The first two weeks of 2011 show no sign that the trend is changing. Nine farmers in Vidharba (Maharashtra) killed themselves as snow and hail ruined an almost-ready crop. Since November, 11 farmers in Orissa's Sambalpur district also took their own lives.
Fr Paul Thelakat, spokesman of the Syro-Malabar Church, spoke to AsiaNews about the report’s findings. “Suicide is a serious disease affecting our society,” he said. “When a person fails in a culture with its terrible consumerist values and cut throat competitions he or she is led to despair and to take his or her own life. For our society does not consider failed people worthwhile.”
The “value of life is in success, power and money. Life is reduced to having, not being. People do not learn to fail. Suffering and failures have lost all meaning because life has become empty and hollow.”
All this “denotes the failure of religions who are supposed to give people positive values of faith and hope in life in spite of hurdles and failures. It is also a symptom of the lack of community feeling and relations, of being alone in a crowd. In our world, relationships have become very much commodified and reified based on power and success, not on personal friendship and love.”
“The suicide of farmers must shock society and the authorities. It tells of a social life that is against the very nature of our nature. Our life has become anti-nature and farmers are the least wanted people in our society. It is simply the expression of our diseased collective life that is affecting society.”
For Fr Babu Joseph, spokesperson for the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, “The 2009 data on suicide and accidental death in India [. . .] are truly disturbing. They call for more concerted efforts by government policy planners, executives, civil society groups and other voluntary organisations to minimise these self-destructive trends in Indian society.”
“It is indeed a sad commentary on Indian policy makers that while tall claims are made on the growth in GDP, reality on the ground remains rather grim with more farmers committing suicides due to debt, youth finding no employment and young women victims of archaic social customs.”
A cloistered Carmelite nun, a convert from Hinduism, prays every day for the farmers who took their own lives. “It is appalling that this practice is so widespread among farmers, who work the fields and toil day and night to grow the wheat, which we eat every day. It saddens me that this wheat is ground into flour to make our bread and even bake the hosts made for the Eucharist all over Mumbai.”