 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today in our Independence Day series, we're going to discuss with P Sainath, the founder and editor of Pari, which I think all of you know by now, and of course, the well-known journalist. Sainath Independence Day for us, for me particularly, is a midnight children and for you who are born soon after. This is still a very important day. So how do you look at Independence, what its significance of it was to the people then, the particular generation which preceded us, and for our generation and what we see today? I think as a people, it was simply the greatest chapter in the history of the Indian peoples. It was certainly the noblest chapter in our history when hundreds of millions of people rose to bring down the mightiest empire in the world. And for me personally, that August 15th signifies it's the seal on that chapter and is simply the most important day of this year or any year for me. How it is perceived now is quite different and this is not truly of the present Modi government period. But I think when we shifted course as a nation, as a state rather, from the early 90s, we violated every principle that the freedom struggle was fought for. And come right to this year, for instance, I mean less than 24 hours from when we are about to celebrate Independence and freedom, the Supreme Court of India gives you the saddest judgment in its history. In relating to freedom, to freedom of expression, relating to all those things we fought for to destroy the British Raj. And I cannot think of a single noble principle of the freedom struggle or of the constitution that is its child. I cannot think of a single principle that this Supreme Court judgment punishing Prashant Bhushan honors. I cannot see a single thing that it honors in the constitution that is born of the freedom struggle or in any principle of the freedom struggle. There are others now in power who seem to think that liberation was achieved on August 5, 2020, 10 days earlier where the Prime Minister says that the great sacrifice, the liberation, I mean, in two paragraphs, he places the freedom struggle and the Jaram Janam Bhumi movement on the same platform. That is, it's simply blasphemous for someone like me who has, you know, grew up and has lived for this, for the ideals of that struggle. That's what inspires me, moves me. That's what Pari is about, all of it. Now, the principles which are expressed in the constitution are not just in the fundamental rights, but also in the directive principles of state policy, which starts by talking about the need to fight and mitigate inequality. The last 29 years have been directed entirely at enhancing that magnifying, that inequality and celebrating. A few days ago you saw Mukesh Ambani, which is 4th richest of 5th richest man. That's the debate in the media. You see the 4th or the 5th richest man in the universe. So where does that spirit of the freedom struggle, even if you go back to 97 under the Congress, Raj, I'll never forget the 50th anniversary celebrations down Rajput. The elite, the children of the elite, Bollywood celebrities, everybody dancing down Rajput celebrating while the masses stood on the sidelines watching. Incidentally, several of those in that joyous procession came from, I mean, I can't blame anyone for their parents or grandparents, but they did come from families with a very different history in the freedom struggle, that of collaboration, collaborators. I'm not saying they should not celebrate freedom, but I wish those who had fought and sacrificed for it were there. I wish Captain Ramchandra Shri Patilad, otherwise known as Captain Elder Brother, Captain Bau, who conducted the greatest train robbery in India and perhaps Asia in history. In 97, he was 20 years, 25 years younger. He was 23 years younger. But you didn't see the Captain Bau there. You did not see an N. Sankaraya who spent his entire adult life going from, I mean, still independence going from one jail to another, a man who saw six prisons, Comrade N. Sankaraya. You can read his story on the People's Archive of Rural India. Now, Captain Bau told me two, three years ago, when I congratulated him, I discovered him, you know, sinking into oblivion, unknown in his own village, this legend of the freedom struggle. And I congratulated him on delivering us freedom and independence. Is it better we fought for two things. We fought for independence and we fought for freedom. We achieved independence. I mean, for me, that just said about as much as a history of independent India could say in five volumes. We fought for independence and freedom. We achieved independence. That's a commentary or where we are. But what you said was, I think, a very important element. In the last 30 years, what we've completely lost sight of are the essentially egalitarian pronouncements of the direct principles. And we have gone to the position now, which Manmohan Singh also talked about earlier, the animal spirits of capital. But much more than that, when Mahmoudi says, and he's the Prime Minister says, wealth creators, he's talking not of the producers. He's not talking of the labor of the workers, either in factories or the labor of the farmers in the fields. So he believes the wealth is created by those who own it, not by who produce basically what we live. Basically, if we didn't have food, we would live with the farmers produced or the other goods. So this shift from producers being recognized and the freedom movement does that. It talks about land, it talks about workers, all those basically the right of the individual human being on society or on state is articulated