshat Mukti’ (Devotion, Strategy, Strength and Liberation in Three Years), delivered at the 1981 Pimpalgaon Basavant victory rally in Nashik district, sets the template. Joshi reviews the recent agitations over onion, sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton prices, exposing the precise mechanisms by which the Centre kept procurement prices below cost — importing American wheat at higher rates than what Indian farmers were offered, importing 21 lakh tonnes of sugar to break the cane-price agitation, banning cotton exports to crush prices, and using cooperative sugar-factory chairmen and politicians like A. R. Antulay and Vasantdada Patil as instruments of this policy. He names ministers (Rao Birendra Singh, Bhagwantrao Gaikwad) and bureaucrats by name, cites exact figures (Rs 300 vs Rs 367 per tonne for cane, Rs 700 demanded vs Rs 200 offered for cotton), and lays out a three-front strategy of court litigation, special general-body meetings of cooperative factories, and statewide road blockades on 10 November 1981.

Later speeches — from the Sangli–Mirja conference agenda to Aurangabad’s ‘Jnyanyaji Phalanishpatti’ and the closing ‘Ranavin Swatantrya Kona Milena’ — broaden the canvas to the Bharat–India binary, the Bali-raja reconstruction programme, opposition to Nehruvian planning that produced kisan indebtedness, support for the entrepreneurial age of liberalisation, and the demand to scrap controls on land, credit, and trade. Together the volume functions as the political testament of India’s most consequential post-Independence farmers’ movement, arguing for economic freedom for agriculture as the precondition of any genuine swaraj.

Key points

• Collects 29 speeches by Sharad Joshi delivered between 1981 (Pimpalgaon Basavant) and January 2009 (Parbhani executive meeting), spanning 28 years of Shetkari Sanghatana ideology.
• Published 6 June 2010 by Janshakti Vachak Chalwal, Aurangabad, as the tenth book in the ‘Samagra Sharad Joshi’ series; publisher’s note signed by Shrikant Anant Umrikar.
• The opening 1981 speech documents government tactics to defeat farmer agitations — importing American wheat, 21 lakh tonnes of imported sugar, banning cotton exports, and bribing cooperative-society officials at Rs 1000 per truck.
• Joshi names specific adversaries — A. R. Antulay, Vasantdada Patil, Rao Birendra Singh, Bhagwantrao Gaikwad — and details exact price gaps (cane Rs 300 vs Rs 367; cotton Rs 700 demanded vs Rs 190 offered).
• Lays out a four-front strategy: court litigation through Nashik lawyers’ committee, special general-body meetings of cooperative sugar factories, statewide propaganda in talukas, and a 10 November 1981 statewide road blockade.
• Articulates the Bharat versus India framework — the rural producing nation versus the urban consuming state — and links farmer prices to a broader programme of dismantling Nehruvian controls.
• Includes thematic chapters on the Bali-raja reconstruction programme, the entrepreneurial age (‘Yug ahe udyojakvadi sanskrutiche’), and farmer indebtedness as ‘the sin of Nehru and his dynasty’.
• Closes with the call ‘Ranavin Swatantrya Kona Milena’ — no freedom without a fight — framing the farmers’ movement as the unfinished work of swaraj.