Tens of thousands of farmers blocked highways across India on Saturday in continuation of a months-long protest movement against new agricultural policies that they say would empower and destroy them financially.
The sustained protests indicate that prosthetic energy remains strong as the government and farmers remain locked in a stalemate, after a few rounds of negotiations yielding no major breakthroughs.
Protesters used tractors, trucks, tents and rocks to block roads during a three-hour ‘chakka jam’, or roadblock, according to Reuters.
According to Avik Saha, secretary of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordinating Committee, a federation of farmers’ groups, blockades were set up in more than 10,000 places in India on Saturday.
“We will continue to fight to the last breath,” Jhajjan Singh, an 80-year-old farmer at a protest site in Ghazipur, told the Guardian. He said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi “should know he will stay or we will.”
Tens of thousands of police have been deployed across the country to deal with the protests. While the farmers’ demonstrations were largely peaceful, a group of protesters separated from a demonstration route on January 26 and fought with police officers in Delhi, an incident that resulted in hundreds of injuries and the death of a protester.
Boer leaders have condemned the violence, but security has increased since then. According to the Guardian, police added iron points and steel barriers to protest sites to prevent farmers from entering the capital.
Why the protesters mobilize
Protesters mobilize against three agrarian reform laws passed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in September; collectively, the laws aim to deregulate India’s agricultural industry.
As Jariel Arvin of Vox explained in December, while the government says it is necessary to modernize the economy, protesters argue that it will only intensify their economic presidency:
Under the new policy, farmers will now sell goods and enter into contracts with independent buyers outside the government-approved markets, which have long served as the most important place for farmers to do business. Modi and members of his party believe that these reforms will help India modernize and improve its farming, which will mean greater freedom and prosperity for farmers.
But the protesting farmers are not convinced. Although the government has said it will not lower the minimum aid prices for essential crops such as grain, which the Indian government has determined and guaranteed for decades, farmers are worried that they will disappear. Without them, the farmers believe that they will receive large companies that will pay extraordinarily low prices for essential crops, which will land them in debt and financial ruin.
“Farmers have so much passion because they know that these three laws are like death rights to them,” Abhimanyu Kohar, coordinator of the National Farmer’s Alliance, a federation of more than 180 non-political organizations in India, said in an interview with me said. “Our farmers are doing this movement for our future, for our own survival.”
The protests attracted international attention, in part because of their sheer scale. As Reuters notes, although farming makes up only about 15 parents of India’s GDP, about 50 per cent of the country’s workers are farmers – and hundreds of millions of farmers have taken part in street demonstrations and strikes since last autumn.
Farmers have had a powerful voice in Indian politics – and do not want to lose it
Experts believe that the government’s attempt to change agricultural policy has touched a third track in Indian politics, revealing the tensions created by modernization, while threatening to unravel the market norms for farmers that have existed for decades .
Since the 1970s, an extensive system of agricultural subsidies and price guarantees, organized by a system of marketplaces known as mandis, has been a central feature of agricultural policy in India, and, as Arvin noted, has in fact helped farmers a type of safety net.
Aditya Dasgupta, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, who specializes in Indian politics, says the policy is the product of large-scale mobilization by farmers, agricultural unions, movements and parties involved in the Green Revolution, the country’s enormous leap in agricultural productivity, which took place in the 1970s and 80s.
“The farmers’ protests today depend on the tradition of protest and the display of agricultural power, but the context is very different,” Dasgupta told me. “India’s urbanization, agriculture is responsible for a shrinking share of GDP, and the main source of political-economic support for the ruling BJP party comes from urban big business.”
“It is, in a sense, not just a conflict over specific policies, but also a bigger hotspot over the sectoral base of political power, and whether farmers remain a politically powerful interest group if India is urbanized,” he said. .
While it is unclear what kind of compromise or concession could turn off the tensions over the current reforms, experts like Dasgupta point out that the underlying dynamics that led to it – questions about who should possess power in India’s developing economy – are likely in the long run. term.