there. All that has disappeared. So we are only talking about now how to help the wealth creators that will create more wealth for the nation. Well, I think we have substantially achieved helping the wealth creators that Mr. Modi recognizes. Mr. Ambani was 19th or 29th richest man in the world a few months ago, at least in the last Forbes billionaires list. Now he's fourth or fifth according to the Hurun billionaires report. So I think that substantial assistance has been, we have always, we have been for a very long time outside of the United States, the greatest welfare state for the wealthy. We've been that for a substantial period of our independent history. But there is a parallel, even in the freedom struggle, there is a parallel in the freedom struggle where a substantial number of people felt that this ridiculous demand for redistribution. You know, when things were going well, you needed to strengthen the, you needed to strengthen the rich. You needed to, this debate takes place all the time under, it takes place after the bubonic plague destroyed saw more than about half of Bombay's population fleeing to the countryside as migrants. Though they were all migrants. There was a big debate between two capitalist groups on this issue. Should we share more or share less? Tata, Mr Tata and his bunch of mill owners said, let the scumbags go, let them go. We'll get others from the North. There are so many poor and marginalized people, they'll come and work here. It didn't happen because the North was, people were dying of the flu, they were dying of various, of the famine, of various other problems as well. Now, Rosti Wadia led another group of capitalists which said, we have to give out, we have to give more and take less, marginally, marginally. But they, they argued that and that's how the slump, that's how the chals of Bombay came into being with the Bombay Improvement Trust, an act passed in the House of Lords in England. So you had this debate and there was always a class that said that what freedom struggle, we've been fighting for freedom for 800 years from the days we were enslaved by Muslims. And that is the, that was the Mr Modi's idea of freedom struggle and liberation as he expressed it in August 5, that this was an even older, even more hoary tradition and struggle than the mere 200 years. That's how he positions it in his, that's how he positions it in his speech in Ayodhya. So you always had a section that was against this country's achieving freedom from the British. They were, they were, they were our billionaires of those days, our millionaires of those days. They sent their laundry to London to be washed by other equally poor and miserable Chinese people in Limehouse. Also Prabir, when we talk about independence and that today, when India is in a period of gigantic hunger, with 91 million tons of food grain and the buffer stocks and half your population hungry, which makes it about half the world's population of hungry people. It's worth remembering how easy it is for the elite to disconnect from what, from the carnage around them, okay? Independence Day today, for me, as I said, personally the most important day in my life, of any year, every year. Because of the struggle it represents, of hundreds of millions bringing down the mightiest empire on earth. However, that ability of the elite to distance, today August 15th is increasingly a day on which we measure our distance from what we fought for. That is, it's a measurement of that disconnect. At the time of the great Darbar, where a lady called Victoria on finding that she owned a lot of real estate, thought that she deserved not to be called queen anymore but empress. And the most, some of the most valuable real estate in the world, paying her the wealth of the British empire came. It was what came from the Indian peasant was greater than that which came from the Solomon's mines. In 1876 you have this deadly famine. And you're seeing an incredible parallel today in the media, in the government, in the society. You had this deadly, deadly famine. 140,000 people died in a week in between Madras and Mysore alone. Poor people, hungry, starving, flocked to the cities. They flocked to the cities. And where, you will read accounts of this in the newspapers of that time, several were clubbed to death at the barricades of the city, put up by the police to stop all these horrible unwashed from entering our hallowed precincts. So you have this going on. On the other hand, you have the greatest party in the history of the world going on with 68,000 guests for the coronation, for the Darbar. Now the 68,000 guests were mostly royalty. Each of them came with an entourage. So you're talking about a quarter of a million people gathering. Somebody, his bodyguards, his carriage, his horse, the horses, the guy who looked after the horses, the guy who cleaned the horses shit out of the stable. You had a quarter of a million people converging, I think, but the guest list was 68,000. Now the newspapers of the time reported both. They did report the Darbar and its pomp and glory. And they did say that, hey, there is a famine going on and people are trying to enter the cities and we are smashing them on the doorsteps. But they never connected. Never once did they make a connection between the glorious Darbar and the hunger and famine and the cause of why those people were driven to the cities in terror and in extreme distress. So you had that situation happening. In fact, even today, the only history book that really deals with it. You know, much as you and I love Eric Hobsbawm, his work does not talk about the gigantic impact of famines