India's Farmers Take to Streets in Mass Protest John Elliott

Demands for repeal of reform laws rushed through parliament.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authoritarian rule – supported by his home minister Amit Shah – is facing one of its biggest challenges since 2014 with thousands of farmers staging mass protests and blocking highways on New Delhi’s outskirts. They are opposing recent agricultural legislation that introduces reforms affecting the selling and pricing of their crops.

The farmers have refused to be tempted into the city for a controlled demonstration and have stayed where they have most power, on the main routes into the capital. Some have joined by wives, widening the base of the protests, Accompanied with food canteens, they are reported to be in no hurry to go home – seasonal crop harvesting and sowing have just been completed in the state of Punjab, which is leading the protest along with neighboring Haryana.

Amit Shah uncharacteristically tried to mediate earlier in the week, but more than three hours of talks with 35 representatives from more than 20 farmers’ organizations failed when they rejected the creation of a committee to examine the issues. Today (Dec 3) there have been more than seven hours of talks (the farmers took their own food and refused the government’s) but no final solution has been found. Talks will resume on December 5.

Meanwhile, the protests on the highways have been gathering strength, sometimes clashing with police and paramilitary forces.

The basic demand has been for the government to recall parliament and repeal three laws that it passed last September. That would be a huge climb-down that Modi and Shah clearly want to avoid, so the government is offering ways to ease some of the farmers’ concerns, which might lead to the laws being amended 

The aim is to bring agriculture into line with India’s primary reforms that began to open up the economy in 1991. But there has been repeated opposition because of the sensitivities of India’s hundreds of millions of farmers, many with tiny holdings, and because of vested interests ranging from large farmers to government market agents.

The Bharatiya Janata government can’t be blamed for what it’s trying to do. Indeed it should be praised for trying to solve an old problem that has been holding back the development of agriculture, which involves half of India’s 1.38 billion people.

Insensitive Approach

It can however be blamed for the insensitive way that it issued executive orders in June and then rushed approval of the three bills through parliament in September when hearings were encumbered by the coronavirus shutdown. Modi and Shah ignored calls for the usual detailed consideration and debate, assuming that they wouldn’t face significant opposition.

The issues are emotive but the protests so far have been primarily party political, driven by Punjab, which has a Congress state government. The state’s highways and railways have been blocked since September by members of 31 organizations representing nearly one million farmers.

Modi seems to have not realized that Punjab has proud characteristics that differentiate it from other states and that affect how it should be handled. It is the home of the Sikh religion and, as Shekhar Gupta, a leading editor pointed out in ThePrint last week, it “is not part of the Hindi/Hindu heartland” that instinctively backs Modi. Sikhs do not subscribe to the nationalist Hindutva. 

It had the bloody Khalistan independence movement in the 1980s, which was wiped out as a terrorist force at the beginning of the 1990s but still has some appeal – Khalistan banners have been seen on the highway protests. The government should therefore be taking care to ensure that the current protests not result in a revival of social unrest among the youth – earlier generations provided the foot soldiers for the Khalistan movement.

Youth Unemployment

Some 26 percent of the state’s youth are jobless and farmers fear they are losing their identity and ability to act as a political force. The youth have not till now had “a focal point around which to coalesce their grievances,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a prominent political scientist, wrote in the Indian Express. This “might be sustaining the farmers’ agitation and driving it to a greater show of strength”.

The idea behind the legislation is to remove restrictions on the sale of produce so that farmers can avoid bureaucratic and often corrupt mandis -- local public sector markets – that have a statutory monopoly in many, but not all, states. This should boost both food processing, which currently only absorbs 10 percent of production, and exports that only account for 2.3 percent of world trade. 

“These reforms have not only broken shackles of farmers but have also given new rights and opportunities to them,” Modi claimed last week in his Mann Ki Baat, or monthly radio talk.

Under India’s complex quasi-federal constitution, agriculture is a state subject but the central government also has powers, which it used for the September legislation. Two of the bills allowed farmers to bypass state-mandated mandis and sell to whomever they like, and provided a structure for contract farming with direct farmer-to-buyer deals. The third bill lowered government control on production, sale, and distribution of key commodities.

Individual states have the right to reject or amend new laws, which some have done. In Punjab and Haryana, however, the states’ governors have not approved amended laws, presumably on instructions from the central government.

The farmers’ unions are now complaining that they were not consulted. They are understandably concerned that private sector buyers will deal with them more harshly than the current mandis where influence can be peddled, and relationships developed between the farmer and commission agents who often become family moneylenders.

They are also concerned that they will lose the protection of food grains’ minimum support prices that guarantees prices the government pays – in Punjab and Haryana, the government’s Food Corporation of India buys 85 percent of the main wheat and paddy. Modi has publicly stated several times that the support price system won’t be removed, but the fear remains. The farmers’ organizations want this enshrined in law, which the government does not want to do, but it seems that ministers are discussing ways to spread the minimum price protection to private sector deals.

Modi has often been criticized for his poor execution of policies. This time it is his hubris and insensitivity that has opened the way for the issue to be politicized by the opposition and vested interests.

John Elliott is Asia Sentinel’s South Asia correspondent. He blogs at Riding the Elephant.

This article was published in Asia Sentinel dated 3 December 2020. Republished with permission from Asia Sentinel.