Shetkari Sanghatak

Summary

This 21 May 1995 issue (Year 12, No. 2) of the Marathi fortnightly Shetkari Sanghatak, organ of Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana, is anchored by a long signed front-page essay by Joshi reflecting on the February 1995 Maharashtra assembly election, in which the movement’s political vehicle, the Swatantra Bharat Paksha (Free India Party), fared badly. Joshi’s lead argues that ‘it is wrong to blame the people’s choice’ for the result and turns the defeat into a candid self-examination of the party’s strategy and message. In the rendered pages the analysis runs under headings such as ‘Why did the people reject the Swatantra Bharat Party?’, ‘No single-pillar tent’, and ‘The campaign side was lame’ — Joshi diagnoses an over-reliance on a single leader, an under-developed organisation, and a campaign that failed to communicate the free-market, open-economy case to voters, while defending the party against the charge that the electorate repudiated its ideas. The issue also reports on farmer debt-relief (कर्जमाफी) and forced recovery of loans, carries a news box noting that Joshi’s health is improving at a Hyderabad hospital, and on its back page prints a notice for the expanded executive-committee meeting of 3–4 June 1995 at Ambethan, signed by the movement’s office-bearers. Standard periodical matter — a price/displacement table with a reference to Walter Fernandes et al. (Indian Social Institute, 1989) and the colophon — fills out the four pages.

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