in India. It does not, not really, not the kind of deaths that occurred and the kind of trauma that people underwent. I mean, I love Hobsbawm still, but the fact is, you have a book which I would advise every reader of Newsclick to buy and read by Mike Davis. Late Victorian Holocausts, where he takes you through this, where he takes you through the ecological environmental crisis. El Nino, he's tracing back to the 1870s. He's talking about how this wonderful Darbar functions while people are being butchered by the police to stop them from disrupting the city's gentile life of the cities. In fact, as far as the only person I know outside of this, any book which gives you a sense of that was before was Rajini Palme that's India today, which was promptly proscribed in Britain. So in fact, if you look at it, it's a sort of secret of Indian history, what happened around the Darbar. I call it Victoria's original secret. I was quickly coming to what you said is the parallel that existed at that time. Do you see the Indian media, for instance, not reporting the complete dislocation and the impact this has had on poverty today? I know you're coming there. How can they? You know, the thing is, at the very moment that the Indian public require us the most, at the very moment, the very period, the very juncture in our history, when the Indian public require journalism and journalists the most, media house after media house is throwing out hundreds of journalists. 1200 journalists and media workers, that's a very conservative figure in my opinion. Hindustan times 180, Anand the Vikatan 175 and a lot of, you're throwing out journalists at the very time they're needed. In the first place, you never had journalists covering these issues. Now, you're throwing out those who could at least go out and cover those issues. So what you did, you saw in the first week of the lockdown, you saw a lot of journalism and I believe there are hundreds of wonderful journalists in this country. I know I work with several of them. And as someone who has spent 40 years in the profession, I think I have the right to make judgments on that. I think that are wonderful journalists. Most of the wonderful journalists are today jobless. Those who have not been kicked out have had their salaries hit by half. So now, how on earth are you actually making a statement? I'm not going to cover your bloody migrants. They've reached their villages. It mattered to me when they were leaving my job and not become refusing to be my Mali, my Naukar, my domestic maid when they were abandoning those posts and going it mattered. So I followed them till the border of Mumbai to the Nashik, Mumbai highway, which was more busy in that month than I have seen it in 40 years. So once they're gone, they're gone. You're not bothered because the media are not bothered. Yesterday there was this discussion on media and about the Congress spokesperson yet committed suicide and whether... I cannot believe that in four, five, six people who spoke very well, it's made a lot of sense on everything. Why are the media like this? I did not... I don't believe I heard the word corporations. I don't believe I heard the word what media are under capitalism. You know, Murray Kempton, one of the earliest editors of the New Republican, he said once so beautifully in 1960s, what is the job of the editorial writer? He said the job of the editorial writer is to go down into the valley after the battle is over and shoot the wounded. That's what we're doing. While those people are struggling for their lives, you are creating these new ordinances on the APMC, taking away from the farmer what little access he had or she had. While those things... while people are struggling for their existence, while... I'll elaborate a little on what APMC is. By the way, the Congress spokesperson is the one who died of a cardiac arrest. Correct. He's the one who died of a cardiac arrest, sorry. But his other party spokesperson leaked it to the humiliation and the anguish and pain. Sorry, I should have said that. Anguish and pain that he underwent as a result of what they call the toxic TV debates. You know, there are also good capitalist reasons for those debates. You see, it's very low cost and you generate eyeballs, there is no cost. TalkTV justifies its existence as a revenue model. You know, rather than send people out to discuss a report on something, you have five guys sitting in a hall in a room or now in their homes, yacking about stuff they haven't a clue about. It's a very good revenue model. And the shouting and screaming is part of the emoting that they are... which they have taken from the entertainment world. Yes. So that's another thing. But the media, coming back to that, you've got now 1200 journalists, media persons. Many of them highly qualified. Some of them terrific journalists having been sacked on the streets at a time when maybe their partners and spouses are also out of jobs. Yeah. What are they going to do? Who is going to tell the stories? So you've got the media performing. As I told you the last time on NewsClick, this is the lowest point in our performance in nearly 200 years since Raja Ram Mohan Roy launched Meera Tulakbhar. I want to come back to what you also talked about the APMC. Yeah. Just elaborate for our viewers. The APMC stands for what it means and how it fits in also to the question of who are the wealth creators? The farmers who produce or the ones who buy their goods cheaply and make a lot of money off? Agriculture, produce, marketing committees. You know, it's very interesting when these markets, they were earlier for the last 40, 50, 60 years