Democratic failure: Mass suicides by farmers in India

For a number of reasons -- foreign competition, drought, inability to pay back high-interest loans -- over the last 10 years farmers in India have been committing suicide at a rate of 10,000 a year.

This has to be the most under-reported news story of the decade. How can this happen in a modern democracy? Something has interfered with free institutions.

I’d love to hear what R.J. Rummel has to say about this. He has observed that famine is almost impossible in a democracy. As he explains it, the problem of spreading hunger would be reported by a free press, and a democratic government would jump into action to prevent starvation at a massive scale.

But what about this long and deadly episode? It’s not a famine, but it’s horrible and huge. How does India’s democratic government manage to ignore it?

Frank Warner