HYDERABAD: Hyderabad Central University research scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide. Politicians – from Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi to CPI leader D Raja to Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal – rushed to Hyderabad to express solidarity with the anguished and agitating students demanding justice for the Dalit student.The political heat forced PM Narendra Modi to break his silence. Hardly had the intolerance debate died down that the opposition attempted to stick the anti-Dalit tag on to his government.Modi said, “A son of my country, Rohith, was compelled to commit suicide. What suffering his family is going through, I can feel that pain.” The HRD ministry headed by Smriti Irani has agreed to set up a judicial panel to probe Rohith’s death.If one Dalit student’s suicide pained the political community so much, we can imagine the pain that must be welling inside each of these politician for over 5,600 farmers who committed suicide in 2014.It must be making these politicians, who made a beeline to Hyderabad, angry and anguished at debt-laden farmers being driven to suicide. Did we see any of them rush to a single home of these unfortunate farmers? We did not. Were they not sons and daughters of this country? The PM and politicians know better.Probably, farmers are not an organised vote bank like Dalits. They are not net-savvy to whip up an emotional frenzy on social media. At the mercy of the monsoon, they sweat and pray for a good crop. The tentacles of debt tighten their grip on their necks a little more with every crop failure.These deaths do not emotionally stir urban folk. No candle light vigil is carried out for those who provide us with food. National Crime Records Bureau in its ‘Deaths and Suicides in India - 2014’ report said 5,650 farmers committed suicide in 2014. Debt drove more than 20% of them to commit suicide.Why do farmers’ deaths not make politicians forget party lines, put their heads together and devise a workable plan to improve their pitiable condition that has remained unchanged for decades?Money-lenders have traditionally squeezed farmers. Isn’t it a pity that after nearly 70 years of independence, majority of our farmers, the real sons of the soil, are yet to get proper irrigation facilities?But the money-lenders have thrived. They are a powerful lot with close nexus with politicians. The Supreme Court had highlighted the role of money-lenders in its judgment in Fatehchand Himmatlal case [1977 SCC (2) 670], “It is a cruel legal joke to legitimate as trade this age-old bleeding business of agrestic India whereby the little peasant, the landless tiller, the bonded labourer, the pavement tenant and the slum dweller have been born and buried during the Raj and the Republic in chill penury. Is trade in human bondage to be dignified legally, betraying the proletarian generation? For whom do the constitutional bells of the socialist Republic toll?”After 33 years, the SC in Sarangdharsingh Shivdassingh Chavan case on December 14, 2010 had asked the same question. In the 1977 case, the Maharashtra government was attempting to defend its legislation against money-lending. But in 2010, it was defending then Congress chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh who had protected money-lenders who were squeezing farmers with an interest rate of 10% per month, which is 120% per annum.In disgust, the SC had said, “The District Anti-Money Lending Committee was constituted by Maharashtra government on October 19, 2009 for protecting farmers against unscrupulous money lenders.“But in total disregard of the scheme of the Act, the CM gave instructions which had the effect of frustrating the object of the legislation enacted for the protection of farmers. The CM’s instructions to district collector, Buldhana, were ex-facie ultra vires the provisions of the Act.” The SC said this amounted to protecting money-lenders who had violated the law.The SC said it was “extremely anguished to see that such instruction could come from the CM of a state which is governed under a Constitution which resolves to constitute India into a socialist, secular, democratic Republic. The CM’s instructions are so incongruous and anachronistic, being in defiance of all logic and reason, that our conscience is deeply disturbed. We condemn the same in no uncertain terms”.A judicial condemnation did not shake the political position of the then CM, who continued merrily in the Manmohan Singh Cabinet. It did not shake or stir the conscience of the political class, whose heart bled for Rohith. For, the issue involved was not caste politics, but a stark reality of India’s hinterland where debt-drowned farmers virtually race against each other to commit suicide.Let us light many candles — from Hyderabad to Delhi — to protest against university authorities who allegedly forced Rohith to commit suicide and to bring those guilty to book. But let us light at least one candle to highlight how political apathy for seven decades continues to force thousands of farmers to commit suicide year after year, every year.