Poverty Kills

'Suicide has very little to do with poverty'

In an exclusive interview, noted sociologist, psychologist and writer, Professor Ashis Nandy, explains how poverty and deprivation in themselves do not lead to suicide. The growing incidence of suicide among the poor today, he says, can be attributed to a sense of despair, desperation and hopelessness. A situation that has to do with the fact that, while people may previously have been poor they did have some measure of control over their lives and their work. And a minimum amount of dignity and pride in what they did

by Parshuram Ray

Ashis Nandy is presently Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Chairperson of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, both in Delhi. He has been Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (1992-1997); Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington (1988); Charles Wallace Fellow, Department of Politics, University of Hull (Summer, 1990); Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh (Summer, 1991); UNESCO Professor, Centre for European Studies, University of Trier, Germany (Summer, 1994); and Regent's Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles.

Trained as a sociologist and clinical psychologist, Nandy's research interests are political psychology, cultures of knowledge, utopias and visions, popular culture, and futures. Among Nandy's books are Alternative Sciences (1980,1995); At the Edge of Psychology (1980); The Intimate Enemy (1983); Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias (1987); The Tao of Cricket (1989); The Illegitimacy of Nationalism (1994); and The Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves (1995). He is also co-author of The Blinded Eye (1993) also published as Barbaric Others, and Creating a Nationality (1995). Nandy has edited two books, (ed), Science, Hegemony and Violence (1988); and The Secret Politics of our Desires; and co-edited The Multiverse of Democracy (1996). Oxford University Press is now bringing out an omnibus edition of all his works. Nandy's works have been translated into a number of languages, among them Bengali, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Marathi, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Tamil. He has also contributed to major human rights reports on ethnic and communal violence and democratic elections.

In this interview, Professor Nandy spoke on the connections between farmer suicides and globalisation, poverty and prosperity, development and deprivation, consumerism and the middle class, democracy and disempowerment, etc. Some excerpts:

In the last two-three years, several suicide deaths have been reported from various parts of India and in a fairly large number of these cases, poverty seems to be the immediate cause. Farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab have committed suicide due to crop failure and the resulting debt trap, industrial workers from various parts of the country have ended their lives after being rendered jobless due to the closure of `sick' industries, and many more. As a social psychologist how do you look upon this?

You have mentioned that I am a psychologist and I will try to respond partly as a psychologist. I do not think poverty leads to suicide. There are millions of poor in this world; they all have not committed suicide. In normal times, the rate of suicide is not higher amongst the poor. The suicide rates in Scandinavian countries, which are some of the richest countries in the world, are very high. So, suicides and other forces of self-destructiveness have other sources of origin. One of the sources of this kind of self-destructiveness is the sense of despair. You think that you have no control over your life, over the forces that are buffeting your family, and you don't see any light at the end of it. You try to escape it due to that sense of desperation.

What you are seeing amongst the farmers of India is a sense of desperation and despair, and that is to do with the fact that, while they were previously poor they had control over their lives, they had control over their profession, they had control over their work. They might have been poor, but they were poor with a minimum amount of dignity, a minimum sense of control, some pride in their work, in their own profession and their lifestyle.

Now, changing times have taken away this pride, taken away their control. They are being reduced to machines that produce agricultural commodities for the sake of markets which they do not know, with the help of a technology that they cannot understand and utilise, and are taking decisions which are not really their own, where there are no options. It's a controlled world where you do not know who controls you, and when that world collapses, you don't know how to handle it, how to cope with it. That ends in a sense of despair and that leads to suicide.

But do you not think that this increasing helplessness and powerlessness is linked to a liberalisation of the economy?

Yes, and I see that connection also in the case of modernisation of agriculture in general. Because, by modernisation of agronomy we usually mean the modern market. And the modern market is something which Indian farmers are not accustomed to. They don't know how to cope with it. It makes them totally dependent on forces they do not understand, handing over responsibilities and decisions relating to their lives to someone else. So, when you are cornered by something -- drought, cyclone, etc -- you do not know which way to look. Peasants all over the world, at least traditional peasants, are known for their sense of autonomy, their resistance to changes which are initiated from outside, and their intuitive understanding of the process of farming. Each peasant is, in effect, a bit of a scientist and a technologist who knows his own needs, often better than a professional agronomist does. This, essentially, may or may not be true. That is a different issue. On the whole, the peasant's life was built around certain forms of resistance to externally-imposed solutions, externally-imposed decisions and externally-imposed marketers. Now that world is collapsing and peasants who have been peasants for generations are paying the price for that. To that extent certainly, the present suicides are related to the global changes in the political economy we are witnessing.