controlled by small traders and local traders and some big traders. Now like in so many other spheres of life, like in farming itself, you're knocking out small capitalists in favor of monopoly capital. Farming was always a private sector. Remember that? It was never a public sector. But you killed it more viciously than you killed the rest of the public sector because of your hurry to hand it over to corporate monopolies. Big capital. Big capital. Yeah, you did that. Then now as it goes here, see now what you call the middle man and I've been saying this for 15, 20 years because there were also many amendments earlier to the APMC Act. There were many tricks and tweaks around it as well, games paid around it. The middle, you know, that wretched middleman, the villainous middleman, the difference in the villainous middleman is the middleman now wears Gucci and Armani. That's who the middleman is. The lady who used to come before the lockdown sell vegetables at our doorstep in Mumbai where I live carrying 30 kilograms up seven flights of stairs and down when she couldn't get the lift. She would tell us, as anyone who comes and sells Bhaji to you would tell you how difficult it was for her to access from the wholesale markets anymore as that was all going to reliance fresh, Godrej natural and other chains of big capital. Incidentally, a little friendly tip for your viewers, anything that is named with has the tag suffix or prefix fresh or natural, it isn't. It's been frozen for weeks and months. The people, the vendors of the streets who are selling, their stuff is natural and their stuff is at any rate, it's fresh because they have no way of storing it overnight. If they don't sell it, it's dead. So everything has been shifted. The entire, the agrarian crisis in five words Praveen is corporate hijack of Indian agriculture. That's the thing in five words. The process by which that happens in five words is predatory commercialization of the countryside and the outcome of that process in five words, greatest displacement in our history. Now we know the media which asked why are these people leaving? Why are these migrants leaving the city for things? What will they go there and do? Never asked that question when they were leaving the villages to come to the cities. In millions and tens of millions. We never bothered until it affected us, until it affected the beautiful people. It didn't matter. So what they're doing now is making that control of corporate monopolies of big capital, of great chains, powerful corporate chains over those markets near total. And the wonderful thing is that they justify it on the ground. They justify it on the ground that now a farmer can sell his product anywhere he wants. He's not, yeah. So the guy in Bundelkhand finds out that there's a better price than Tamil Nadu. He's going to leap onto his bullock cart and make it to Chennai. I mean, it's so obscene. The thought of it is so obscene. By the way, this is the same principle that in a different way informs this whole ridiculous thing called GST in India. It was introduced to create unified market. Capitalism requires it. It doesn't. The United States has three, you know, three kinds of taxes in every state and different kinds of taxes. When I thought at Princeton or at Berkeley, my paycheck would tell me my local professional taxes. It would tell me the state taxes and it would tell me the federal taxes and sales tax very dramatically from state to state. I always, if I get any electronics from the U.S., I ask whoever is buying it in the U.S. to mail it to Portland because tax, Intel, home of Intel, its sales tax on electronics is zero. You buy it in New York, it's eight and a half percent. It works for them. It works for them. Who did it work for here? Now, it works for you if you're a national big corporation requiring a conformity, a homogeneity everywhere across. It saves you a lot of money, makes you a lot of money. If you're a cooperative of 204 weavers in Bihar, your margin is so much in a day. And you're only getting that margin by being a cooperative, by putting your collective strength together. With GST, that margin is destroyed. They have to buy computers. They have to get data entry operators. They have to get a CA. They have to file it online. And what little margin those guys got together by being a cooperative, that's good. But if you've got like in several, in two buildings of Nariman Point, Mumbai that I am aware of, a whole floor of lawyers working for one, lawyers and accountants working for one corporation. This suits you beautifully. Apart from that also it has the disadvantage to the states. The state government lose control of their revenue, which we are seeing now. I cannot believe it. I could not believe it at the time that the states could set back federalism by 50 years from the days when Jyoti Bosu and M. Karunanidhi got together and fought for states' rights. From that period of the early 70s, when that, I think 71, 72, when those fights began, coordinating between southern and a few eastern states, those states' rights till now, with one fell swoop, the GST really devastates that. And it's also very much more when you see that how late they are now sending the taxes back to the states. So essentially, they're not sending the tax. They're not sending. The central government is living off the tax share of the states and the states are not getting their basic share six months or eight months, nine months after it is due to them. So really, we have reversed not only the power, but even the funding that should happen to the states in the center is now really related in this particular