Last week, a report published in The Hindu newspaper said that Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik had dashed off a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding a national policy on farm loan waivers.
Patnaik’s initiative comes in the backdrop of a round of politics of competitive populism with all parties promising farm loan waivers in the run-up to the just-concluded assembly elections. Though once elected almost all of them have struggled to deliver on the promise; the latest being Karnataka, where farmers are threatening to take to the streets to force the state government to keep its pre-election promise.
Patnaik should be credited for trying to force a debate on what is otherwise an increasingly popular policy prescription (another matter that he may be making virtue of a necessity since, in less than a year, Odisha goes to polls and Patnaik will be battling anti-incumbency especially on account of farm distress).
At the same time, he has also inadvertently put the issue of farm distress on the centre stage of national politics—and by consequence central to the electoral agenda in the 17th general election due next year.
It has been long overdue. While it is indeed a legacy issue, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is guilty of not reacting early enough. I remember raising this issue in a conversation with a senior member of the Union cabinet in 2015—by when the crisis had already assumed distress proportions—who summarily dismissed…
