Farmers storm India's Red Fort by the thousands
Sheikh Saaliq

The Associated PressStaff
Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Thousands of farmers protest in India

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Thousands of farmers stormed the Red Fort in New Delhi to demand the withdrawal of new laws which they say will impact their earnings.

NEW DELHI -- Tens of thousands of farmers marched, rode horses and drove tractors into India's capital on Tuesday, breaking through police barricades to storm the historic Red Fort -- a deeply symbolic act that revealed the scale of their challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.

As the country celebrated Republic Day, the long-running protest turned violent, with farmers waving farm union and religious flags from the ramparts of the fort, where prime ministers annually hoist the national flag on the country's August independence holiday. Riot police fired tear gas and water cannons and set up barricades in an attempt to prevent the protesters from reaching the centre of New Delhi, but the demonstrators broke through in many places.

People watched in shock as the takeover of the fort, which was built in the 17th century and served as the palace of Mughal emperors, was shown live on hundreds of news channels. Protesters, some carrying ceremonial swords, ropes and sticks, overwhelmed police.


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The farmers have been staging largely peaceful protests for nearly two months, demanding the withdrawal of new laws that they say will favour large corporate farms and devastate the earnings of smaller scale farmers.

The contentious legislation has exacerbated existing resentment among farmers, who have long been seen as the heart and soul of India but often complain of being ignored by the government. As their protest has gathered strength, it has rattled the government like never before since they form the most influential voting bloc in India and are also crucial to its economy.

"We want to show Modi our strength," said Satpal Singh, a farmer who drove into the capital on a tractor along with his family of five. "We will not surrender."

Leaders of the farmers said more than 10,000 tractors joined the protest, and thousands more people marched on foot or rode on horseback while shouting slogans against Modi. At some places, they were showered with flower petals by residents who recorded the unprecedented protest on their phones.

Authorities used tear gas, water cannons and placed large trucks and buses in roads to try to hold back crowd, including rows upon rows of tractors, which shoved aside concrete and steel barricades. Police said one protester died after his tractor overturned, but farmers said he was shot. Several bloodied protesters could be seen in television footage.

Farmers -- many of them Sikhs from Punjab and Haryana states -- tried to march into New Delhi in November but were stopped by police. Since then, unfazed by the winter cold and frequent rains, they have hunkered down at the edge of the city and threatened to besiege it if the farm laws are not repealed.

"We will do as we want to. You cannot force your laws on the poor," said Manjeet Singh, a protesting farmer.

The government insists that the agriculture reform laws passed by Parliament in September will benefit farmers and boost production through private investment. But the farmers fear it will leave those who hold small plots behind as big corporations win out.

The government has offered to amend the laws and suspend their implementation for 18 months. But farmers insist they will settle for nothing less than a complete repeal and plan to march on foot to Parliament on Feb. 1.

Farmers are the latest group to upset Modi's image of imperturbable dominance in Indian politics.

Since returning to power for a second term, Modi's government has been rocked by several convulsions. The economy has tanked, social strife has widened, protests have erupted against laws some deem discriminatory and his government has been questioned over its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2019, the year that witnessed the first major protests against his administration, a diverse coalition of groups rallied against a contentious new citizenship law that they said discriminated against Muslims.

But the latest protests -- which began in northern states that are major agricultural producers -- have triggered a growing farmer rebellion that is fast spreading to other parts of the country, presenting a serious challenge to Modi's government.

Agriculture supports more than half of the country's 1.4 billion people. But the economic clout of farmers has diminished over the last three decades. Once producing a third of India's gross domestic product, farmers now account for only 15% of the country's $2.9 trillion economy.

More than half of farmers are in debt, with 20,638 killing themselves in 2018 and 2019, according to official records.

Devinder Sharma, an agriculture expert who has spent the last two decades campaigning for income equality for Indian farmers, said they are not only protesting the reforms but also "challenging the entire economic design of the country."

"The anger that you see is compounded anger," Sharma said. "Inequality is growing in India and farmers are becoming poorer. Policy planners have failed to realize this and have sucked the income from the bottom to the top. The farmers are only demanding what is their right."


Modi has tried to dismiss the farmers' fears as unfounded and has repeatedly accused opposition parties of agitating them by spreading rumours.

The protests overshadowed Republic Day celebrations, in which Modi oversaw a traditional lavish parade along ceremonial Rajpath boulevard displaying the country's military power and cultural diversity. Authorities shut some metro train stations, and mobile internet service was suspended in some parts of the capital, a frequent tactic of the government to thwart protests.

The parade was scaled back because of the pandemic. People wore masks and adhered to social distancing as police and military battalions marched along the route displaying their latest equipment.

Republic Day marks the anniversary of the adoption of the country's constitution on Jan. 26, 1950.

Police said the protesting farmers broke away from the approved protest routes and resorted to "violence and vandalism."

The group that organized the protest, Samyukt Kisan Morcha, or United Farmers' Front, blamed the violence on "anti-social elements" who "infiltrated an otherwise peaceful movement."

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AP video journalist Rishabh R. Jain contributed to this report
RELATED IMAGES




Indian Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel march during Republic Day celebrations in Hyderabad, India, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.)