So, on the whole, you agree with people like Vandana Shiva, Devinder Sharma and Kamal Nayan Kabra who see a deeper link between globalisation and these suicides?

There is a link. I don't think others also will deny that fully, except the very insensitive. Nobody will deny it, not even Sharad Joshi who is on the whole favourable towards globalisation. Only thing is, his explanation of suicide is different. But I stand by my explanation because this is my area. Sharad may know a lot about farmers and about farming, but he knows much less about the causes of suicide.

But you do not agree that these suicides are primarily caused by poverty and deprivation?

There I will disagree with both Vandana Shiva and Sharad Joshi and say that poverty and deprivation by themselves do not lead to suicide. Otherwise, millions of people all over the world would have committed suicide. In India, 30 per cent of the people are supposed to be poor, probably 15-20 per cent of these people are desperately poor, and there is no evidence that the rate of suicide is higher among them. In fact, the suicide rate is higher among some marginal groups, certain other kinds of communities where certain other kinds of traditions have collapsed. That is different. Suicide has very little to do with poverty.

There has been a controversy over poverty trends in the post-reform period. The official estimates of poverty, based on a National Sample Survey (NSS), show that rural poverty has declined marginally from 39.1 per cent in 1987-88 to 37.3 per cent in 1993-94, while urban poverty declined from 38.2 per cent to 32.4 per cent during the same period. The estimates of Gaurav Datt and S P Gupta show that rural poverty has not declined but urban poverty showed a decline in the post-reform period. What is your assessment or opinion on this?

I am neither an economist nor a specialist on poverty. All I can say is that if there is a controversy over it, it is obvious that the situation is not clear. Let us presume that we do not know. If, after 10 years of globalisation and liberalisation, we are not even sure that poverty has declined and there is a controversy over it, that is good enough for me, a good enough comment on globalisation and liberalisation. Also, finally, I personally feel rates of poverty in the long run may come down, as happened in places like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, long before their economic crises. But the fact remains that even in countries that have gone through an enormous and unprecedented period of prosperity, if it is a complex, multi-ethnic society, poverty never comes down below something like 10 or 15 per cent. The United States has 13 per cent of its people living below the poverty line. Now here is a country which can not only feed its own people but also possibly another 50 countries. And it cannot remove poverty within its own boundaries. To me it says something about the present economic regime. Mainly that the regime, after poverty comes down below a certain level, is no longer interested in the poor because these poor then constitute a small part of the political economy and their votes no longer count in national elections and their voices no longer matter in our public life.

How do you look upon the increasing `tribe' of urban elite and their obscene consumerist lifestyles? Have they become immune to this increasing deprivation and destitution? What is the psychological defence against deprivation used by our middle class? In this context, do you agree with Sateesh Kumar, the editor of Resurgence, when he says that poverty is not the problem, our idea of prosperity is?

Yes, I fully agree with Sateesh Kumar. In fact, I would go further. I would say that I do not find the lifestyle and consumption pattern of our urban elite obscene, I find it comical. Here is an elite that is desperately trying to catch up with the latest trends in the West, that goes with the whole family to McDonald's as if that were a great event. They go to Pizza Hut and they think that they are having the time of their lives. That I find pathetic. Here is a chain that is supposed to supply junk food; educated Americans never go to these places. They try to keep their children away from these places. Even if they do go to McDonald's or Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken, they pretend that they do not, they hide the fact. Even if they do have television sets and watch television, they don't advertise the fact. They don't even put their televisions in their drawing rooms, they put them in their basements and claim that they keep them for their old mothers or their children. Our elite has this hunger for doing or consuming all that the western world has done. But they have very little clue about how the western elite really lives; they have very little clue as to what is really trendy in the West. So they come out as village bumpkins, comically trying to live up to the standards of the western urban slum-dweller. I don't think one should call it obscene, one should call it hilariously funny.

What happened to the `trickle-down economists' and `Thatcherite crumbs'? I am referring to the `notorious' statement made by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher who said that even the crumbs left behind by capitalism would be more nutritious to the poor than the sumptuous meals offered by communism.

