Editor’s Note: India’s war against its own farmers

The government’s ferocious reaction is a naked admission of its extreme fear of its own people, its fear of the potency of peaceful protest.

A Nihang or a Sikh warrior rests on a makeshift barricade of sandbags at Shambhu on the Punjab-Haryana border on February 23. | Photo Credit: ADNAN ABIDI/REUTERS

Iron nails in the tarmac, concrete blocks, concertina wire, barricades, sandbags. Rubber bullets and drones dropping teargas shells. Demolition notices pasted on homes. The Ambala DSP’s threat to cancel passports. This is nothing short of a declaration of war. Is it against an invading enemy? No, it is against farmers demanding state guarantees.

Are India’s farmers doing something unprecedented? No, as this goes to press, farmers’ protests are raging across Europe, in Brussels, Madrid, Cardiff, Warsaw, Bordeaux. Farmers have parked tractors outside parliament buildings, driven into city squares, burnt bales of straw. But not one country has prevented farmers from entering their capital the way India has.

This catastrophised and ferocious reaction to citizens who express unhappiness against the government has now become distinctive of the Indian state. It is a naked admission of the government’s extreme fear of its own people, fear of the potency of peaceful protest.

Despite India’s cherished history of satyagraha and civil disobedience, two prominent tools that stymied and helped drive out the British Raj, there are astonishing numbers of Indians today who believe that protests are illegitimate and protesters should be arrested; that criticism of the government arises only from personal animus against the Prime Minister; that protesting anti-people policies is anti-national. How does one make sense of this attitude from descendants of a people who strode fearlessly with Gandhi to make salt in flagrant disobedience of a law?

But let us first ask why farmers are demanding a legally guaranteed MSP. Because unlike salaried jobs, farming income is not guaranteed; it depends on many vagaries. From the 1960s, India has had a Food Corporation of India and APMCs to buy produce at a reasonable price, thus inoculating farmers from exploitation and market insecurity, and buyers from high costs. Since liberalisation, however, farmers have been coerced into growing crops the West needs and into an open market where the odds are stacked heavily against them by WTO mandates and free trade deals. It has pushed them deeper and deeper into debt. Today, they are fighting for survival. And fighting back the waves of neo-colonialism lapping at the shores of the Global South even as governments keep pushing the country back into the maws of Western economic control.

Unfortunately, sections of the middle class, themselves vastly differentiated in wealth and status, are unable to separate the idea of the “rich farmer” from the idea of farming as a sector. Or to realise why Indian farming must be protected from rapacious neoliberal trends. Studies show that this middle class is driven less by ideology and more by aspirations, social media, and narcissism. Even the neoliberal guru Gurcharan Das described them as “uninhibited, pragmatic and amoral”. Large swathes of this middle class claim space as “public opinion” today. That woman in Delhi mouthing obscenities at farmers from her car is its archetype—oblivious, self-righteous, enraged by anything that disturbs her status quo.

So long as these sections of people believe they can remain insulated inside their gated communities and WhatsApp groups, they will continue to show no indignation when a government barricades the capital against the very citizens whose capital it is. They will continue to watch and even cheer when the state launches a war against its own.

But the middle class also focusses keenly on its own survival. It is unlikely to be soothed forever by acronymic assurances alone. Soon small businessmen, for instance, will realise that their unhappiness with GST is part of a growing overall crisis. And that whether it is GST reforms, MSME grants, unemployment woes, or farmers’ protests, they are all part of a larger rights agenda. Which must be everyone’s agenda.