Sikhs wave the Nishan Sahib, a Sikh religious flag, as they arrive at the historic Red Fort monument in New Delhi, India, on Jan. 26, 2021. (Dinesh Joshi / AP

Indian farmers storm historic Red Fort in Republic Day protests

Growers have camped outside New Delhi for almost 2 months

Thomson Reuters · Posted: Jan 26, 2021 

Protesters gather at the Red Fort as Indian farmers continue to demonstrate against the central government's recent agricultural reforms in New Delhi on Tuesday. (Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images)

Thousands of Indian farmers protesting against agricultural reforms overwhelmed police on Tuesday and stormed into the historic Red Fort complex in New Delhi after tearing down barricades and driving tractors through roadblocks.

Police fired tear gas in an unsuccessful bid to force the protesters back. One protester was killed, a witness said, and Delhi police said 86 officers had been injured across the city.

Some of those who scaled the walls of Red Fort carried ceremonial swords, scattering police who tried to prevent them from entering. Footage from Reuters partner ANI showed police jumping from the ramparts to escape. Once inside, the protesters hoisted flags.

Angered by laws they say help large, private buyers at the expense of producers, farmers have camped outside the capital for almost two months, posing one of the biggest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he came to power in 2014.

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"Modi will hear us now, he will have to hear us now," said Sukhdev Singh, 55, a farmer from the northern state of Punjab.

The body of one protester draped in an Indian tricolour lay in the street after the tractor he rode overturned in one clash, said a witness, Vishu Arora.

"He died right there," Arora said.


Indian farmers descend on capital to protest reforms

PHOTOS 12 TOTAL Indian farmers storm historic Red Fort in Republic Day protests | CBC News

A Reuters witness saw several police and protesters with head injuries following clashes at the Red Fort, from whose ramparts Modi delivers an annual speech.

The government ordered internet services in some parts of the capital to be blocked, according to mobile carrier Vodafone Idea, in an attempt to prevent further unrest.
Breakaway protests condemned

Tens of thousands of farmers began the day in a convoy of tractors festooned with flags along the city's fringes.

But hundreds of protesters — some on horseback — broke away from approved routes, heading for government buildings in the city centre where the annual Republic Day parade of troops and military hardware was taking place.

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They commandeered cranes and used ropes to tear down roadblocks, forcing constables in riot gear to give way, Reuters witnesses said. A second group rode tractors to a traffic junction, also breaching barricades after clashes with police.

Police accused those who diverged from the agreed routes of "violence and destruction."

"They have caused great damage to public property and many police personnel have also been injured," a police statement said.


Farmers in New Delhi take part in a tractor rally on Tuesday as they demonstrate against the Indian government's recent agricultural reforms. (Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images)

Protest organizer Samyukt Kisan Morcha said the groups deviating from set routes did not represent the majority of farmers.

"We also condemn and regret the undesirable and unacceptable events that have taken place today and dissociate ourselves from those indulging in such acts," the group of farm unions said in a statement.

Amarinder Singh, chief minister of Punjab state where many of the protesters came from, called the clashes "shocking."

"The violence by some elements is unacceptable," he said in a tweet. "It'll negate goodwill generated by peacefully protesting farmers."
Farmers' unrest concerns government

Agriculture employs about half of India's population of 1.3 billion, and unrest among an estimated 150 million landowning farmers worries the government.

Nine rounds of talks with farmers' unions have failed to end the protests, as farm leaders rejected the government's offer to delay the laws for 18 months, making a push for repeal instead.

A farmer in New Delhi covers his face to protect himself from

 tear gas during the protest on Tuesday against controversial 

farm laws introduced by the government. 

(Adnan Abidi/Reuters)

"The farm organizations have a very strong hold," said Ambar Kumar Ghosh, an analyst at New Delhi think-tank the Observer Research Foundation.

"They have the resources to mobilize support, and to continue the protest for a long time. They have also been very successful in keeping the protest really focused."

India showcases its military hardware with a parade every year on Republic Day, which marks the adoption of its constitution in 1950.

THEY ARE SIKH'S BJP ARE HINDUTVA

‘We want dignity’: Indian farmers defy pellets, drones to demand new deal

Two years after they brought the Indian capital to a standstill, farmers say Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has betrayed its promises.

Farmers gather in protest at the Shambhu border between the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana

 [Md Meherban/Al Jazeera]

By Rifat Fareed
21 Feb 2024

Shambhu border, India — Balvinder Singh lies on his side, writhing in pain, on a hospital bed in the northern Indian state of Punjab.

When Singh, 47, was hit by a volley of piercing objects while marching towards New Delhi with thousands of other farmers, he did not know what had struck him.

But his body is pockmarked with telltale black scars from iron pellets fired by security forces to prevent farmers from crossing over from Punjab into the state of Haryana, which borders New Delhi. Haryana is ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, whose federal policies the farmers are protesting against.

Singh, a farmer from Faridkot district in Punjab, who was admitted at Rajindra Hospital in the city of Patiala, was hit when he was calming the angry young farmers at the front of the protest site, metres away from the border on February 14, a day after the protests began.

