Ishika Agarwal
In a democratic country, most people know only one means of rebellion, which is protest. Be it the Swadeshi Movement of 1905 or Satyagraha in 1930, movements have shaped the history of the nation. Just like that, people showed unrest against the three agriculture acts- Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance, Farm Services Act, 2020, and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020 passed by the Indian parliament.
More than 60 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, though the sector accounts for only about 15 percent of the country’s economic output. Their reliance has only increased after the coronavirus pandemic badly struck the urban economy and sent millions of laborers back to their villages. For years, debts and bankruptcies have been driving farmers to high rates of suicide. The protesters are challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his efforts to reshape farming in India.
It is being demanded that the government should repeal recent farming laws that would minimize the government’s role in agriculture and open more space for private investors. The government says the new laws would unshackle farmers and private investment, bringing growth. But farmers are skeptical, fearing that the removal of state protections that they already consider insufficient would leave them at the mercy of greedy corporations. Taken together, the contentious reforms will loosen rules around the sale, pricing and storage of farm produce – rules that have protected India’s farmers from an unfettered free market for decades. Farmers argue that market-friendly laws will eventually eliminate regulatory support and leave them bereft, with the weakened economy offering little chance of a different livelihood.
For a long time, farmers have sold their crops in 7,000-odd government-regulated wholesale markets or “mandis” across the country. They are run by committees made up of farmers, often large land-owners, and traders or “commission agents” who act as middlemen for brokering sales, organising storage and transport, and even financing deals. The new reforms allow farmers to rely less on these markets and promise to improve their income. But farmers are not convinced. “We will lose our lands, we will lose our income if you let big businesses decide prices and buy crops. We don’t trust big business. Free markets work in countries with less corruption and more regulation. It can’t work for us here,” Gurnam Singh Charuni, one of the main leaders of the agitation, stated publicly.
The three Acts passed by Parliament reinforce the apprehensions of this class that their control over the agricultural economy is being weakened even as they could not graduate to industry, trade or the service sector. For the hegemonic agrarian ruling class in Punjab, land is not merely an economic asset, but has social and cultural value. The current protest movement is different from earlier agrarian protests in terms of the economic demands, politico-cultural stakes and identity overtones. Most of the protests in the ’80s revolved largely around the enhancement of support prices, institutionalised credit system, regular supply of inputs on subsidised rates, etc. Those protests used to threaten to stop the supply of foodgrain to other states. Whereas now the crisis is privatisation of agricultural operations and of foodgrain not finding a market. This protest is for survival.
India’s farmers are mostly small or marginal: 68% of them own less than one hectare of land. Only 6% of them actually receive guaranteed price support for their crops, and more than 90% of the farmers sell their produce in the market. More than half of the farmers, in the words of an economist, “don’t even have enough to sell”. The populous and poor northern state of Bihar has allowed unrestricted private trade of crops, but there are few private buyers there. India’s foray into contract farming has been patchy, working mainly for a few commodities in limited geographies. Not surprisingly, for the large number of farmers, incomes are dwindling. According to the 2016 Economic Survey, the average annual income of a farming family in more than half of India’s states was a paltry 20,000 rupees.
Just as the protests are increasing, elections have created havoc in the country. Most people fail to understand the desperation of political parties, other than the BJP, to support this agitation. In Punjab, it has provided an opportunity to the ruling Congress to overcome anti-incumbency. Knowing well that the state assembly has no powers to nullify the central Acts and introduce their own Acts to regulate agriculture trade, the Amarinder Singh government did exactly that.
The government has been trying to make amends and resolve this problem with the Farmers’ Union. The first round of talks with farmers was held on December 3, 2020. In the sixth round, the Centre agreed to exempt farmers from the stubble burning penalty and dropped changes notified in the Electricity Amendment Bill, 2020. As a follow-up, the government offered to amend provisions related to the fee structure notified in the Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs), and promised stricter provisions to safeguard farmers’ land rights, strengthening of notified markets and a guarantee on minimum support prices (MSPs). These proposals were rejected by a majority vote by 35 farm organisations. On January 12, the Supreme Court stayed for two years the implementation of the farm laws, besides constituting a committee to reach fair and equitable solutions.
Over 500, 000 farmers are protesting and rallying all over North India. Each rally held by the Union of Farmers has had over 50, 000 participants. About 477 protestors died during the six months of heated petitioning where 87% of the deceased were from Punjab. In December last year, 48 farmers from Punjab and around 10 from Haryana had died. January witnessed maximum deaths of the farmers, mostly due to the cold wave, as around 120 farmers, including 108 from Punjab (which is more than three farmers daily) alone, died during the protest. From February to May 26, 280 deaths took place in four months.
In the beginning of the protest, our farmers were forced to live under harsh conditions in tractor trolleys and also it was unhygienic because of which several farmers picked illness and died due to several types of ailments in intense cold weather conditions. They could not get timely medical aid, but now the conditions are improving and they have made makeshift and concrete dwellings on the roadside and several doctors are visiting the place voluntarily to treat the ill,” said general secretary, Bhartiya Kisan Union (Dakaunda), Jagmohan Singh. He added that now a makeshift hospital has also been set up because farmers cannot depend on the government, which, he said, has turned totally indifferent towards farmers and left them to die on the roads.
Farmers have refused to come to a mutual compromise and have vowed to take their stand until the government gives in. The government has refused to listen to this matter ever since no resolution came out of the rounds of talk. People are supporting different sides, though everyone agrees that since a majority of India’s population is made of farmers, they have a right to protest.
“Less than ⅕ th of India’s economy relies on agriculture,but the country’s farmers and rural population– ⅔ of all Indians– have an outsized influence,” states Simon Robinson, a Delhite and famous social media influencer. Around 7/9ths of the Indians support the farmers. According to him and millions of people in our country, farmers are only fighting for their rights, which should be granted by the government of India.
However, the Home Minister does not support this view. With thousands of farmers continuing with their protests against the Centre’s new farm laws, Union home minister Amit Shah on Sunday said the new laws were meant for the welfare of farmers and called their agitation apolitical. “The new farm laws are meant for the welfare of farmers. After a long time the farmer will be able to come out of a locked system. Whoever wants to oppose it politically, let them do it. I have never said the farmers’ protest is political and would never say so,” Amit Shah said. Though the Union Home Minister is publicly stating that this issue is not a political grudge, his speech at the December Press Conference: Government v.s. Farmers represented the opposite.
Gyan Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, said the closest parallel to such a riot was in the 1970s, also known as the Emergency Rule. Indira Gandhi curbed civil liberties, imprisoned political opponents, and shut down the news media. “But the B.J.P. onslaught is also very different and even more damaging to whatever remains of democracy in India,” he said, referring to Mr. Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. “Critics often call it an ‘undeclared emergency,” said Mr. Prakash, who has even written a book about the horrors, both politically and personally, of the dreaded ‘Emergency’ era in the ‘70s. He called a creeping dismantling of the pillars of democracy under Mr. Modi, from the coercion and control of the mainstream media to influencing the courts.
The repeal of those laws does no more than take us back to where we were – which was never a good place. It would return us to a terrible and ongoing agrarian crisis. But, on the other hand, it would halt these new add-ons to agrarian misery or slow them down. The farmers see the importance of these laws in dismantling the citizen’s right to legal recourse and in eroding our rights. And even if they may not see or articulate it that way – theirs is also a defence of the basic structure of the Constitution and of democracy itself.
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