Shetkari Sanghatak

Summary

This fortnightly issue (Year 12, Issue 11, dated 21 October 1995) of the Marathi-language periodical Shetkari Sanghatak — the house organ of Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana farmers’ movement, published from Pune — carries four substantive items alongside Diwali greetings, organisational notices, and observances for Baliraj Day (30 October) and Farmer Martyrs’ Day (10 November). In the rendered pages the lead essay is Sharad Joshi’s ‘प्रशिक्षणाचा खरा अर्थ’ (The Real Meaning of Training), excerpted from his pre-camp address of 6 August 1995, arguing that the movement’s training programme is not classroom instruction but the cultivation of independent economic reasoning among farmers. A serialised Marathi translation by Shri. Medha Mudholkar of George Orwell’s Animal Farm continues with chapter four, ‘गोठ्याची लढाई’ (The Battle of the Cowshed). Dr. Manavendra Kachole of Aurangabad contributes a constitutional-political polemic, ‘या देशावर राज्य कुणाचे?’ (Whose State Rules This Country?), arguing that the post-independence Indian state has never genuinely consulted the public on policy. A featured editorial extract titled ‘स्वराज्याची गुरुकिल्ली’ reproduces a passage from Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj on the duty of civil disobedience to unjust law. The issue closes with notices of cadre training camps at the Krishi Arth Prabodhini in Ambethan and a joint executive meeting of Shetkari Sanghatana and Shetkari Mahila Aghadi scheduled in Nagpur on 9 November 1995.

Essays

प्रशिक्षणाचा खरा अर्थ

By शरद जोशी

Sharad Joshi reframes ‘training’ (प्रशिक्षण) for the Shetkari Sanghatana cadre as something categorically distinct from formal schooling. School-style training, he argues, hands the trainee a settled curriculum and a finished body of knowledge; the movement’s training, by contrast, has no fixed textbook and must be invented on the ground because the farmer’s predicament — the systematic suppression of agricultural prices through state policy — is one that established economists and politicians have refused to name. The essay reads as a stocktaking of a decade of agitation: Joshi insists that the Sanghatana’s most extraordinary achievement is having forced the question of remunerative prices for farm produce into national debate against the ridicule of every mainstream economist and party.

• Distinguishes school-style training (fixed syllabus, transmitted knowledge) from movement training, which must be co-constructed from the farmer’s own economic experience.
• Names the Sanghatana’s central achievement as having shifted the public question from subsidies and charity to remunerative prices for agricultural produce.
• Argues that the established economists and political parties initially ridiculed the price-of-produce framing but were ultimately compelled to engage it.
• Frames cadre training as preparation for autonomous reasoning rather than ideological indoctrination.
• Treats Shetkari Sanghatana’s movement-knowledge as something that had to be built from scratch because no prior literature addressed the Indian cultivator’s terms of trade.

जनावरांचे शिवार (जॉर्ज ऑरवेल यांच्या Animal Farm चे भाषांतर)

By श्री. मेहूल मुखोपाध्याय (१९८५)

The issue carries the fourth chapter, ‘गोठ्याची लढाई’ (The Battle of the Cowshed), of Shri. Medha Mudholkar’s serialised Marathi translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). The chapter narrates the animals’ first armed defence of the farm against Mr. Jones and the neighbouring farmers, in which Snowball (स्नोबॉल) leads the counter-attack and the animals consolidate the new order. A short sidebar headed ‘जनावरांचे शिवार’ (Animal Farm) reminds readers that Orwell’s allegory was directed at totalitarian regimes in which a revolutionary vanguard captures the levers of power and turns against the ordinary people in whose name it had risen.

• Marathi serialisation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, here Chapter 4: the Battle of the Cowshed.
• Snowball, Benjamin and Boxer are foregrounded in the defence of the farm against the returning humans.
• An editorial sidebar frames Orwell’s fable as a parable about revolutionary elites who betray the people they claim to liberate.
• Serialisation in a farmers’ movement periodical signals the Sanghatana’s reading of Animal Farm as a warning against state socialism.

हे कोण बोलले?

By दै. मराठवाडा वरून

Dr. Manavendra Kachole of Aurangabad opens with a flat claim that the citizens of independent India have never developed a sense of belonging towards their own government, and uses that distance to interrogate the legitimacy of the entire post-independence administrative order. The essay argues that the people have never been seriously consulted on policy, that the state apparatus has substituted itself for them, and that the political class — across parties — has converged on a shared interest in preserving the patronage and rent-extraction structures of governance. Kachole frames the question in the title — ‘whose state rules this country?’ — as a deliberately unanswerable one, suggesting that the formal constitutional answer (‘the people’) and the lived answer (a self-perpetuating political-bureaucratic class) have diverged so far that the original republican question has to be posed again.

• Diagnoses an enduring alienation between the Indian citizen and the post-1947 state.
• Argues that policy has been formulated without genuine public consultation across successive governments.
• Treats party-political alternation as cosmetic, since the underlying administrative class and its incentives remain unchanged.
• Reposes the foundational republican question — sovereignty in whom — as unsettled rather than settled by the Constitution.
• Reads the distance between ruler and ruled as a structural rather than incidental problem of Indian democracy.

या देशावर राज्य कुणाचे?

By Mahatma Gandhi

A boxed editorial feature on the back page, headed ‘स्वराज्याची गुरुकिल्ली’ (The Master Key to Swaraj) and credited to M. Gandhi, reproduces a passage from Hind Swaraj on the duty of civil disobedience. Gandhi argues — in Hindi — that the teaching that one must obey laws regardless of their justice is contrary to manhood, contrary to religion, and amounts to the very limit of slavery; that a government whose laws are unjust deserves to be confronted by the citizen who refuses to dance to its tune even at the cost of suffering; and that the willingness to break an unjust law and accept its punishment is the master key of Hind Swaraj.

• Reprints a Hind Swaraj passage on the moral status of unjust law.
• Frames habitual obedience to law as incompatible with both manliness and dharma.
• Positions civil disobedience — willingness to suffer the law’s penalty — as the ‘master key’ of swaraj.
• Curated by the periodical as ideological scaffolding for the farmers’ movement’s confrontational style.

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