“I was calming down the protesters when I was hit,” Singh says, his left eye bloody from a pellet injury. “I could not understand whether it was a bullet or something else that hurt me.”

Singh says he had never heard of iron pellets being used as ammunition by security forces against civilian protesters. In the past, such pellets have been mostly used in Indian-administered Kashmir as a crowd-control mechanism. Pellet guns have blinded scores of people in Kashmir.

Balvinder Singh, his eye bloodied by a wound from an iron pellet fired by police, in a hospital in Patiala, Punjab 

[Md Meherban/Al Jazeera]

Now, they are part of the intensifying confrontation between farmers and the government. The government in Punjab, which is ruled by the Aam Aadmi Party that is in opposition nationally, has said that three farmers have lost their eyesight after being hit with the Haryana police pellets and a dozen others have also suffered pellet injuries.

Critics of the farmers, meanwhile, argue that the central government cannot allow the protests to escalate the way they did in 2021, when clashes broke out on the streets of New Delhi. Some protesters reached the Red Fort – from where the prime minister delivers the Independence Day speech – and were accused of yanking down the national flag. A security crackdown followed.

Yet, days after this latest agitation kicked off, there are growing signs of a repeat of the kind of escalation in tensions that India witnessed three years ago.

Thousands of farmers in their tractor trolleys, small trucks, on foot, and scooters have travelled from rural areas of Punjab and gathered on the Punjab-Haryana highway waiting to march on the capital city. They are hoping to press the BJP government for demands including a guaranteed minimum support price (MSP) for their crops and loan waivers, among others.

In Haryana, the government has been criticised for using drones to drop tear gas shells on the protesting farmers. The state’s police have sealed the border with heavy cemented blocks, iron nails and barbed wire.

Singh, who owns a four-acre plot where he grows rice and wheat, says there is no guarantee of price in the fluctuating market for other crops.

“We spend more on cultivation [when growing other crops] and there is no earning,” he says.

“Now, we are also facing water shortages for even growing these two crops [rice and wheat]. We are in deep stress.”

At present the government buys rice and wheat from farmers for public distribution, and offers them a minimum support price for these grains. But other agricultural commodities do not receive this price protection. That, farmers say, has in turn led to the overproduction of rice and wheat. Paddies in particular, are water intensive, leading to depleted groundwater levels.

“If I want to diversify to other crops, there should be financial security for me that I will get a good price – that is what we are asking. We are asking for our rights,” says Singh, from the hospital, where eight other farmers, some aged above 60, are also being treated.

One of them, Mota Singh, 32, from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, said that he was hit by a rubber bullet on his hand. To Mota, something even more fundamental is at stake than crop prices.

“Farmers are demanding dignity, we cannot be poor forever,” says Mota, when asked why he was protesting.

Female farmers listen to a speech by a farming leader at the protest site on the Shambhu border between Haryana and Punjab

 [Md Meherban/Al Jazeera]

Why are farmers again on the roads?

More than 250 farmers’ unions have supported the protest that is being organised from Punjab.

Up to two-thirds of India’s 1.4 billion population are engaged in agriculture-related activities for their livelihoods and the sector contributes nearly a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product.

Farmers say that their main demand – minimum support price legislation – would ensure that the rates of their crops are sustainable and provide them with decent earnings.

At present, the government protects wheat and rice against the price fall by setting a minimum purchase price, a system that was introduced more than 60 years ago, to ensure food security in India.

Development economist Jayati Ghosh says that if other crops were also brought under the MSP regime, it would help provide sustainable financial support to the farmers. This wouldn’t mean that the government would need to buy large volumes of these crops, says Ghosh, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

It’s only when the price drops below the MSP that the government would need to step in and buy just enough that the price rises above the minimum set bar, she says.

“It’s a market intervention that makes sure that farmers have this other option,” Ghosh says.

In India, experts say that agriculture has been going through a severe crisis due to increasing extreme weather combined with a lowering water table, affecting yields and pushing farmers deep into debt. Thousands of farmers take their own lives each year. In 2022, data collected by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that 11,290 farmers died by suicide.

Ghosh questions why the government is reluctant to write off farm loans.

“Every year the banking system writes off loans of lakhs of crores (billions of dollars) of money taken by large corporations and that is not even mentioned and it is not even news,” she says. “The corporations can get away with all kinds of loan waivers but the farmers are asking a small fraction of that and … are treated as criminals.”

Injured farmers at a hospital in Patiala, Punjab, where they are being treated for injuries received during baton charges and pellet gun firing by the police 

[Md Meherban/Al Jazeera]
‘Government not honouring its promises’

The farmers are also demanding that the Modi government withdraw cases filed against them during the last protest in 2020-21.

Held on the outskirts of New Delhi for 13 months, those protests were against a set of three farm laws brought in by the BJP government that aimed to push India’s family-based, smallholdings-driven farm sector towards privatised and industrialised agriculture.

The government argued that the laws would improve market competition and in turn bring new wealth, especially to smaller farmers. But farmers protested, worried that the laws would leave them at the mercy of big corporations.

Eventually, Modi agreed to repeal the laws, and his government said it would set up a panel of stakeholders to find ways to ensure support prices for all produce.

