Peepli Live: No Laughing Matter

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Socialist Action congressional candidate Chris Hutchinson wins ballot line Socialist Action September 2010 11 “Peepli Live” is an Indian film, but not in the popular Bollywood style like “Slumdog Millionaire.” “Peepli”

concerns the spate of farmers’ suicides. An endnote from the film states that since 2001, 8 million farmers have taken their life because of crop failures and bank foreclosures, although government reports put the number much lower.

In the film, brothers Natha (Omkar Das) and Budhia (Raqhuvir Yadav), who are farmers, sit in a field and complain of being pushed to extremes by being restricted to using American seeds and American fertilizer—which costs much, much more than what they had paid in the past for local goods. Plus the fact that the return on cotton is half of what it had been. They talk about the possibility of losing their land because their scant crops didn’t bring in enough money to repay a loan.

Their home is in Peepli, a small village of one-room clay or stone buildings reached by meandering dirt paths, through colorful but sparse vegetation. The brothers live with Natha’s ever-complaining wife, Daniya (Shalina Vatsa), their kids, and their bedridden, yet shrewish, voluble, mother, Amma (Farrukh Jaffar), and suffer Amma and Daniya’s constant wrath for not providing for them and their children.

They’re accused of being lazy and doing nothing but sitting around smoking hashish and drinking beer. Natha discovers that the government has kept secret the fact that it pays 20,000 rupees (about US$429,000)

to families of suicides. Since he has a wife, a mother, and kids, he decides he, not Budhia, should commit suicide, unless he can borrow more money. But he is in already in debt to the local politician—an aviatorsunglasses wearing, self-important decider of fates.

Natha sees only one way out.

Word gets to the local newspaper about his decision.

Later, a TV reporter picks it up and casually announces the fact as a throw-away, human-interest closing bit.

Alerted, angry government officials threaten to shut down media. Like a lighted match on dry straw soaked with gasoline (which actually happens towards the end of the film), the story catches fire and news teams from all over, with their antennae-sprouting vans, cameras, cameramen, reporters, anchors, and staff, descend on Peepli.

People flock to the village, which literally becomes a carnival, with rides, entertainment, refreshments, and songs about Natha, even games of chance.

The lead media team is headed by Nadita (Mailaka Shenoy) and her crew; they vie with and hassle other news teams. Reporters interview everyone even the children about their father and their life in general, take cute pictures of them cradling kids (baby goats).

The issue becomes a sensation. Soon, politicians running for office in the upcoming election try to outdo HARTFORD, Conn.—On Aug. 24 the Connecticut Secretary of State’s office announced that Socialist Action’s candidate for U.S. Congress, Chris Hutchinson, has filed enough valid signatures to qualify for ballot status. Socialist Action will be the first party since 1960 with the word “socialist” in its name to successfully place a candidate on the ballot for U.S. House of Representatives in Connecticut.

The petition drive spanned about four months. Volunteers collected about 5750 signatures, distributed thousands of campaign brochures, and made new allies who are now working on the campaign.

The final stretch of the petition drive took place while campaign activists were also organizing for the United National Antiwar Conference in Albany, N.Y. The campaign helped build the conference— a demonstration of how a working-class electoral campaign can act to mobilize its participants in wider social movements.

The primary purpose of Chris Hutchinson’s run for Congress is to foster independent working-class struggle. What is holding back this struggle today? As South African Black Power leader Steve Biko said, “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” The American capitalist class possesses the most sophisticated machine of psychological manipulation in human history, and the electoral spectacle is its crown jewel.

As the assaults on working and oppressed people grow to unprecedented extremes, the election drama attempts to renew confidence in the capitalist system, break down workers’ self-confidence, and otherwise disorient growing struggles of the oppressed to liberate themselves. Without such manufactured confusion, workers could end their oppression with little more than a shrug.

Combating this confusion is the central task of Hutchinson’s campaign. It aims to expose the servants of big business and their ideology. It seeks to advance the confidence of working people and to help build a vision that can unite our struggles.

