Why are Farmers in India Protesting? – A Ground Report from New Delhi

It is a tragedy that over two hundred farmers have died protesting in the bitter winter cold outside India’s capital, New Delhi.

It is perhaps an equally great tragedy that a large number of urban Indians don’t even know why hundreds of thousands of farmers have been protesting there for the last two and a half months in the first place. All they know is that it has something to do with three new farm-related laws that the government of India passed in Parliament last year.

One can hardly blame them for not knowing. Much of the electronic and print media that the great majority of Indians consume only broadcasts and publishes news that makes the government look good. Interestingly, India’s caste system manifests itself even in the mainstream media, most of which is run by a small number of families who are members of the upper castes. Dalits, or members of the lower casts, believe it or not, have a very difficult time rising in media organizations.

If most TV channels and newspapers in India are to believed, then the farmers sitting in protest are ‘misled’ at best and ‘terrorists’ at worst. (Yes, you read that right. Terrorists.)

Screaming anchors on prime time news and gladiatorial panel discussions every night have made sure that no rational discussion or debate on critical national issues ever takes place, and that TV viewers and newsreaders all over India are fed a steady diet of fake news, misinformation and inflammatory negative coverage of the Farmers Protest.

Consider how a single Tweet about the farmers’ protest by pop icon Rihanna dominated Indian prime time news for days on end and even provoked an angry rebuke by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs telling her to “keep out of India’s internal matters”.

This week Twitter blocked or deleted the accounts of at least 500 people, including activists and groups who were sharing what is happening with the farmers protest in India at the request of the Indian government.

In fact, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, who is part of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party or BJP, has gone so far as to call the farmer protesters “parasites who live off agitations.” From the floor of the Indian Parliament.

The few brave journalists and independent media houses who have dared to challenge the predominant narrative are finding themselves harassed by government agencies and million- dollar defamation suits.

You can click here to India Speaks to hear from some of the farmers themselves.

It is important to understand that the Indian farmers’ woes began long before these three new bits of legislation were enacted. One needs to go all the way back to the early 1990s when India adopted “market reforms” and began to move from a largely state-controlled economy to a *neo-liberal one.

*Neo liberalism: a political orientation that favors policies that promote free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending

India’s much-touted ‘growth story’, however, has left the farmer behind. Although the farmer has always been one of the most vulnerable members of Indian society (how many other professions depend on the weather for their very existence?), her fate was truly sealed in the 1990s – in 1996, to be precise. According to food and agriculture expert Devinder Sharma, the Indian state has deliberately enacted policies that have driven farmers out of agriculture.

“This approach follows the World Bank’s prescriptions from way back in the 1990s – that India needs to move 400 million people from rural to urban areas by 2015,” he says. “To achieve this, successive governments have been systematically [defunding] public investments in agriculture and impoverishing farmers by denying them a fair and remunerative price.”

In other words, there has been a concerted, state-sponsored effort for decades to make agriculture unprofitable and push farmers off the farms and into the cities; to turn them into cheap labour for infrastructure, construction, and real estate projects! This long-term project based on short-term thinking has cut across party lines. The National Skill Development Council stated in 2015 that its aim was to reduce the work force in agriculture from the existing 57% per cent to 38% by 2022.

Whatever our successive governments’ intentions may have been, the results of their policies are clear. While the urban rich continue to increase their wealth every year, the rural poor continue to sink deeper into debt bondage and poverty. 

We can’t speak on this subject without mentioning what Monsanto has done to the farmers of India. In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations including Monsanto. Monsanto quickly monopolized the seeds in India with their GMO seeds which they designed to require fertilizers and pesticides that farmers can ill afford. Monsanto made their seeds sterile so new seeds cannot be harvested for the next year. Many of Monsanto’s seeds did not grow well or yield a harvest. The seed which had been the farmers’ common resource became the “intellectual property” of Monsanto, for which it started collecting hefty royalties from the farmers. Monsanto made a renewable resource a non-renewable, patented commodity forcing farmers to buy the seeds from them each season. They raised the cost of their cotton seeds 80,000%.

Over 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide, trapped in vicious cycles of debt and crop failures, 84% of these suicides are attributed directly to Monsanto’s Bt cotton. Their land is taken away to pay their debts. What is worse is that after a farmer commits suicide, the debt falls on the remaining family members. Monsanto has essentially created a generational slave economy based on their toxic chemical and seed monopolies. The farmers debts are Monsanto’s massive profits. Experts fear the farming laws could drive even more people to the brink.

