Inequality in India Is Now Structural : P.Sainath

From Farmers’ Distress to Billionaire Spectacle: Who Does the Media Serve

P. Sainath at Doon Library

Justice and the crisis of journalism in India

At the Doon Library and Research Centre journalist P. Sainath marked the Third Surjit Das Memorial Lecture. The packed auditorium included students, journalists, researchers and social activists as Sainath delivered a wide ranging lecture on inequality, justice and the crisis of journalism in India.

Veteran journalist said India is living through the greatest inequality in its history greater even than during the British Raj. He warned that inequality has now become embedded in the country’s political economy justice system and media structures.

Speaking at the Third Surjit Das Memorial Lecture at the Doon Library and Research Centre Sainath began his address by saying
“Every Indian language is my language.”
He said India cannot be understood without listening to its villages workers farmers and marginalised communities voices that mainstream media has increasingly erased.

Greater inequality than British India

Referring to Covid reverse migration and policy choices Sainath said India has entered a phase of extreme concentration of wealth. 

He said disengagement from the agrarian crisis explains why the arrival of nearly two lakh farmers at Delhi’s borders during the farmers’ protest shocked urban India though it did not surprise him.

Crores wedding in a state where farmers cancel marriages

Sainath referred to a recent ultra luxury corporate wedding that reportedly cost  crores rupees. He said the media celebrated it uncritically even as Maharashtra where the wedding took place remains the worst affected state in India’s agrarian crisis.

He cited a Maharashtra government survey showing that in just six districts of Vidarbha lakhs of families declared they could not afford to marry their daughters.
“Today there are villages full of men in their thirties who remain unmarried because no parent wants to give their daughter to a farmer,” he said.

Calling the wedding a brilliant business investment Sainath said such spectacles help consolidate influence over governments bureaucracies and public resources while costing billionaires only a tiny fraction of their wealth.

Billionaire wealth comes from public resources

Sainath said the dominant source of Indian billionaire wealth is rentier income derived from forests land minerals gas oil and infrastructure contracts.
“This is a direct violation of the constitutional principle that the resources of the community should not be concentrated in a few hands,” he said.

He noted that India had zero dollar billionaires in nineteen ninety one but now has more than two hundred ranking third globally in billionaire numbers while remaining near the bottom of the Human Development Index.

GDP fell but billionaire wealth doubled

Sainath said during the first year of Covid India’s GDP contracted by seven point seven percent yet the number of billionaires and their combined wealth doubled.
He said if the cake was shrinking that wealth did not come from above. It was sucked up from below.

He described MGNREGA as a lifeline for rural India especially women noting that sixty five percent of agricultural labour is done by women.
If hard work made people rich every rural woman in India would be a billionaire, he said.

Using wage calculations Sainath said an MGNREGA worker would need million years to accumulate wealth equivalent to India’s richest industrialist.

Justice system and unequal power

On the justice system Sainath said inequality manifests most brutally in policing and courts. Quoting a Dalit rural activist he said All the learned judges of the Supreme Court do not have the power of my local havaldar.

He said bail operates differently depending on class and power with wealthy and influential accused walking free while poor dissenters remain imprisoned for years.

Farmers protest and corporate power

Sainath described the farmers movement as the largest democratic constitutional and peaceful struggle for justice in the world in the last thirty years.

He said the movement marked the first direct confrontation between Indian farmers and corporate power since the East India Company adding that the media largely ignored farmers slogans and demands.

Media and journalism are not the same

Sainath drew a sharp distinction between media corporations and journalism.
He said media exist to maximise profit for shareholders. Journalism exists for the public.

Despite being declared an essential service during the lockdown he said Indian media organisations sacked more than three thousand five hundred journalists and fifteen thousand other media workers during Covid which he described as illegal.

At least seven hundred and fifty journalists died of Covid many without acknowledgement or compensation from their employers.

Journalism must stand for justice

Sainath said no society has survived such extreme inequality. Either we destroy inequality or inequality will destroy us.

Calling for constitutional renewal he argued that the Right to Work and the Right to Food must become fundamental rights not merely directive principles.

Concluding his lecture Sainath said
If journalism is to have any meaning the J in journalism must stand for justice. Without justice it is not worth doing.

He urged writers filmmakers and citizens to support independent media document endangered languages and practise intellectual self defence in an age of misinformation.