The day after Gajendra Singh from Rajasthan's Dausa district apparently ended his life by hanging himself from a tree on Delhi's Jantar Mantar grounds, opinion was divided on whether he was a farmer, a businessman or an aspiring politician. While the debate raged over social media, several farmers from Ajmer in Rajasthan arrived at Jantar Mantar on Thursday to join a protest against the land ordinance introduced by the Narendra Modi government. In their view, the wrangling over Singh's suicide was misplaced. 

“He was also a farmer from Rajasthan like us,” said Pratap Singh, a farmer from Rathodon ki Dhani village. “The state and the media are lying when they say he was rich. The family land was divided among his father and father's brother, and further between him and his two brothers. The 25 bighas that his father owned was divided four ways, among the father and three sons. It was land owned by four families, each had a share of only six bighas.”

Said Binja Ram Meghwal, a Dalit farmer, "If the rains had been normal, he would have earned well for his produce. But after the hailstorm, his crop was destroyed.” Meghwal said he had heard about Singh's death on television. Even though he did not have a direct acquaintance with Singh or his family, he claimed to know what had led to his suicide. “The thakur had a loan," he said. "Once you have a loan, people harass you everyday.”

Binja Ram Meghwal at a dharna in Jantar Mantar, Delhi.

Pratap Singh said he had heard about Gajendra Singh's death the previous day, before he set out for Delhi as part of a group of farmers from four villages from the Kishangarh block in Ajmer district. People of the four villages – Rathodon ki Dhani, Jatvi, Kutada, Sarana – have been on a sit-in in their district since March 15 to protest against the acquisition of their multi-crop farmland for the Ajmer-Kishangarh airport. The villagers said they have lived on the land for several generations but are now being treated as encroachers. 

They had travelled to Delhi to join a larger demonstration called Haq Wapsi Dharna (Return Our Rights Protest) organised by several activist groups to protest against the shrinking of social sector budgets under the Modi government and the dilution of land acquisition safeguards. The farmers from the Kishangarh block said they had first-hand experience of forcible land acquisition.

Meghwal said he and his three brothers owned nine bighas of land that they had cultivated jointly. The village found out about the government's plan to build an airport when residents woke up one day to find officials had arrived to mark the project's boundary.

The farmer said the government acquired the land for the airport, allotting the brothers an alternative plot. But the brothers have been unable to claim the plot or use it. Meghwal's family is among 17 of 88 families who were allotted plots who say the alternative parcels of land given to them do not exist. “The housing board and my family have been allotted land on the same spot,” he said.

Others farmers in the group claimed the parcels of land the state government had allotted to them in lieu of their plots were  low-lying. “We will have to fill it several feet ourselves" said Vikram Singh. "Khadde mein hai plot ”  The plot is in a ditch.

Government apathy

Their petition to the state government went unheard. Sangram Singh, a farmer in his late 20s, recounted several trips he and the other villagers had made to the Jaipur secretariat, spending over a day's wage on the Rs 250 bus fare and several hours for a chance to meet the chief minister, only to be turned away by the secretariat staff after waiting the whole day.

“We tried to meet the Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Sindia at least 50 times in the last year," Singh said. "Could she not take time to meet us even once? Even our MLA Bhagirath Chaudhary refused to talk to us. Before this, at the initial stages of the acquisition, it used to be the same with the Congress Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot.”

Sangram Singh said he had studied till class tenth and had been unable to find a job. After his family's nine bighas of land were acquired, the family sustained itself by rearing livestock. But since the airport project started, there was no common grazing land left. “Everyone has to buy fodder from the market at Rs 40 per kg," he said. "The temple land, the community building land, they took all of it away for the airport.”

Pratap Singh recounted that farmers in his village, Rathodon ki Dhani, went on a hunger strike in 2012 but got no response. “On March 16, several men from our village tried to immolate themselves but the police stopped them,” he said. “For the last 40 days, we have been on a dharna and stopped work at the project site. The administration sends force to our village everyday to threaten us.”

This experience of official apathy and intimidation has shaped the farmers' view of the government as well as their convictions about Singh's suicide. Even though they did not know the dead man, they saw their distress mirrored in him. 

“Gajendra Singh did many rounds of government offices," said Sangram Singh. "They told him 'Your crop is fine, it is not damaged', they told him off. His father told him there is nothing left in farming, leave the village and find other work. He came to Delhi and tried to meet Kejriwal but the police and the administration did not let him. He was mentally very stressed.”

Sangram Singh has not been able to find a job.