The protesting farmers now accuse the government of not honouring those promises. And they are readying for a long wait to pressure the government.

Hardeep Singh, 57, from Gurdaspur in Punjab, has come prepared with bags of rice, flour, and other essentials in his tractor.

“We are here even if it takes months,” says Hardeep, who left his home with dozens of other villagers on February 11.

“We might not be allowed to go forward but we will not go backward, either.”

Darshan Singh displaying the photo of his son who died in the farmers’ protest two years ago

 [Md Meherban/Al Jazeera]

‘Not afraid of losing my health’

Darshan Singh, 66, sits silently on the side of the highway. He carries a passport-size photo of his son, 27-year-old Gurpreet Singh, in his wallet.

Gurpreet was among more than 700 farmers who died during the previous farmers’ protest in 2021.

“He was at the protest site for a year. He fell sick at the site and died after returning to the village. We are giving sacrifices for this movement,” Darshan tells Al Jazeera. But that tragedy has not deterred the father from joining the protest this time. “I am not afraid of losing my health here.”

Darshan says he wants justice for the two children and young wife his son left behind.

With national elections in India just two months away, the farmers are trying to ensure that they cannot be ignored. Because of their sheer numbers, farmers constitute a significant chunk of Indian voters.

The ruling BJP government recently conferred the nation’s highest civilian award on MS Swaminathan, a pioneer of the agricultural revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, the opposition Congress party has promised to legalise an MSP on crops if elected to power.

A government delegation has been engaged in negotiations with the protesting farmers without a breakthrough.

“We feel the government wants to suppress us and pass time,” Manjeet Singh, a leader of Bhartiya Kisan Union Shaheed Bhagat Singh, a local farmers’ union from Haryana, told Al Jazeera.

A fourth round of talks on Sunday evening, held between a 14-member farmers’ delegation and government representatives, including three federal ministers, failed to yield a breakthrough.

The government has offered farmers MSP for pulses, cotton and maize. The crops, according to the proposal, would be bought by the government agencies on an agreement for five years.

But the farmers have rejected the offer, which they argue only temporarily addresses their demand – unlike a law that would guarantee them MSP for these commodities in the long run. The farmers say they will continue with their protest march to New Delhi.

Farmers rest in a tractor trolley at the protest site on the Shambhu border between the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab

 [Md Meherban/Al Jazeera]

‘Why can’t farmers be prosperous?’

Devinder Sharma, a food and agricultural expert based in Chandigarh, the capital of both Punjab and Haryana, says that the farmers’ demands have merit.

“We have deliberately kept agriculture impoverished,” he says, adding that an MSP law could provide an unprecedented economic boom for the country by improving the income of a majority of the nation’s families that depend on agriculture.

He is not surprised at the pushback the farmers are facing from critics, mostly in the cities, though.

“The problem is when the prices go up the corporate profit is reduced. The (corporates) want to ruthlessly exploit farmers and I think enough is enough,” he says.

“Why can’t farmers be prosperous?”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

With cranes and excavators, Indian farmers prepare to march on capital

A farmer wears a makeshift mask to protect himself from tear gas fired by the police, at the site where farmers are marching towards New Delhi to press for better crop prices promised to them in 2021, at Shambhu barrier, a border crossing between Punjab and Haryana states, India, Feb 21, 2024.
PHOTO: Reuters

FEBRUARY 21, 2024 

SHAMBHU, India — Indian police fired tear gas on Wednesday (Feb 21) to scatter protesting farmers as they resumed a march to the capital, equipped with cranes and excavators after talks with the government on guaranteed prices for their produce failed to break a deadlock.

To escape the stinging gas and clouds of smoke, thousands of farmers, some wearing medical masks, ran into the fields surrounding their gathering-point on a highway about 200 km north of New Delhi.

The police action came as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a fresh offer to resume talks on the farmers' demands. Agriculture Minister Arjun Munda urged the farmers to resolve their grievances through the talks.


"After the fourth round, the government is ready to discuss all the issues" such as guaranteed prices, he posted on social network X, as the march resumed.

"I again invite the farmer leaders for discussion. It is important for us to maintain peace."

On Monday, the farmers' groups had rejected the government's previous proposal for five-year contracts and guaranteed support prices for produce such as corn, cotton and pulses.

Farmers shout slogans, as they stand on a modified excavator, during a protest demanding better crop prices, promised to them in 2021, at Shambhu Barrier, a border crossing between Punjab and Haryana states, India, Feb 20, 2024.
PHOTO: Reuters

The farmers, mostly from the northern state of Punjab, have been demanding higher prices backed by law for their crops. They form an influential bloc of voters Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot afford to anger ahead of general elections due by May.
Sticks, stones, gas masks

The farmers began marching at 0530 GMT from the spot where authorities had stopped them by erecting barricades on the border of Punjab state with Haryana, blocking a key highway.

"It is not right that such massive barricades have been placed to stop us," said one of the farmers' leaders, Jagjit Singh Dallewal. "We want to march to Delhi peacefully. If not, they should accede to our demands."