Right now the parties and media of big business are pushing the line that the government has overspent itself, and that even to maintain public spending at its current level would mean either dramatic deficit spending or taxing working people at much higher rates. This lends credibility to their campaigns against every public service—from education to food stamps to roads, street lights, fire departments, and Social Security.

However, using the funds allocated to the military budget alone could not only maintain present services for the entire country but expand them beyond all precedent—while creating full employment (for more on this, see votesocialistaction.org, category: War). But eliminating the most destructive war machine ever known is completely unthinkable to the bosses and their parties.

Just as sacred is the private property of the banks and mega-corporations. Both owe their very existence to massive public expenditures and support, yet the notion that either could be forced to invest in the public good or have their assets seized is simply sacrilegious.

Is this love of war and private profit held each other with promises to help Natha and his family with everything but what he needs: money to pay his loan and save his farm. One trucks in a cast-iron water pump, useless, since there is no water and no money to have it installed.

Speeches are made. The head of the party for the protection of the poor, or some such moniker, some spiritual leader, dressed in silks and followed by an entourage, works to gain leverage over a rival. Interior scenes of men in business suits in lavishly appointed offices drink tea while passing the buck over who exactly is responsible for helping these poor farmers. Nothing is resolved.

All speculate on when he will commit suicide. When Natha goes into the field for a bathroom break, he disappears, causing a heightened media frenzy, resembling a Keystone Kops’ bit.

CNN’s George Lerner quoted noted Indian activist Vandana Shiva, saying to reporter Christiane Amanpour, “The farmer suicides started in 1997. That’s when the corporate seed control started. And it’s directly related to indebtedness, and indebtedness created by two factors linked to globalization.” Lerner went on to say that, for Shiva, who works with farming communities across India, those two factors were the in the same regard by working people?

Hardly. In gathering signatures to place Chris Hutchinson on the ballot, campaign volunteers were able to gain a sense of the political perspectives held by working people in Connecticut. People commonly responded positively to the demand of a massive public works program to end unemployment, but sometimes viewed it as financially unrealistic. Yet this skepticism often disappeared when it was pointed out that military spending could serve as the source of funds for the program.

Many were deeply angry over the incoming cuts in education. Although some had become resigned to cuts in services, many grew more confident in their opposition to these cuts upon hearing that spending for prisons and the military are both increasing while everything in their lives is slashed. A surprising number of people either held no hostility towards socialism, were curious about it, or were ceding of control of the seed supply to the corporate chemical industry—leading to increased production costs for already-struggling farmers—as well as falling food prices in a global agricultural economy.

“The combination is unpayable debt, and it’s the day the farmer is going to lose his land for chemicals and seeds, that is the day the farmer drinks pesticide,” Shiva said. “And it’s totally related to a negative economy, of an agriculture that costs more in production than the farmer can ever earn.”

Americans and other audiences from so-called developed countries uneducated in aspects of Indian social traditions and culture will see much of “Peepli” as a comedy. In fact, some in the audience of the theater I was in laughed at certain points, as when Natha is brow-beaten by his wife and or when his decrepit mother screams at him, calls him names, and refers to his wife as a slut. The brothers were seen as a comedy team like The Three Stooges.

Still, as the film progressed, laughter towards the family ceased, but picked up during scenes of pompous bumbling bureaucrats and politicians playing hot-potato with Natha’s dilemma. Inept politicians are obviously people that Americans can readily identify from our own culture. n Julius Arscott / Socialist Action downright ecstatic to find someone running for Congress as a socialist. Most people approached didn’t know much about socialism, but loved the demands advanced by the campaign. Support for the campaign’s program and socialism in general was strongest in the cities and among working Latinos and African Americans. In Hartford, the biggest hurdle to winning a signature usually came about because many people were enraged and disillusioned with politicians and politics in general.

Hutchinson is running against Democratic incumbent John Larson, who is the fourth ranking Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is also contending with Republican Ann Brickley and Green Party candidate Ken Krayeske. Hutchinson will fight to win a place in upcoming public debates. He will speak next at the September New England Trans United rally in Springfield, Mass. n