That is a difficult issue to respond to. I think communism presumed that if you gave bread, you didn't need to give freedom. I think that is a total misreading of human nature and it shows a total contempt for ordinary people, which all the Marxist rhetoric cannot wash off. Both Leninism and generations of Marxists have mechanically repeated these slogans in the belief that somehow the repetition will make it true. It is not true. Human beings want bread and freedom both. I don't think they want capitalism any more than they wanted communism. Because, under both systems they are at the receiving end. I have seen that ordinary human beings usually are not as ideologically motivated as to feel that they should take a position on issues as large as capitalism or communism. They basically react to the world in their own way and judge things on their own criteria. Ultimately, it is clear that they have found both systems wanting. People want a decent way of living and a decent degree of freedom. I think both capitalism and communism have failed in that respect. I do not think ordinary human beings are mad to consume. I think that is the myth propagated by the votaries of modern capitalism. There is no evidence, in any empirical psychological world, that consumption has an instinctual basis. People consume badly or indiscriminately only under certain circumstances. For example, when you are very lonely or where community life has collapsed you look on consumption as some form of compensation. When people are totally disempowered, for whatever reason, they get a sense of power out of consumption. You throw money around and buy things to show power; you consume madly when you feel that you have to prove to yourself or to somebody else that you love them deeply. You buy madly for your children or for your grandchildren because family ties may be collapsing or you may suspect that family ties are not worth what they once were. So, as a compensatory mechanism, because you work 15 hours a day and cannot give much time to your children or your grandchildren, you feel that by buying them enormous amounts of toys or presents you are showing your love. You are convincing not only the children, you are convincing yourself that you care. These are the situations in which people consume unreasonably. Otherwise, I don't think ordinary people want to get caught up in this unending spiral of consumerism.

Do you see all these developments as the logical conclusion of Henry Truman's `Altruist Enterprise' called development?

Oh yes. I do see development as the basic design within which many of the world's changes are taking place. I think as relevant as Henry Truman is Ivan Illich's well-known saying that it took 20 years for two billion human beings in the world to recognise that they were underdeveloped. I don't think development is the last word in social change, nor do I think that unending development is the end state of human civilisation. I think many societies have already developed so much that they need to de-develop. I remember C T Kurien saying some years ago that, "The fattest are not the fittest". Other countries may need to increase consumption levels to a certain degree, remove glaring instances of poverty and try to attain a standard of living. It is, in the long run, not harmful to the environment and does not involve living off future generations. But then it is not fashionable to think of the future generation. As Lord Keynes pointed out, and he is one of the ruling deities of the economic pantheon: in the long run we all are dead. W C Field, who was more direct, quotes somewhere: "Why should I think of the future generation? What has the future generation done for me?"

Do you foresee any revolt or mass mobilisation by marginalised and deprived communities of society against the macro-policies and processes causing these deprivations and suicides?

I do not immediately see any widespread rebellion against the present regime in countries like India. Especially because the earlier system was so bad. Many of those opposing globalisation make this mistake and try to hint that the earlier system was better. And that, had globalisation not come it would have been better off. It is not true. The earlier system was also atrocious and very oppressive, particularly as it involved the middle class living off the poor. All our development programmes and socialistic pattern of society were geared to service the middle classes. It displeased both the business classes and the poor. I mean the babus previously ruled the country. I must tell you that they were no better rulers than the multinational corporations are turning out to be. They were as greedy and, being themselves not as wealthy as the multinational corporations or our nouveau rich, were willing to pick your pocket for a five-rupee note. Even the five-rupee note in the pocket of the poor was a source of greed for them.

Poverty and deprivation are not new to a country like India. But, in the past, there were other traditional social defence mechanisms and vast commons of nature to fall back upon during times of distress. Do you agree that a slow death of these social defence mechanisms and the enclosure of the vast commons of nature are also responsible for the dehumanising deprivation, soul-killing poverty and desperate suicides?

I fully agree with the way you have formulated this question, that the destruction of the global commons and decline in community life also meant the dismantling of social defence mechanisms which protected one against the extremes of poverty. So, poverty in earlier times didn't exactly mean what poverty means today. In fact, today I even distinguish between poverty and destitution. By destitution I mean those situations where you have zero income to start with, whereas poverty is a situation where you might be under-nourished, you may be terribly hungry every day, but you don't die. You at least have neighbours, at least relatives, at least the forest, if you are staying in a forest, at least the village commons to partially take care of your needs. It is not a very good life. It is a terrible life, but it is better than the undignified slow death by starvation in the cities, if you have no income. Now this difference is also crucial because the definition of poverty itself is undergoing a lot of change. It is constantly expanding.

