Why Zubani ? Indian rural narratives of women

The idea for this blog came up in the course of some discussions regarding what women - the wives and the daughters - of the farmers, who are committing suicides, in the cotton belt of India of Vidarbha, Maharashtra, are thinking.
Priya of Samanvaya, Chennai has been involved with a campaign of email updates regarding the farmer suicides in Maharashtra.
In the course of the discussions, we wondered, that if and when, the dust of arguments, rhetoric, politics settles down, who is facing the world with blank uncomprehending eyes ?
No proud farmer of rural India deliberately wants to be a delinquent debtor. No Indian farmer wants to die without repaying all his accumulated debts.
However he has been pushed into disasters due to a failure of economic policy.
The Indian economic policies with respect to agriculture, are nothing other than a disguised exit policy and a tool for sucking surplus for subsidizing industry.
For large masses of Indian farming populations, the present and the future is bleak.

Even though India is a democracy, the Indian farmer, and rural populations, fail to find a voice in policy making, as New Delhi and Mumbai, pursue a course of economic restructuring of epic proportions, driven by the desire to benefit from globalization and the need to respond to the threat from China, US, Europe.

Large scale economic restructuring is unleashing large social displacement and rural distress.
The farmer of course - the husbands and the fathers - who committed suicide by drinking a can of pesticides, and was able to manage to relieve himself of the mental burden of financial debt and the daily verbal torture of debtors, and money lenders.
But it is the rural women of India who are unable to comprehend that Indian economic policies are making agriculture unviable for the farmer who is solely dependant on rural incomes.
It is these women of India, reduced to a sorry state, from divine Shakthi and the Rani of Jhansi invocations, who are left alone in the wake of these powerful market forces and economic policies of Indian urban led growth policies without social security.
It is the women, the daughters and the wives, who will pay the price of the debacle of Indian farming and disguised exit policy.
This is an attempt to collect some of the rural narratives of some such women, the powerless Shakthi, who does not have the power to slap the errant people in the face, as shown in the TV soaps, that are the staple of Indian middle class and upper classes, solely preoccupied by the return to form of Saurav Ganguly, the get rich quick questions of Shah Rukh Khan and the unending rise of the Indian sensex.