FOR the last four years, India’s farming community remains under great turmoil because of Indian premier Narendra Modi’s obscure, fascist, fundamentalist and an apartheid green lawfare. Needless to say, intermittently since September 2020, the Indian Government has been witnessing a continuous wave of populist movements against the policies –callously and ruthlessly brought forward by the ruling right-wing central government (BJP) –indoctrinated by the Hindutva ideologues in New Delhi. This farmers ‘movement against the Modi Government is deeply rooted in the recently passed farm laws, namely the ‘Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; Farmers Agreement on Price Assurance and Farms Services Act 2020; and Essential Commodities Amendment Act 2020.
Tens of thousands of farmers began a protest march toward New Delhi earlier this week to demand guaranteed prices for their produce, but were stopped by the police about 200 kilometres away from the capital. The farmers are camping on the border between Punjab and Haryana after being blocked by concrete and metal barricades. Police have unjustifiably detained hundreds of protesters who through country-wide remonstrance have appealed the Government to review the three fascist conditions that New Delhi imposed on farmers in September 2020. Whereas, the preamble to the first law says it aims to “protect and empower” farmers to engage with wholesalers, exporters and retailers in a “fair and transparent manner.”
The core of the agrarian movement: most of the protesters are farmers from northern Punjab and Haryana states, the two biggest agricultural producers. They are demanding the repeal of laws passed by Parliament in September that they say will favour large corporate farms, devastate the earnings of many farmers and leave those who hold small plots behind as big corporations win out. Modi has billed the laws as necessary to modernize Indian farming. Because of the demographics of Punjab and Haryana, many of the protesters in New Delhi happen to be from India’s minority Sikh community though their grievances are rooted in economic issues, not religious ones. These protests are also happening in other parts of the country among Indians of other backgrounds.
Notably, over 250 farmer unions are marching together to press the ruling leadership on ironclad guarantees. “Last time, they fooled us, but this time we won’t be fooled. We will not return until our demands are met,” said one of the protestors, according to the Reuters News Agency. Indian authorities have responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and a beefed-up security presence in the capital, all designed to keep protestors from exercising their right to assemble and protest in peace.
Ostensibly observed that the farmers are strictly adhered to their core demand for a Minimum Support Prices (MSP) mechanism. Per se, MSP is a necessary buffer for Indian farmers to navigate increased price volatility and sudden market fluctuations through better state support. A majority of India’s population remains deeply dependent on agricultural income for livelihoods and farmers represent the lifeblood of that sector. The lion’s share of Indian farmers have less than two hectares of land, face largely stagnant incomes and have struggled to secure ambitious levels of investment and debt relief once promised by the BJP.
The MSP system runs largely on trust, yet policymakers can effectively dismantle it by setting the price so low that no farmer will want to sell or by not providing accessible product collection centres. In many parts of India today, for example, farmers are told they can sell their grain at a certain price, but there is nowhere in their vicinity to sell it. If a corporation violates a contract with a farmer, the new laws prohibit the farmer from seeking redress in a regular court. Interestingly, the Government-passed legislation removes restrictions on stockpiling food grain.
BJP’s Eco fascists: “The most simple definition would be (someone with) a fascist politic or a fascist worldview that is invoking environmental concern or environmental rhetoric to justify the hateful and extreme elements of their ideology,” a social scientist Cassidy Thomas told DW. In the 1930s and ’40s, Hindutva’s founding ideologues V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar extolled Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for manifesting “national pride at its highest” and thus, Hindutva fanatics are inspired to profit from it. Since 2014, India has been stirred up with a range of protest movements focused on multiple issues—caste discriminations, authoritarian curtailment of freedom of speech, religion-based citizenship issue….’’The Modi government’s agenda– to repress the dissent voices intrinsically– expose its growing authoritarianism vis-à-vis the Indian minorities. BJP’s sponsored existing systems of inequality that target certain people while leaving others untouched is being challenged through the agrarian movement.
Needless to say, the ruling party, BJP, through its IT cell and control over media, began to spread a narrative that they were, at best, rich farmers and, at worst, the operatives of Khalistan Movement who are demanding the secession of the state of Punjab, where the majority of protesters were from. Furthermore, in what appeared to be a pre-mediated event, farmers were presented to be insulting the Indian national flag, in line with previous strategies of the Hindu national government to present critical voices as anti-national. By multiple accounts, the Hindutva-launched campaigns of “Reforestation,” “wildlife habitat preservation” and “green energy production” have become bywords for the extrajudicial killing, torture and dispossession of indigenous peoples, funded and supported by international conservation and development organizations.
Modi’s New Delhi must learn that democracy works only when there are more rules and mechanisms to control the rich and powerful than the poor. By all contours, ‘this movement reflects on the post Marxist-reductionist values of a class struggle, fostering a determination for a social change. Of course, many farmers don’t trust the government. The agrarian law demonstrators see the new laws as the first step toward dismantling all the support given to farmers during the Green Revolution in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the peasants’ community that played a dominant role in Indian politics in the 1940s, has spurred the biggest challenge to Modi’s rule. They are a powerful constituency that Premier Modi cannot afford to alienate. All the more, given the magnitude of the Sikh community, the movement will profoundly cast an impact on India’s upcoming elections.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law. He deals with the strategic and nuclear issues.
Email: rizvipeaceresearcher@gmail.com
views expressed are writer’s own.
