An Indian Farm?

Animal Farm by George Orwell is a brilliant satire on what we call socialist policies. According to Karl Marx’s theory socialism is when every individual of the state is an equal and no one has special privileges. In ideal socialist state, there is no room for class based division and power lies not with the government but with the common people.

Author narrates a story of Manor farm owned by a human. The farm consists of several animals. There is this old respected major PIG in the farm who shares his views of ‘Animalism’ i.e. the idea of a world where equality prevails. His views inspire the animals and one fine day all the animals, after suffering enough abuse at their owner’s hand, decide to chase him away. They achieve this successfully. After this they rename the farm to ‘Animal Farm’ and decide 7 Rules that every member of the farm must obey. These 7 rules are given based on the old major’s idea of animalism. Animals idealize two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, as their leaders.

Over the time, Napoleon’s greed gets the worst out of him. The plot revolves around how he manages to get rid of people who oppose him or no longer serve his interest. Gradually Napoleon and his comrades start breaking the 7 rules and in order to pacify other animals at farm keep making amends to the rules. Animalism had its last breath when the core essence of it i.e. equality was also tampered and changed to “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal.” The book ends with pigs enjoying dinner with the humans. They all seem same, without any difference. Again, everything is back to square one.

Although the book was aimed to take a dig at Stalin and how he moulded socialism to his fit, we can see the traces of India’s situation from pre and post independence era. Here, the farm owner are the English people who were eventually chased away by farm animals i.e. Indians. The old wise fellow is Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who gave India its own theory of ‘Animalism’ in form of The Indian Constitution. Napoleon is Nehru and his entire clan – Indira Gandhi and Indian National Congress (except for a few leaders like Sardar Patel, Netaji Bose, Lal Bahadur Shastri and the likes) who kept amending the constitution time to time in order to fulfil their agendas. The exceptions of INC stated above are analogous to Snowball i.e. who were against the selfish agendas of Nehru-Gandhi clan. Democracy was just an eyewash term to pacify innocent citizens.

In reality only the ‘elites’ were entitled to power and Mrs. Indira Gandhi proved this in 1975 when she sensed that she might lose her entitlement. During the period of emergency, she killed the core essence of democracy and India was back to what it was before 1947.

Things have changed a lot thereafter, but Animal Farm remains relevant to every society, to every context.