The street is an eternal shapeshifter.
It transforms quickly, urgently, and then collapses back into its
grey, rough stillness at nightfall.
It turns into a theatre when a group of
people start performing an act. It turns into an art gallery when
people paint or draw rangoli designs around the time of festivals.
Sometimes pictures of gods are drawn and it even turns into a sacred
site.
Very often, it also turns into a site
of contested power. Indeed, nowhere is power contested and victory
rammed home as forcefully as it is on the street. Look around and
find in plain sight several clues as to who can seize control over
the street and pays the least price financially and emotionally.
However, people who are not powerful also use the streets in creative
ways, whether or not they're allowed to.
Recently, some people expressed their
dissatisfaction with the state government by dumping great sackfuls
of potatoes on the streets of Lucknow. One of the dumping spots was
on a road leading to the chief minister Yogi Adityanath's residence.
This dumping of potatoes was a pointer
to the plight of farmers in Uttar Pradesh, one of the biggest potato
producers in the country. The cost of production and storage is
higher than the price at which the state offers to buy the crop from
farmers.
This isn't the first time farmers have
dumped crops in sheer frustration and as a means of protest. Potato
farmers in Punjab had dumped their produce on the highway last year,
and earlier, in 2011 too. But this may be the first time a state
government has responded with aggression rather than solicititude.
The Yogi government seemed to view the
potatoes on the road as a personal insult and a consiparacy. The
state police swung into action to find the 'miscreants'. Police
officials reportedly tapped 10,000 phones, viewed hours of CCTV
footage and finally arrested two men, accusing them of trying to
'defame' the state and of being linked to the opposition party.
It is funny that a government should be
so shaken by a pile of potatoes lying about forlorn on the road. If
indeed it was just a case of two men playing political pranks, and if
potato farmers are not facing any sort of crisis, then where was the
harm in letting the piles be? The poor and hungry (and there are
millions of them) may have taken some away. Stray cattle (of which
there are also a great many) might have eaten some. At best, the
state could simply have sent out a team to clear the defamatory pile.
It would have been a lot cheaper than taking police personnel away
from their actual job – crime investigations, filing and following
up on FIRs, ensuring faster justice through the lawcourts, patrolling
and so on. Those defamatory potatoes in Lucknow have cost the
taxpayer very dear.
At any rate, the state responded to
potatoes on Lucknow roads with alacrity but pointedly ignored the
potatoes dumped along on village roads. Other newspaper report
suggests that in villages too, farmers have been dumping the crop,
letting potatoes rot where they lay. Cold storage and transport Are
too expensive and the state government had done precious little to
help them avoid huge losses. None of those farmers are being
especially evasive about who they are. In fact, I'm guessing they
wouldn't mind coming to the capital city to dump a few more sackfuls.
The only thing stopping them is the cost of a ride into town.
First published here: http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/the-shape-shifting-street/article22450400.ece