They’ve Been Fooling Us: Rajasthan’s Farmers Upset With BJP, Cong

“They told us getting the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bhima will benefit us, but we have received no money,” a farmer says.

“They’ve been fooling us,” Rajasthan’s farmers upset with BJP and Congress.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

Editor: Sandeep Suman, Varun Sharma
Cameraperson: Aishwarya S Iyer

“I told the bank guy, the Ashok Gehlot (Congress) govt had said, during electioneering for state elections in 2018, that farmers’ loan will be waived, then why should I pay you? He retorted and told me that the government had made a fool of me,” 55-year-old Cheetar Yadav from Daadiya village near Jaipur told The Quint.

The Congress government has only waived loans of farmers from co-operative banks, and not the much larger number of those farmers who took loans from nationalised banks. But farmers like Yadav are also upset with the BJP government for not receiving their insurance claims under PM Modi’s flagship Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bhima Yojana.

Around 350 kilometers away in Dhandhaniya village near Jodhpur, Moola Ram said the bank officials had convinced him that getting insurance (Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bhima Yojana) for the crop will benefit the farmers, “So we got it done for moong and til (sesame), but we did not get the money,” he says in a disgruntled tone.

Now if you compare the performance of the BJP and the Congress in the rural constituencies in the 2013 and 2018 state elections in Rajasthan, you'll see that the BJP's performance fell from being voted in about 80 percent of them, down to 30 percent. While the Congress’s performance improved from being voted in about 12 percent of them to more than 50 percent of them.

But the question now is if Congress will be able to repeat its performance of the state elections in the rural areas in the Lok Sabha elections as well or will the BJP, which won all 25 Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 general elections, be able to maintain its hold.