Police in riot gear lined both sides of the highway as the farmers, gathering earlier amid morning fog, waved colourful flags emblazoned with the symbols of their unions, while loudspeakers urged them to fight for their rights.

Television images showed some wearing gas masks.

Late on Tuesday, Haryana police's chief ordered the immediate seizure of the heavy equipment brought by the farmers, to prevent its use by protesters in destroying barricades.

Police also asked owners of such equipment not to lend or rent it to protesters, as its use to harm security forces would be a criminal offence.

Farmers guide a modified excavator, during a protest demanding better crop prices, promised to them in 2021, at Shambhu Barrier, a border crossing between Punjab and Haryana states, India, Feb 20, 2024.
PHOTO: Reuters

About 10,000 people had gathered on Wednesday, along with 1,200 tractors and waggons at Shambhu on the state border, police in Haryana posted on X, warning against the risk of stone-throwing as they were armed with sticks and stones.

Sunday's government proposal of minimum support prices to farmers who diversify their crops to grow cotton, pigeon peas, black matpe, red lentils and corn was rejected by the protesters, who wanted additional foodgrains covered.

Similar protests two years ago, when farmers camped for two months at the border of New Delhi, forced Modi's government to repeal a set of farm laws.

ALSO READ: Protesting farmers clash with security forces 200km from New Delhi

Source: Reuters

Police fire teargas as Indian farmers resume protest march to New Delhi after talks fail

Police have fired tear gas at thousands of Indian farmers who resumed their protest march to New Delhi after talks with the government failed to end an impasse over their demands for guaranteed crop prices

ByALTAF QADRI Associated Press and KRUTIKA PATHI Associated Press

February 21, 2024

SHAMBHU, India -- Police fired tear gas on Wednesday at thousands of Indian farmers who resumed their protest march to New Delhi after talks with the government failed to end an impasse over their demands for guaranteed crop prices.

The protests come at a crucial time for India, where national elections are due in the coming months and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party is widely expected to secure a third successive term in office.

The farmers began their protest last week but were stopped some 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the capital. Authorities are set on containing the protest, which has renewed the movement from over two years ago when tens of thousands of farmers had camped out on the outskirts of the city for over a year.

At the time, the farmers pitched tents, bought food supplies and held out in the sit-in until they forced Modi to repeal new agriculture laws in a major reversal for his government.

This time around, the authorities have barricaded the highways into New Delhi with cement blocks, metal containers, barbed wire and iron spikes to prevent the farmer from entering.

On Wednesday, the farmers arrived at the barricades with bulldozers and excavators to try and push through.

Jagjit Singh Dallewal, one of the farmers leading the march, said they did not want any violence, but condemned the federal government over the massive security measures.

“It is our request that we want to go to Delhi in a peaceful manner. The government should remove the barricades,” he said.

Last week, the farmers had paused their protest and hunkered down near the town of Shambhu, close to the border between Punjab and Haryana states, as farmers unions engaged in discussions with government ministers.

They rejected a proposal from the government that offered them five-year contracts of guaranteed prices on a set of certain crops, including maize, grain legumes and cotton, and the farmers resumed their march on Wednesday.

The protest organizers say the farmers are seeking a new legislation that would guarantee minimum prices for 23 crops.

The government protects agricultural producers against sharp falls in farm prices by setting a minimum purchase price for certain essential crops, a system that was introduced in the 1960s to help shore up food reserves and prevent shortages. The system can apply up to 23 crops, but the government usually offers the minimum price only for rice and wheat.

The farmers say guaranteed minimum support price for all 23 crops would stabilize their income. They are also pressing the government to follow through on promises to waive loans and withdraw legal cases brought against them during the earlier 2021 protests.

Several talks so far have failed to break the deadlock. But Arjun Munda, one of the ministers negotiating with the farmers, said they were willing to hold another discussion and that the government wanted to maintain peace.

“It is the prime minister’s responsibility, who has been elected with majority votes, to handle the situation and accept our demands,” Sarwan Singh Pandher, a farm leader, told the Press Trust of India news agency.

The farmers are an influential voting bloc and particularly important to Modi’s base — especially in Northern Haryana and several other states with a substantial farming population that are ruled by his Bharatiya Janata Party.

___

Pathi reported from New Delhi.

Thousands of Indian farmers prepare to continue march on Delhi

They are demanding higher prices backed by law for their crops 

from the government

Indian farmers stand near the Shambhu border crossing between northern Punjab 

and Haryana states, about 200km from New Delhi, on Wednesday. AP

Taniya Dutta

Feb 21, 2024

Thousands of Indian farmers prepared to march on the capital on Wednesday to pressure Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to meet their demands.

Last week, farmers from Punjab and Haryana, the states responsible for 60 per cent of India's wheat production, started their journey to New Delhi on foot and by tractors. However, they were halted about 200km from their destination by road blockades erected by police and paramilitary forces.

The farmers waited while representatives held talks with the government but decided to press on with their march after a meeting on Monday ended without agreement on their main demand of minimum supports prices for their crops.

Indian farmers wait to march to the capital near the Shambhu border that divides northern Punjab and Haryana states, about 200km from New Delhi, India. AP

Braving the cold and rain, farmers stood on a bridge over the Ghaggar river on Wednesday morning amid preparations to push through barricades. The bridge is on a motorway that passes from Punjab through Haryana, ruled by Mr Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, to Delhi.

