Thousands of farmers blocked main roads across India on Saturday in a months-long protest against the new agricultural policies, saying corporations would be empowered and economically devastated.
Continuing demonstrations indicate that the opposition energy rja remains strong, as the government and the farmer are stuck in a stalemate after failing to achieve any major success even after several rounds of negotiations between them.
According to Reuters, protesters across the country used tractors, trucks, tents and boulders to block roads during a three-hour “chakka jam” or road blockade across the country.
According to Avik Sahana, secretary of the All India Peasants ‘Struggle Coordinating Committee, Federation of Farmers’ Groups, blockades were set up at more than 10,000 places across India on Saturday.
“We will continue to fight till our last breath,” Zajjan Singh, an 80-year-old farmer at the protest site in Ghazipur, told the Guardian. “Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi should know that either he will stay or we will stay,” he said.
Thousands of protesters across the country to meet the police presence was deployed. While the farmers’ demonstration was largely peaceful on January 26, a group of protesters stormed a protest road and clashed with police officers in Delhi, leaving hundreds injured and one protester dead.
Farmer leaders condemned the violence, but security has increased since then. According to the Guardian, police have added iron spikes and steel barricades around protest sites to prevent farmers from entering the capital.
Why protesters are gathering
Opponents are gathering against three agrarian reform laws passed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in September; At the same time, the laws are aimed at deregulating India’s agricultural industry.
In December, Vox’s Jaril Irwin explained that while the government says this is necessary to modernize the economy, opponents argue that it will only intensify their economic ambiguity:
Under the new policies, farmers will now sell goods and enter into agreements with independent buyers outside of government-approved markets, which have long served as primary places for farmers to do business. Modi and his party members believe that the reforms will help India modernize and improve its agro-industry, which will mean more freedom and prosperity for farmers.
But protesting farmers are not convinced. However, the government has said it will not reduce the minimum support price for essential crops like cereals, which the Indian government has set for decades and has assured that they will disappear. Without them, farmers believe they will be at the mercy of large corporations that will pay extremely low prices for the crops they need, plunging them into debt and financial ruin.
“Farmers are so passionate that they know these three laws are like death warrants for them,” said Abhimanyu Kohar, coordinator of the National Farmers Alliance of the Federation of more than 180 non-political farming organizations across India. “Our farmers are making this movement for our survival, for our future.”
Due to the size of their protests, the protesters have received constant international attention. According to Reuters, agriculture belongs to about 15 parents of India’s GDP, about 50 per cent of the country’s working farmers – and millions of farmers have taken part in street demonstrations and strikes since last fall.
Farmers have a powerful voice in Indian politics – and do not want to lose it
Experts say the government’s attempt to change farming policy has touched a third rail in Indian politics, which has eroded the tensions created by modernization, which has been threatening to break market norms for farmers for decades.
Since the 1970s, an extensive system of agricultural subsidies and price guarantees, organized by the market system known as mandi, has been a central feature of India’s agricultural policy, and, as Arwin noted, has essentially helped to provide some sort of provision to farmers. Safety net
Aditya Dasgupta, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, who specializes in Indian politics, says those policies are the product of large-scale mobilization by farmers, agricultural organizations, movements and parties, during which they became politically powerful. The Green Revolution, the country’s greatest leap in agricultural productivity, took place in the 1970s and ’80s.
Dasgupta told me, ‘Today leads to the tradition of farmers protesting and demonstrating agricultural power, but the context is very different,’ Dasgupta told me. ‘India is urbanizing, agriculture is a declining share of GDP, and for the ruling BJP party The main source of political-economic support comes from large urban businesses. “
“So, in a sense, this is not just a contradiction about specific policies, but a big way about the regional base of political power, and whether India remains a politically powerful interest group in the way it urbanizes,” he said.
While it is not clear what kind of compromise or relaxation can be made in the tensions over the current reforms, experts like Dasgupta have said that the underlying dynamics that have propelled them – questions about who should take power in India’s growing economy – are likely. Long term.
