Rakesh Tikait is a highly unlikely adversary of the ruling dispensation in the Center. The 51-year-old Delhi police officer turned farmer leader admits to voting for the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The majority did the same in his Jat community-dominated village of Sisauli in Muzaffarnagar district. from Uttar Pradesh, especially by its candidate, Union Minister Sanjeev Kumar Balyan, who belongs to the same Khap (clan) from Bali, headed by Rakesh’s older brother, Naresh Tikait.
Young Tikait has also had an illustrious political career. He contested the 2007 UP Assembly elections from the Khatauli seat with the support of Congress, only to finish in a distant sixth place. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, he struggled with a Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) ticket from Amroha and lost his deposit after polling just 9,539 votes.
BKU leader Rakesh Tikait in Ghazipur. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)
Even in the current uproar against the Narendra Modi government’s agricultural reform laws, farmers from the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) of Tikait were, until very recently, numerically fewer at the Delhi-UP Ghazipur border protest site compared to with those mobilized by his rival VM Singh. from Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan. Some claim that Tikait was actually “promoted” by the Center to neutralize the more belligerent farmers’ unions in Punjab and Haryana.
But all of that has changed after Tikait’s speech Thursday night in Ghazipur, refusing to follow orders from the local administration to vacate the site and judicial arrest. As videos of his collapse and threats to hang himself if farm laws were not repealed went viral, “har kisan roya aur sabhi ko Mahender Singh Ji yaad aaya (All the farmers were crying and remembering their father and BKU founder Mahendra Singh Tikait), ”said Rajvir Singh Mundet, Shamli social worker and activist.
Also, with VM Singh coming out of the turmoil, Rakesh has now become the undisputed net kisan of Western UP. His action has increased further with RLD chief Chaudhary Ajit Singh, with whom the Tikaits have shared a hot and cold relationship, calling personally the same night and also with the support of Jat leaders from neighboring states, including Abhay. Singh from Indian National Lok Dal. Hanuman Beniwal of the Chautala Party and Rashtriya Loktantrik.
Bharatiya Kisan Union spokesperson Rakesh Tikait and farmer representatives during the eighth round of talks with the government on new farm laws, at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi, Friday, January 8, 2021 (PTI Photo / Manvender Vashist).
“That single emotional act – everyone saw his humiliation by a vengeful government as their own – has united our entire farming community not only in West UP, but also in Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Delhi. This has never happened since 1987-88, ”added Mundet.
That was the time when Mahendra Singh Tikait launched a four-day dharna at the Karmukhera Energy House in Muzaffarnagar in January 1987 against raising the state government’s electricity rates by a third to begin with. This was followed a year later by a 24-day gherao from the Meerut Commission (to increase the official price of sugarcane from Rs 27 to Rs 35 / cwt) and finally the weeklong rally of half a million farmers. on the New Lawn of the Delhi Boat Club in October 1988.
Bharatiya Kisan Union Leader Mahendra Singh Tikait addresses a farmers’ rally in Sisauli in the presence of then-Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, Devi Lal Deputy Prime Minister and UP Prime Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav Express Archives
However, veteran journalist Harvir Singh felt that the contexts are different.
The 1970s and 1980s were a period of relative prosperity for farmers, with better crop yields from newly grown varieties of wheat and sugar cane. There were government jobs, whether in the army and the police or as school teachers and workers at the village level, even for those with basic education, which in itself was cheap. “The agitations of the BKU then were only to defend those achievements,” he noted. The ongoing protests, by contrast, are from farmers who, having seen better times, are today on a slippery path.
There is no better symbol of that than sugar cane.
BKU President Naresh Tikait with his grandchildren and a photo of his father Mahendra Singh Tikait seen in the picture, in his village in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. (Express photo / PRAVEEN KHANNA)
The BJP government led by Yogi Adityanath in UP, since coming to power in March 2017, has increased the state recommended price (SAP) of cane by just Rs 10 per quintal to Rs 315-325. The SAP for the 2020-21 season has not even been announced even though mills have started crushing operations since late October. In addition, they owe farmers more than 12 billion rupees for cane purchases made in both the current and previous seasons.
In UP, the real source of anger for farmers, more than the three reform laws of the Center, is sugar cane, in addition to the doubling of electricity rates (both for irrigation pumps and for domestic connections) , diesel turns around Rs 10 / liter more expensive in the last. year alone, and the collateral damage of the Adityanath government’s strict anti-slaughter measures. And they have apparently chosen Rakesh Tikait to lead their cause, as did his father three decades ago.
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