way. And we don't print notes. Therefore, we are not having a larger deficit because deficit really comes from squeezing the states. And secondly, you also have the same principle of centralization applied in politics, in economics, in everything. Even a simple thing like the relief fund for COVID victims for the crisis. You create a PM cares fund, often called PM's cares fund, because you better pay up. So lots of people give crores, two crores, three crores there. We don't know how many thousands of crores are in that fund. And they don't give it to the state CM relief funds where it is desperately needed. There, if you give it, I understand that you don't get it countered as CSR. But if you give it here to a privately registered trust that is not going to be subject to government audit, you get CSR. Now, the logic of this, I wish the Supreme Court would take urgently this kind of an issue. If it had time to do that, it would be wonderful if they did this. But coming back again to the whole idea of freedom and if you look at it historically, the greatest, see, one of the things that we did in the last 30 years, we robbed a generation and a half of their history. They have no clue what, you know, in that event that I keep attacking on 1997, Azadi was a Pepsi ad by Shahrukh Khan. A generation grew up looking at that ad. And because of his charismatic appeal, it was a big deal that the same word Azadi in JNU has a totally different reaction from the state. It's not encouraged to go dancing down Raj. So you have that entire generation robbed of its history. They have no idea where a generation that doesn't know where it came from has no clue where it's going. I think it's so important, so important in education. And the rastriya svayam sevaksam, to their credit, were the first to recognize this, that it's so important to capture textbook history. And they have been at it diligently since the 1970s when they got the NCRT books banned, when they were withdrawn, when they were in power, briefly. Now if you have people who can write history at will, you know, and you don't, that's why I think it's so important. For me, personally the project that I am in love with is trying to get these last living freedom fighters to speak. Do you know, when the farmers marched in Delhi, the people who came out to make comments and go on record, where for us, six freedom fighters aged, youngest was, the infant was 92 and the oldest was 98, and they came out and sent video messages of support to the farmers because they were telling you, this is what we fought for. This is the special edition of the NCRT. With the help of the people of this country, I am Chhattatrasenani Krantvir, Captain Ram Laud. I am standing today in the age of 17. We saw the dream of freedom and fought for freedom. The happiness of the farmers. But today, the farmers are happy in the state of India. This is a very shameful thing. In a few years, in the Delhi parliament, there will be a dead man. The dead man will have to get my land and my land. He will have to get my land and my land. And the justice I have got, I will not be able to do anything. You, the price of the land, the price of the land, I will not be able to get anything. The government, the price of the land, I will not get anything. The people of this country will have to get justice, the people of this country will have to get justice. That is a part of their freedom struggle. In 2018, a year after I interviewed him when he was 95 then, Captain Baugh, I asked him. He was out on the street with his hand stick and in a farmer's protest. I asked him, what are you doing here, Captain Baugh? He said, you know, and he was talking of the freedom struggle. He said, then also it was for farmers and workers. Now also I am there for farmers and workers. That's something inspirational that has never left me. Then also we fought for farmers and workers. Today also we fight for farmers and workers. Sairat, last words from you on this before we close today. Yeah, cut it as you like. Something sharp, two sentences, three sentences as they say in TV, bad TV, but here if you want. Or we can close it on Baugh Sahib also. The current generations need to be inspired by even the words of someone like Comrade Sankaraya. He was a top student in his college, the American College Madurai, one of the elite colleges of that time. He was a top student. He was a football player. He was the founder of the first Tamil poetry society in the campus. He was doing damn well and he was about to become a lawyer when 15 days before the final exam he was in prison. More than half a century later, asked by his comrades, what went through your mind at the moment of your arrest? When you saw your entire career destroyed, you knew that you're not going to write these exams. Your parents were waiting for you to do that law degree, become a great lawyer. One of your classmates or contemporaries becomes Chief Secretary of Tamil Nadu 50 years later. Others become judges in high courts. What went through your mind at that moment when you saw it all destroyed? He said, elation. That I was able to stand up and go to prison for my country and its freedom. I think on that note Sainath, let us conclude this session. And I must say, for this generation, they have to discover this generation not yours in mind, but the younger generation today. They have to again rediscover or recreate the freedom struggle we need today. Thank you very much Sainath for being with us, giving, running through some of the inspirational chapters in this history of ours and remembering what it meant for the past generation and what it means to us today.