The motorway was blocked when farmers from the two states launched a sit-in in 2020 after they were stopped from entering Delhi to protest.

A farmer wears a mask to protect himself from tear gas fired by the police at the Shambhu border. Reuters

Authorities brought in more than 700 more security personnel and dug trenches to prevent the farmers moving forward. Internet and SMS services were cut off in Haryana.

“We are not scared of the authorities. Last time, we protested for a year. This time around, if they don’t fulfil our demands, we will spend our entire lives here protesting for our rights,” Jaspreet Singh, a farmer from Punjab, told The National.

“We have all the preparations in place to go through the barricade and we still appeal to the government to not use force against us and allow us to go to Delhi which is our constitutional right,” said Manjeet Singh, another farmer.

The farmers have rejected a government offer to buy pulses, maize and cotton at guaranteed prices through cooperatives for five years, saying they want minimum support prices for 23 crops.

The protest has already caused disruption in Delhi, with long traffic jams at entry points to the city where police and paramilitary forces have been posted.

Updated: February 21, 2024

BACKGROUNDER
Indian farmers intensify protests, testing Modi's promised market miracle

Issued on: 09/12/2020 - 

A policeman stands in front of protesters during a nationwide strike called by farmers in Mumbai, India, on December 8, 2020. AFP - INDRANIL MUKHERJEE

Text by: Leela JACINTO

If Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government calculated that the pandemic would enable it to rush through reforms deregulating the agricultural sector, it was a miscalculation. Protesters have descended on the capital in an extraordinary mobilisation that presents the Hindu nationalist government with one of its biggest challenges.

In late March, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi enacted the world’s toughest nationwide coronavirus lockdown, it sparked a deadly mass exodus from Indian cities to villages that shocked the nation. With no work, money or ability to survive in shutdown cities, millions of migrant workers took to their feet, setting off on the only path out of destitution available: long journeys back to their villages.

Rural India has consistently provided a counter narrative to the headlines trumpeting the country’s economic boom for decades. More than half of India’s 1.3 billion people still depend in some way on farming, but agriculture accounts for only 17 percent of the economy. Shrinking farm plot sizes, poverty, harvest uncertainties and indebtedness drive tens of thousands of Indian farmers to suicide every year and forces millions to migrate to cities.

But when a harsh lockdown was suddenly imposed, millions of Indians calculated that their villages – with tiny plots of cultivable land and informal networks of support and loans – were their only survival option.

Months later, some of the highways that led migrant workers in New Delhi to their villages to weather the lockdown are blocked by a reverse wave of farmers descending on the Indian capital to protest against three new farm laws.

Driving mud-splattered tractors, trailers, trucks and minivans packed with produce, pots, pans and blankets, tens of thousands of angry farmers, mainly from the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, have blocked the arterial roads into the country’s capital since November 26.

Setting up a giant sit-in, the farmers have braved the North Indian winter and defied government attempts to move them to outlying grounds, while protests have spread to neighbouring states, presenting one of the biggest challenges to the Modi administration since it came to power in 2014. India’s ruling Hindu nationalist government has a record of brutally stifling dissent. But farmers are a critical voting bloc in India and though the government and its supporters have tried to vilify and downplay the protests, they have not succeeded.

On Tuesday, railways and highways were blocked across India as farmers, trade unions and opposition parties answered a nationwide solidarity shutdown call. The widespread action saw Home Minister Amit Shah call for a meeting with farming leaders late Tuesday, ahead of a sixth round of talks on Wednesday.

Protesters are demanding a total repeal of the new laws, which make farmers sell their produce on the open market – including agribusiness corporations and supermarket chains – instead of through state-run institutions that guarantee a minimum price.

Modi maintains the “reforms are needed for development,” warning that, “we cannot build the next century with the laws of the previous century."

But as the curtain falls on a year that saw a pandemic ravage lives and livelihoods, India’s farmers are not persuaded by the promise of markets providing next-generation solutions to longstanding problems.

The resolve of the farmers and their extraordinary mobilisation, gathering supporters across sectors, has caught the Modi administration by surprise and is a cautionary tale for governments managing post-pandemic economic recoveries.

Using ‘the cover of the pandemic’

The latest crisis was sparked in September, when the government crammed complex legislative changes into three new laws and pushed them through parliament during an opposition walkout. They were passed as Covid-19 rages through India, with the country reporting the world’s second-highest number of cases.

“In the midst of a pandemic, laws with far-reaching impact on more than 50 percent of the population and on 100 percent of the food security of India were passed. The government used the cover of the pandemic to push through the laws, believing they would not be resisted. This has been bulldozed through parliament with no debate, no discussions,” explained Amandeep Sandhu, a writer who documented agricultural practices in Punjab in his book, “Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines”.

Since he came to power in 2014, Modi has opted for shock announcements with little preparedness that have left the populace scrambling to cope with the fallout – humanitarian and economic – of his populist moves.