“The new laws that they have passed, we call them death warrants of farmers and laborers,” farmer Kewal Singh of Punjab said.

In many ways, the three new farm laws are the straw that threatens to break the Indian farmer’s back once and for all. Here are some of their most contentious features:

• Farmers currently sell their produce in government-run networks of wholesale markets called mandis. Here, they are assured of at least a basic minimum price for rice and wheat and a handful of other crops. But the new Farm Laws allow private companies to set up parallel mandis, which, the farmers fear will make the existing mandis redundant and leave them at the mercy of large corporations who will eventually force them to sell their produce at throwaway prices even though initially they may offer higher prices than the existing mandis.

The farmers’ great fear (and it is not an unfounded one) is that they will no longer be able to afford to run even their small plots of farm lands and will be forced to sell them off to the larger corporations. Either that or they will end up as labourers on their own lands. It is worth remembering that 86% of India’s farmers farm very small plots of land, less than 5 acres.

• The new Laws also give corporations the freedom to stock and store as much agricultural produce as they want. Till very recently this was illegal, because hoarding food leads to black-marketeering and subsequent price rise. One does not have to be a genius to realize that he who controls the supply also controls the price.

• Besides the land-owning farmers, there are also nearly 500 million landless individuals in rural India, who depend on the farm sector for their livelihoods. Once the corporations come in and bring in modern technology and heavy machinery, a huge chunk of these farm labourers as they are called will most certainly lose their jobs working on the farms, being made redundant. They will have no safety net

• Possibly the most galling aspect of these new laws is the legal immunity they give corporations in the area of contract farming. In case of a disagreement between a farmer and a corporation, the farmer will have no legal recourse left. He will not be allowed to appeal to Indian courts. He will only allowed to appeal his case to the Sub-divisional Magistrate, a fairly low level administrative rank and one that is notorious for its corruptibility.

For many decades now, farmers have been receiving something called ‘MSP’ or Minimum Support Price for growing certain crops. The farmers are demanding that the government scrap these three laws and bring in a fresh piece of legislation that makes Minimum Support Price a legal guarantee for the farmers. The farmers rightly argue that doing so will put money in the farmers’ hands and help to solve the huge agrarian crisis that India has been reeling under for decades now.

As someone who has frequented many peaceful and non-violent protests, I can honestly say I have never seen one like this. The farmers camped at Delhi’s borders are living in difficult conditions, at many spots without adequate running water and functional toilets. And yet their demeanor is graceful, generous and kind. The first question I am asked every single I time I visit any of their camp sites is, “Will you have a cup of tea and something to eat.”

This isn’t a courtesy shown only to their well-wishers, it is hospitality that is also extended to the paramilitary troops and police keeping an eye on them.

I try not to go empty-handed when I visit them. Some days I carry along a bag or oranges, other days I take biscuit packets and bottles of water. I know it’s not much, but it is the courteous thing to do while visiting someone, especially those who grow our food.

And when I ask them what we as residents of Delhi can do for them, the answer is always, “Please tell the government and the people of Delhi we are not terrorists. Tell them we are non-violent, and tell them that we will not go back till these laws are repealed. We will stay here as long as we have to do.”

What a lot of urban folks people have not realized – and certainly the government of India didn’t when they passed these laws – is how educated, informed and clear thinking the Indian farming community is. Many of them hold Masters’ degrees in agricultural science, education and sociology and can discuss and debate topics of national importance for hours (I would say, much better than many of their urban counterparts). They are clear about what the government needs to do:

• Repeal the Farm Laws completely

• Introduce Minimum Support Price for all 23 major Indian crops across the country

• Make Minimum Support Price a legal right for farmers.

• Instead of bringing corporations into agriculture, build 42,000 more mandis across the country which will make it easy for India’s farmers to sell their produce.

Despite everything the authorities have tried to do – cut off their Internet, turn off the electricity in their vicinity and attack them either directly or through hired goons – the farmers have dug in for the long haul. As a farmer from the north Indian state of Punjab told me the other day, “We are farmers. We grow food. We know how to be patient and we will stay here as long as we have to. We will either win this battle or we will die trying.”

Author:

Rohit K is a citizen journalist in India who writes to give voice to the suffering and marginalized.