For now, farmers’ protests in Punjab against the Center’s three agricultural laws are bringing together, despite their differing and often conflicting interests, sectors of farmers large and small, landless farm workers and commission agents. It is also a time of unity for Punjab’s notoriously fragmented agricultural unions.
The turmoil is spreading outside the agricultural sector, joining, for example, the theater group in Amritsar, the merchant in the city’s famous cloth wholesale market. A play written in the early 1950s is making a comeback today, says Kewal Dhaliwal, who runs Manch Rangmanch in Amritsar, who has been performing at the protest sites.
In “Harian Saunnian” by Joginder Baharla, Punjab’s two main crops, “Harian” and “Saunnian” (personification of rice and wheat), talk to the farmer and ask him why he is still poor even though he works so hard. . “During the performances now, the audience sings along with the choir, ‘saade khet, saade khet (our fields, ours!),’” Dhaliwal says.
And in the city’s Tahli Sahib Bazaar, fabric merchant Ajay Kumar Arora says, “I belong to a family of entrepreneurs, but about 70 percent of my clients are from the villages. If they get good money for the harvest, they buy more … “
But one group of actors is sidelined and left behind: Punjab’s political parties.
Having woken up late to the upheaval, accused of speaking with many voices, they are being shunned from protest sites and villages, forced to take on the role of cheerleaders, left to mount parallel protests, like the Punjab MPs. of the Congress in Jantar Mantar. Or participate, like Arvind Kejriwal and Amarinder Singh, in discussions on Twitter.
Looking ahead, this marginalization of the political actor has implications for the future of the State and the political party. All parties will have to face disappointment to regain the trust of the people.
In the immediate term, as the protests continue, it could mean that the political party will have little or no say in a crucial calculation that will decide the timing and content of the resolution: When do the costs of mobilization start to exceed investments? being done in it?
As the ruling party in the Center, the BJP, of course, is on the other side of the fence. With Shiromani Akali Dal exiting the NDA because of farm laws, the BJP is alone again in a state that withstood Modi’s sweep in 2014 and again in 2019.
But his current isolation in the state is made of more than that. In its long-standing alliance with the SAD, there was a more or less orderly division of political labor: the BJP focused on Hindu urban areas, while Akalis drew its strength primarily from the Sikh peasantry.
The split with the SAD therefore means that the urban-centric BJP seems incapable of bridging the communication gap with protesting farmers by camping on the borders of Delhi or in the villages.
While looking for conspiracies and Others, the BJP also seems to party in sullen denial.
In Chandigarh, former BJP MP and national executive member Satya Pal Jain speaks of “a lobby, anti-BJP and anti-Modi.” “They did prachar (publicity), as they did against the CAA – aapki zameen chali jaayegi, the corporations will take your land … this propaganda, started by the AAP and a section of the hardline Sikhs, went down. Captain Amarinder Singh took advantage of it to corner both SAD and BJP in one fell swoop. Then came the somersault of SAD ”. The BJP, he says, feels “let down” by SAD.
To this cast of characters, which also includes “leftist” Kisan union leaders, Jain adds the commissioner or arhtiya, “who feels more affected by the new laws”.
But the BJP, says Jain, sees in this crisis a new opportunity. “This will be finally resolved by the Center, and the credit will go to the party.” It will give you the opportunity to expand your base on your own in Punjab, as you did in Haryana and Himachal, and “start a new experiment,” says Jain.
Akali high-ranking leader and former Punjab education minister Daljit Singh Cheema disputes the BJP’s claim that the SAD had been delayed. His party began to object from the introduction of the ordinances, he says, met with agricultural unions, relayed the feedback to the Modi government, asked for a select committee.
Now a cornered SAD, which posted its lowest ever figure in the 2017 assembly elections, winning just 15 seats out of 117, is resorting to its traditional anti-center political rhetoric and tactics, only this time it is not deploy against the old enemy. Congress but recently divorced BJP couple.
“What was the need to do this (bring the laws)?” Cheema asks and answers his own question: “One after another, the Center is invading state powers. The federal system is being undermined, the reason is arrogance ”.
The second term of the NDA has been “very different”, but this “violation of the constitutional spirit” was also visible before, he says, and he cites centrally sponsored schemes, centralization of powers in GST, implementation of laws like UAPA. These are “Emergency waale halaat (Circumstances similar to those of an emergency)”, it is the same “Indira Gandhi policy”.
Like the others, Congress also seems to have been caught off guard. However, his bond is special: he is in power in the state and yet he is not powerful in the issue that currently agitates him; has few or no cards in the confrontation between the Center and the Punjab farmers.
“Acquisitions in this state are done like clockwork. If you went up in a helicopter, you would see the fields of Punjab all yellow, and after 10-12 days, there would be no standing grain. It is well-oiled machinery, ”says Sunil Jakhar, chairman of the Punjab Pradesh Congressional Committee.
There are corruptions and inefficiencies in the FCI, he says, and as leader of the Opposition, he had taken his concerns
to the CAG. “But you have to correct, not dismantle,” he says. The government’s “corporate promotion” is having an unwanted effect, he says, “Now it has painted them as great villains.”
If the congressional wording highlights the mainstream political situation in Punjab, the marginalization of the Aam Aadmi Party underscores the domestication of the alternative.
Just three years ago, in 2017, the AAP had managed to turn Punjab’s contest from two corners into a triangular one into an anti-establishment platform, emerging as the second-largest party in its first assembly election in the state. He is now side by side with the main parties, on the outside of the farmers’ protests, looking inward.
The opposition leader in the Punjab Assembly, Harpal Singh Cheema of the AAP, says: “This started with the agricultural unions, then we talked.”
When Cheema says, “we support the kisan jathebandiyan (farmer mobilizations), jab unhone kiya toh hamne kiya,” it is both a factual description of the sequence of events and an inadvertent admission of the failure of the AAP to seize the moment or movement. .
Cheema reacts to the BJP’s hint of an “AAP-Khalistani lobby”: “Also in the last assembly elections, Congress called us Khalistani and the BJP called us Urban Naxals. The agencies are with them, why don’t they put us in jail? “
But right now, the AAP’s real challenge may lie in what it says below: at the protest sites, “we have to sit in the back, we can’t even sit in the front, they don’t let us speak.”
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