On November 8, 2016, for instance, the prime minister made a surprise evening television appearance to announce that, starting after midnight, the nation’s 500 and 1,000-rupee notes would be demonetised or no longer considered legal tender. Economists estimate the move wiped at least one percent off India’s GDP and cost at least 1.5 million jobs.

Four years and a pandemic later, Indian farmers are sceptical of the Modi administration’s rushed, pro-business panaceas. “Neoliberalism has hollowed out state sectors. The health sector has collapsed, the education sector has collapsed. Now the government is fronting a crony capitalist move to agriculture,” said Sandhu.

‘Villainous’ state markets and middlemen

Economists agree India’s agricultural sector needs repair. The pressure of a growing population is shrinking land holdings, with more than 68 percent of farmers owning less than one or two hectares of land. Yields are often so low that economists estimate more than half of India’s farmers do not cultivate enough to sell.

But the urban manufacturing and service sectors have not produced enough jobs to get the working age population off the land. With unemployment rising in the aftermath of the pandemic, the situation is likely to deteriorate.

The new laws promise farmers freedom from “villainous and exploitative” government-regulated wholesale markets – called mandis – and commissioning agents who act as middlemen, managing sales, storage, transportation and even finance deals.

These middlemen – known as arhtias – also extend credit to farmers, serving as “bankers of the last resort” for desperate farmers, but levying crippling interest rates and repayment conditions in the process.

Loans for night trips to hospitals

News footage in recent days of farmers demonstrating to retain arhtias – viewed by the urban middle class as loan sharks driving the most hapless to suicide – has been another shocker for Indians not living off the land.

But Sandhu – who spent childhood vacations making trips to mandis with farming family members – explains that arhtias are part of the social and economic landscape in rural Punjab.

“They provide easily accessible credit for farmers that banks do not: if a sudden crop disease needs pesticides, a family illness in the middle of the night requires money to go to hospital, an urgent vet call for a sick cow... they play a pivotal role,” said Sandhu.

“What we need is regulation of interest rates and a recovery course for middle men who are extending credit. There is a need for ombudsmen,” he explained. “Now the entire system is being discarded for what, we don’t know. What we do know for sure is it would throw out millions of people from their livelihoods.”

Slick presentations with no answers

The government has attempted to downplay the protests as outbursts by poorly educated farmers who do not understand what’s in their best interests.

But in media interviews after successive rounds of talks, farm union members have proved to be better informed than the government.

In an interview with a Punjabi language TV station earlier this month, for instance, Rajinder Singh, vice president of a farmers union, explained how Indian Agriculture Minister Narendra Tomar displayed a slick presentation to union representatives at recent talks. But when asked about details of the laws, including implementation across states, the minister was unable to provide answers.

Tuesday’s nationwide blockade has triggered another round of negotiations, but with both sides unwilling to back down so far, few can predict how the latest crisis will end.

“The government is really worried because farmers are an important vote bank, North Indian farmers are unhappy and the government didn’t gauge their resilience. Now it’s a deadlock and it’s a matter of who blinks first,” explained Sandhu. “Modi sees himself as a strongman, he has never backed down on anything – it’s part of his strongman image that appeals to voters.”

But the people of Punjab and Haryana also have a long, celebrated history of toughness and bloody-minded intransigence that is gaining increasing respect in a country with a vast appetite for strongmen. The winter of discontent in North India looks set to be a long one.

India Just Had the Biggest Protest in World History
Will it make a difference?

By NITISH PAHWA DEC 09, 2020 SLATE.COM

Protesters scuffle with police during a rally in support of the nationwide general strike called by farmers against the recent agricultural reforms in Allahabad, India, on Tuesday. 

Sanjay Kanojia/AFP via Getty Images

In late November, what may have been the single largest protest in human history took place in India, as tens of thousands of farmers marched to the capital to protest proposed new legislation and upward of 250 million people around the subcontinent participated in a 24-hour general strike in solidarity. This massive people’s movement has gained attention worldwide and, moreover, forced the government to come meet the protesters where they are instead of just cracking down and brutalizing them, a first in the six years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule.

To comprehend this moment, you have to understand the long plight of India’s farmers. To a much greater degree than other major economies, India retains its mass agrarian traditions alongside its developed industrial and tech sectors—agriculture is still the largest source of livelihood for most Indians, employing more than half the subcontinent’s workforce, mostly in small and local farms instead of agribusiness behemoths. Yet the farmers themselves, despite feeding so much of the nation and providing a significant bedrock for India’s economy, have always had a brutal time of it. Colonial-induced famines (temporarily solved by the reforms of the 1960s “Green Revolution,” which later would cause its own issues), bureaucratic and oppressive government policy, exploitation by feudal-minded landholders, and, of course, climate change have continually left India’s land workers among the worst off the world over. Even before the acceleration in mass despair augured by the pandemic and ensuing locust invasion, farmers had been left completely strapped by crippling debts, losses on marketed goods, and devastation from extreme weather; long-troubling suicide rates reached staggering new heights. Those who say India has “too many farmers,” as a writer at Indian business publication Mint and a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute have claimed, are completely missing the point: The country has bled so many other jobs involving so-called unskilled labor, especially lately, that many of the country’s poorest, illiterate, and otherwise disenfranchised have no other labor recourse, especially with no workable safety net on hand.


