ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

And Now, The Zen of Onions and Nuclear Bombs

If you don't have onions, chew on nuclear bombs instead. Yes, why not? What could be a better prescription for Indians missing some spice, some onion-flavoured spice, in their lives these days? And please don't give me any credit for this suggestion, I could not have dreamed anything so exotic. As Dave Barry might say, I am not making this up.

No ma'am. It was in a recent news report that I learned that the BJP is planning to make the May nuclear misadventure "a major poll plank" in the upcoming assembly election. The folks in the party who are handling election preparations think that "the Vajpayee government's achievement in the area of national security should be projected to seek votes." This is "in an apparent attempt to push to the background the gnawing issue of onion prices."

I tell you. I get accused of -- and this is typical -- showing "hatred against the BJP." Now I don't know about that hatred, I'm happy to leave it to be sorted out some other time, by someone else. But the sheer crassness of these guys leaves me breathless. To people who now cannot afford to buy this most basic vegetable, the BJP wants to sell the idea that they should reflect on the bomb, feel proud about it and go vote for the BJP.

As the prices of other vegetables go into orbit, as the simple business of eating becomes a luxury for many Indians, the BJP can think of nothing other than telling them to eat bombs instead. Nuclear bombs, at that.

How can you not feel repelled by these guys?

Of course, it only serves to bolster the truth that Atalji himself confessed to, way back on May 11. Writing to Bill Clinton about the bombs, our PM said his government had exploded them because of "domestic political considerations." At the time, he meant the domestic political considerations of shutting up the large lady of Tamil Nadu and keeping his obstreperous coalition together. If the thought wandered through any of your minds that perhaps those were strange reasons to go nuclear, today there is another. Today, it's the domestic political consideration that rising onion prices are likely to cause the BJP some grief at the polling booth in a few weeks.

How thankful Atalji must be that he had the foresight to approve the bombs all those months ago! It's now, in these overcast, onion-deprived, November days that we are seeing the true vindication of that foresight.

Speaking to Outlook magazine well before his Nobel prize, Amartya Sen called our whole nuclear exercise silly. "The policies of the great powers may have given India a right to do silly things in retaliation," said Sen. "But a right to do silly things doesn't give India a reason to do silly things."

In the light of what I am reading about onions, that one little word -- "silly" -- is a profoundly apt one. Not just that, this government has shown that it is just as silly as every previous one, Congress or otherwise. Silly governments, all, that choose to distract us from our most urgent problems with silly non-issues. In this case, it's just that the silliness involves history's most nauseating weapons.

What's most galling about the onion crisis -- that is, if there's something more galling than resorting to nuclear bombs to make people forget high onion prices -- what's most galling is that the high price has so little to do with onion production. Bombay's Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy estimates that 1998-99 production will be 4.2 million tonnes, about 1.3 per cent less than the 1997-98 haul of 4.27 million tonnes. That's too small to account for the 600 plus per cent increase we have seen in onion prices over the last few months.

Onion prices zoomed, researchers at the Research Unit for Political Economy told me, primarily because of exports and hoarding. Bad weather in other onion-producing countries has pushed international prices up. Last January, Indian traders anxious to cash in on those high prices exported large quantities of onions. That drove domestic prices from Rs 6 a kilo to the then frightful level of about Rs 20 per kilo. Perhaps mindful of the election, I K Gujral's government banned onion exports; prices tumbled to around Rs 8 a kilo. That episode established the clear link between exports and onion prices.

After May, with international prices still high, the new BJP-dominated government lifted the ban on exports. RUPE estimates that between May and August, Indian traders exported about 210,000 tonnes of onions. At about 10 to 12 per cent of the spring crop, that is not an insignificant amount of onions leaving the country.

Besides this, there has been unseasonal rain throughout 1998, and especially in October. That affected production levels, but had a far more significant effect on the behaviour of large traders. With one beady eye on the high prices outside India and a second beady eye on the prospect of rising prices within India, middlemen in the onion distribution chain have been hoarding the stuff. Prices could only go up; they did. RUPE has quoted official estimates that with these practices, such traders have made an extra Rs 30 billion this year.

Not that this is such a bad thing in itself. Traders are in the business, after all, of making money. Of course they will act to make the most they can. It is the government that we charge with the responsibility of ensuring a basic food security to all Indians. Faced with this crisis, the government has been sitting on its complacent behind.

What it has done, in fits and starts, is import onions. This has been an unmitigated disaster on several counts. There is the current high price of onions internationally. Transportation costs for imports are high. When a massive country like India announces that it needs to import onions, that announcement alone drives prices still higher: after all, it is not tiny Luxembourg or tinier Monaco we are talking about here. Besides, farmers quite naturally view imports with distaste and resentment: they stand to lose their margins. With all that, it's no wonder we read nearly daily reports of consignments of imported onions rotting in one warehouse or another.

What's the answer? RUPE thinks the government should have used the Essential Commodities Act to "attack hoarding," to seize the crop that's being hoarded and make it available through the public distribution system. It is, Outlook reminds us, "the government's beholden duty to intervene brutally to safeguard basic food safety."

That much duty must be too heavy a burden. "Till date," Outlook goes on, "not a single wholesaler or warehouse has been raided, not a single middleman even questioned by the police." There are even rumours that this inaction has to do with the traditional support that the BJP has always had from traders.

RUPE researchers also suggest that NAFED, the government agency that can intervene in times of agricultural crisis, should have bought onions directly from small farmers and sold them through the PDS for Rs 8 a kilo. That would have assured the farmers of a reasonable price for their produce as well as kept onions affordable and available to us consumers. That Rs 8 would have accounted for all storage and transport costs.

Instead, and inexplicably, NAFED has been buying onions from traders in Vashi (New Bombay) at Rs 20 a kilo, shipping them to Delhi (where elections are due, naturally) and selling there at the heavily subsidised rate of Rs 10 a kilo. And even this muddle-brained strategy has been bungled. Outlook reports that in Delhi, "people queued up for onions for hours, only to find that corrupt officials in collusion with market middlemen had siphoned off the day's supplies." Usual story.

And all this has to do with just onions. Potatoes, tomatoes, beans, mustard oil, coriander, peas, capsicums: these and more are fast going out of reach of ordinary Indians. It's not inconceivable any longer: eating itself is well on its way to becoming a luxury.

Nothing could be more vital to the overwhelming majority of Indians than food. Than the price of food. Than the ever-present challenge of putting together the next meal in life. To those Indians, in 1998 as in 1947 as in 1857, security means food security.

Think about this security, please. Think about what it must mean to those Indians to be told that instead of worrying about onions, they should feel good about nuclear bombs.

"Silly" is the word that came to Amartya Sen's mind, "crass" to mine. Perhaps you will have some other, choicer, words to add to that little list.

How Readers responded to Dilip D'Souza's recent columns

Dilip D'Souza