You know, before World War II, there was no fully-developed custom of every child in the house having a bedroom of his/her own. If the family could afford it and was rich, they had it. Now you are considered very poor if you don't have a room for each of your kids. So far so good. The problem arises because when we talk of poverty we are constantly talking about including in it a rising level of life, which previously we did not consider poverty. So, today in India you find most middle class children think that their parents were poor because they were school teachers, they were government servants, they were police officers, they were bank clerks. Many of my friends, who have studied with me and are successful in life, think that they came from poor families. My own brothers, who had the same middle class upbringing as I had, think that they were poor. So, the concept of poverty changes. One result of this expanding concept of poverty is that whenever you talk of poverty, you think about removing your own poverty. It is an unending game. After we get what we middle class Indians dream of, or what the middle class in South Asia dreams of, you look forward to American middle class dreams. Once you've got that, you look forward to the middle class Arab's dreams, and there is no end. I have a feeling that we can never remove this kind of poverty. We are not considering this kind of poverty here. What we are talking about is the removal of poverty from the lowest 10-15 per cent of our population. We have to take care of those who, under the present dispensation, will die if we don't intervene, and do so successfully. Because they have neither the monetary capacity to take care of themselves nor do they know how to handle the market, as they have traditionally been on the fringes of the market. They don't know how to handle market forces. Say, for example, communities that have been dependent on barter for sometime will now find it increasingly difficult to survive. They will be wiped out if we do not intervene effectively.

Amartya Sen has been saying that democracy is the best insurance against famine and hunger. But his theory does not seem to apply in the cases of farmer suicides and deprivation. Is the Indian `electocracy' and political system becoming immune to these problems?

Amartya Sen is right when it comes to large-scale famine. But when it comes to small-scale scattered sufferings, things are different; these cannot easily find a political voice even within democracies. You can see this in the United States. The two major parties there are not concerned with the fate of the poor even though more than 10 per cent of Americans are poor. In fact, if a party talks too much about them, it suffers electorally because you antagonise a large majority of people who are not poor. I am afraid that the present process of liberalisation will help consolidate a process that began 50 years ago, namely that a large number of those living on the margins of poverty will, increasingly, get a better chance at participating in the system. Ultimately, you have a majority of people who have a vested interest in not looking at the rest. Indian poverty is defective politically because only one part of you is now poor. I cannot imagine an Indian political system that is sensitive to the needs of the poor, when poverty goes down to something below 15 per cent. Then it is not possible. America has not done it, even after going through an unprecedented economic boom. Britain has not done it. It is not possible. In fact, it has increased in Britain.

Finally, as a futurist, what in your opinion would be the fate of the Indian poor and deprived, in a fast-globalising world? Will they remain just an object for research for people like me and other social scientists or do you foresee them also being subjects of social transformation? I want your futuristic assessment and predictions.

Frankly, I do not know. But I can make a guess. Like any other citizen, I have a right to make a guess. And my guess would be this: that poverty will become even more of a subject for specialised discourse. Even the World Bank and IMF are now talking about poverty-alleviating growth. It has become the latest buzzword. In fact, poverty research has probably already become a billion-dollar multinational corporation. So, in such a world, there will be some diversion of resources to take care of those who are at the margins of poverty, those who are easy to pull up, who have some skills that can be utilised within the modern market economy. Say, some of the artisan castes who can easily be re-trained to become cogs in the wheels of industrial machines. Or some of the wood-workers or ivory-workers who can be re-trained as carpenters probably in the urban context. It's not as though nobody will gain certain standards, but once that has happened I am afraid the response of the middle classes will be to close their eyes, the way middle classes in many societies have closed their eyes to the homelessness, malnutrition and under-nourishment of their neighbours. They will be moved once in a while, I guess, when they see instances of human suffering on the television; like good citizens they will donate some money and think that they have done enough. They will console themselves by saying that these people are unwilling workers, they have not learnt any skills, they are uneducated, they don't deserve sympathy beyond a point. And life will go on, and in the process the ordinary citizenry of this part of the world will become increasingly brutalised. Because, you know, unlike in some European countries where poverty is not visible, here it will be noticeable. So you will have to cultivate a form of deafness and a form of blindness to live with that kind of poverty and I am afraid our middle classes will cultivate these skills. The good news is that, in absolute terms, the poor in this part of the world constitute such a large sector that when their frustrations and anger and desperation speak, it will lead to enormous social upheaval. Crime rates, for instance, in Indian cities are already rising dramatically. I expect them to rise even more. I expect a rise in alcoholism and drug addiction, a rise in prostitution, instances of mental illness and suicides as you have already mentioned. I expect them to rise very quickly and this violence will bring about enormous upheaval and many who have cultivated the deafness and blindness I talked about will be forced to recognise them. If they don't, their children will do so. So I am also a bit hopeful.

(The Transforming Word)

Parshuram Ray is an environmental activist, researcher and writer based in Delhi. He is currently Associate Director, Seeds of Hope, Lokayan.

Published in Humanscape, November-2000