So, after the government took action that seemed to depress farmers’ welfare even further, land workers weren’t going to take it anymore.

In September, Modi rammed three pieces of legislation through Parliament that supposedly serve to remove taxes and other government-imposed financial burdens on farmers to help them directly sell to corporations and encourage private investment in agriculture, following Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s deregulatory agenda. It sounds fine when you describe it so pithily: get rid of the red tape and give farmers free access to bigger markets. But it’s not so simple. The supposedly onerous business barriers the laws remove help provide farmers a guaranteed, timely sale and distribution market for their goods, stop businesses from hoarding produce, keep prices at a fair level, and prevent small farmers from being taken advantage of by agribusiness corporations. Modi’s new laws nominally give farmers a better deal by allowing them to directly sell more produce to more places. What they really do is take away the remaining meager support granted to farmers already deprived of much of the support they need and allow them to be exploited by big agribusiness firms and corporations. With these protections—including guaranteed government-based marketplaces and frameworks to establish minimum prices for goods—cast off, there is little left to stop Big Ag companies within India from swallowing market share.

The awe-inspiring demonstration has becoming the defining story of India’s current era

The Indian government’s shift toward deregulation and privatization since the 1990s has hit farmers hardest, leaving them without the top-down protections that allowed them to not only manage and preserve their farms but also make sure their goods could actually be sold in a manner that provided subsistence and profit. As a result, more laws tailored to free markets were never going to exactly make land workers happy. “We will lose our lands, we will lose our income, if you let big business 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,” one farmer told the BBC last week. And with the country now entering a steep recession for the first time in decades and providing no welfare in turn, enough was enough.

Protests had started forming as far back as August, when awareness of the legislation was becoming more widespread but the bills themselves had not been passed yet. They ramped up soon after passage, with farm unions and other trade unions banding together—primarily in the agriculture-heavy states of Punjab and Haryana but also steadily growing elsewhere—to call for Bharat bandh (a Hindi term calling for a general strike that quite literally means “shut down India”). An actual shutdown did hit the railway, halting trains to and from Punjab through October before the campaign relented following concerns about needed supplies. The farmers and unions then decided to take it straight to the capital.

On Nov. 25, when the marchers reached Delhi, they were met right at the city limits by police, who used tear gas and water cannons against the protesters, and obstructed and damaged the roads outside the city to prevent them from entering. Photos and videos soon went viral on social media of the brutal policing tactics and crackdowns, eliciting worldwide sympathy for the rallygoers. It didn’t pass worldwide notice that some of these farmers kept on, even feeding some of the very officers who beat them.

Modi, in his attempt to quietly ease things for agribusiness corporations in the middle of his oppressive pandemic regime, inadvertently sparked the single largest proletariat uprising in world history. And these farmers are pressuring the Modi administration in a way past protesters simply could not. Last week, government officials started meeting with farm union leaders, and they also granted the marchers a designated area of Delhi within which to carry on the protest (although this mandated location is far from the Parliament House). However, many protesters wished to remain at the city border, having brought ample equipment to set up camps along the boundaries wherein the demonstrators can prepare food and organize.

REUTERS/DANISH SIDDIQUI

The farmers are demanding nothing less than a full retraction of the laws and say they are willing to remain at the capital’s outskirts until this is done. They also are asking Parliament for other special demands and regulations to keep small farms competitive in the marketplace, according to India Today. The newsmagazine also mentions that “the central government has agreed to work on most of the demands and make them part of the rules—which will need Parliament’s approval—except that of making purchases on [minimum support price] rates mandatory.” Without this last measure, talks with the government have continually stalled and restarted, reaching a deadlock. And on Monday, Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar made a show of meeting with a small group of farmers who were mostly BJP supporters in favor of the new law, ignoring the masses outside who were very staunchly opposed to it.

The BJP is now starting to take more drastic, desperate crackdown measures. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that leaders of opposition parties in Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh who have supported the farmers’ protest, including Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal, had been barricaded in their homes by police, reportedly under the government’s direction. (Police soon relented in Kejriwal’s case after further protests.)

The awe-inspiring demonstration has become the defining story of India’s current era. News sites based in the country, like the Quint and the Economic Times, have entire sections dedicated for live updates on the protests. WWE wrestlers of Indian origin have expressed support for the farmers on Instagram. Even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in, in a statement of support for the protesters and concern about the force being used that met with blowback from the Indian government, which personally told Canadian diplomats in India not to have their country interfere.

Until very recently, the worldwide rally against U.S. President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 had been known as the largest in world history, amassing 10 million to 15 million people in more than 600 cities across the globe. This summer’s anti–police brutality protests within the U.S.—which also spread internationally—featured the participation of up to 26 million people in the country alone. So even if the 250 million figure is difficult to pin down with certainty, the Indian farmers’ protests still clearly dwarf these numbers by several degrees. That is, of course, no guarantee of success. After all, this is the same government that crushed dissidents in Kashmir and demonstrators against the Citizenship Amendment Act with relative ease. But that doesn’t mean the farmers shouldn’t keep fighting.