Publication

This paper explores the background of a recent spate of suicides among farmers in India. It is argued that the incidents are a manifestation of an underlying crisis in agriculture which is a result of the marginalization of the agrarian economy in national policy since the economic reforms of the 1990s. The collective bargaining power of the agrarian lobby was curtailed by the conflicting identities associated with class, caste, region and religion. This marginalization of agriculture was politically feasible due to the growing ethnicization and communalization of political discourse in India since the 1990s, which gave rise to a more potent political force than agrarian interests. This is compounded by the remarkable flux within contemporary rural society which changes the identities of the farmers and how they relate to farming and the village.