Of ominous onions and good intentions

By Manohar Malgonkar

I HAD to do what they call a double take. But there it was, a chalkboard in front of a newspaper office in Belgaum bearing a two-line announcement:

Onions Rs 40 per kg

India beat Australia in Dhaka

It was difficult to believe. Yet, there it was, staring you in the face. Cricket had been pushed into second place by, of all things, onions.

To be sure onions had been in the news ever since Dasehra and by Divali they were making headlines. How baskets of onions had replaced laddoos as most welcome gifts, of how shops were trying to sell electric gadgets by offering a free gift of a kilo of onions, how a pop singer belted out songs about onions to ecstatic late-night revellers in Delhi’s fleshpots, and of how someone was planning to bring on a girlie show with his nudes wearing onion garlands.

Meanwhile, of course, the price went soaring, up and up, to Rs 50 and then to Rs 60 per kg. Those who are middle-aged and older will remember that we went through an onion crisis in 1980, when Indira gandhi, who had been tossed out of power after Emergency was trying to make a comeback. Then too, nature and black marketeers and an administrative machine clogged with corruption and red tape, had helped to bring about an onion shortage, so that their price had shot up to Rs 10 per kg.

Indira Gandhi, the seasoned campaigner that she was, made onion prices a major election issue. A government which had not been able to prevent such runaway mehengai had no right to remain in power, she thundered in speech after speech.

And so it transpired.

To be sure it was not only due to onions. Still, onions did play a vital role in defeating the incumbent regime. And if Rs 10 per kg was high in 1980, and could do so much damage, what havoc was onion, at Rs 60 per kg, was going to cause in the 1998 assembly elections?

It is against this background that Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Government tried to do some patchwork damage control, and this seems to have produced some unforeseen consequences.

So New Delhi issued a firman. All export of onion to foreign countries was banned. And the states were directed to encourage traders to import onions from foreign countries. Between them the two measures would ease the onion shortage or so it was hoped.

Foul! cried out Karnataka’s Agriculture Minister, C. Byre Gowda, in a speech in his state’s Assembly. Gowda had been elected from a constituency that produces large quantities of onions, and hitherto, much of their crop was exported. How can my farmers make a decent living if they’re prevented from selling their crops outside India? The ban has caused the prices to plummet to Rs 3 per kg.

Or so, Gowda alleged.

Well, after all it is the business of politicians in opposition to condemn all measures proposed or enacted by the ruling party, and Gowda was only doing his duty by his lights. Anyhow, a debate in the Assembly, no matter how heated, does no actual damage.

Then, while onion had all but vanished from the markets just at a time when the housewives were in most need of it — between Dasehra and Divali, it became known that a large consignment of onions had been allowed to rot in the customs’ godown in Mumbai.

The case brings out the conflict of interest between free enterprise and officialdom and in which the public itself, while vitally affected, can do little more than scream helplessly.

It seems that a trader in Amritsar, sensing that the Government just would have to permit imports of onion to ease the shortage, decided to jump the gun and ordered a whole 150 tonnes from Dubai, at $176 per tonne. That consignment arrived in Mumbai well in time for its wares to be available in the market for Divali.

But the Customs Department willed otherwise. They discovered that the order for the onions had been placed before the date of the Government giving the clearance for such imports.

So they refused clearance. Arguments as to whether the import was deemed to have been made at the time of placing the order for it, or when the consignment actually landed in India, went on at the slow-motion pace of Government offices, and while they were going on, the onions rotted. Their stench became so foul that workers in the Sewree docks had to cover their noses with bandages.

Finally, on October 28, the Customs gave their OK — the trader could take away his onions. By then they were garbage. They were treated as such and thrown away.

Shame! said Bombay’s housewives. Onions by the tonne allowed to rot right under their noses, as it were. What was a Divali without onions?

But who is to blame? That Amritsar trader was not thinking of the plight of the housewife so much as the profits he would make by selling his onions at their going price, and like any enterprising merchant would, he was willing to take risks. He took a gamble that, by the time his consignment arrived the importing of onions would be perfectly legal.

But officials are, after all, trained to be obstructionists; for them, paperwork is all. If imported goods perished in their godowns while the people were screaming for them, it was not their fault. They were only doing their duty.

Other questions arise. Onions from Dubai?... but Dubai doesn’t grow them; indeed Dubai has to import everything that it eats. Quite probably these onions had originated in Gowda’s part of Karnataka, from where they had been exported to Dubai and from there they had been re-exported to India. Merchandising is Dubai’s speciality — and it is carried out mainly by NRIs. The fact that those onions should have rotted within 16 days of arrival is itself a pointer: they must have been lying in storage somewhere for a long while and were already going bad before they arrived.

Still, what a stink! And will the incumbent party lose votes because of it?

What the high price of onions has done to embarrass the Central Government, the low price for groundnuts has done to the Karnataka Government.

The same unseasonal rains that ruined onion crops elsewhere in the country, were like a boon to the groundnut farmers of Sira, in the Tumkur district. They got a bumper crop just when the market price had soared to Rs 1500 per quintal.

On October 28, farmers from all over the district took some 30,000 bags to the market in Sira where the buyers from the oil-extracting companies come to buy their annual stocks. The very abundance of the crop had brought the price down, to Rs 500 per quintal.

A riot ensued. The police had to be called in, and they resorted to firing live bullets. Four people died and nearly 50 suffered wounds. The enraged mobs burned a police jeep, threw stones at random at parked vehicles and actually lynched a police inspector.

What happened to all those bags of groundnut? Well they lay around after the crowd had been dispersed and many of them just vanished. "I’ve not only got a bullet wound, but I lost all my groundnut crop — 15 bags!" One of the victims of the firing said to a reporter.

Sky-high prices, rock-bottom prices. Both seem to be just as capable of setting up panic situations for our political leaders.