Farmers prepare for larger battle as key promises remain unfulfilled

With the government dragging its feet on statutory MSP, farmers are gearing up for another agitation.

The Kisan Mahapanchayat organised by the Samyukt Kisan Morcha in New Delhi’s Ramlila grounds on March 20. | Photo Credit: AMIT SHARMA/ANI

Geeta Khushwaha from Damoh in Madhya Pradesh is a migrant worker in the National Capital Region. She is usually needed at home around March during harvesting, but this year she decided to stay back in the city and look for odd jobs to help out her family in distress. Her large joint family in the village owns some three acres of land. She says they were able to salvage the chana (gram) crop, which was harvested before Holi, but then the weather turned. Hundreds of thousands of small and medium farmers like her saw their harvest ruined by  unseasonal rain and hailstorm in north and central India in the third week of March.

She said no compensation had been announced yet and complained that no one really cared. “If prices of vegetables or wheat flour increase in the city, city people  blame the farmer. The unseasonal rain forced my family to sell wheat very cheap. Once the grain becomes black, no one buys it. It is then sold as fodder,” she said.

Wheat crop destroyed by unseasonal rain in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district. | Photo Credit: T.K. Rajalakshmi

Like other small and medium farmers, the Khushwahas sell their produce to the local seth (trader). The government mandi, she rued, would pick only the good part of the harvest and discard the rest. She said that the family would have normally harvested 300 quintals of wheat but the unseasonal rain pushed the yield down to 120 quintals this year. The government survey, she said, would take place in July to assess the crop damage.  

Rajan Jwala is a small farmer from Shamli district in Uttar Pradesh. Rajan, who is associated with the Rashtriya Lok Dal, said he and his fellow villagers staged a protest outside the district magistrate’s office demanding compensation for the loss of the wheat and mustard crops. “Thirty per cent of the wheat crop was destroyed. As the soil is moist, we have delayed sowing sugarcane as well,” he told Frontline. He said there were farmer protests in various parts of the State every day demanding the payment of sugarcane dues and a minimum support price on the lines of the M.S. Swaminathan Commission’s recommendations.

Hail residue in Haryana where hailstorm in March destroyed the wheat crop in large swathes of farmland. | Photo Credit: T.K. Rajalakshmi

Rajan was among the thousands of farmers from western Uttar Pradesh who  joined the historic agitation that started in November 2020 on the borders of Delhi and eventually forced the repeal of three farm laws passed by Parliament. He found it shocking that the Prime Minister spoke on organ donation in his Mann Ki baat on March 26 but had nothing to say about the setback suffered by farmers.

Key issues

The three controversial farm laws were withdrawn in November 2021. Yet, the real cause of discontent is still to be addressed—the absence of a legally guaranteed MSP. The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), the farmers’ front that spearheaded the 2020 agitation, held a Mahapanchayat at Ramlila grounds on March 20 to remind the government of this unresolved problem. Representatives from across the country declared that the next phase (“volume 2”) of the agitation would be launched after April as the government had not done anything about its assurances of a statutory MSP.

Curiously, the Ramlila grounds site was denied to the farmers in 2020, after which the SKM decided to embark on the long tractor march that made history for its peaceful resistance. When the government refused to allow farmer protesters to enter Delhi, they arrived in their tractors and disembarked at the entry points to the city, which were barricaded by the police.

P. Krishnaprasad, finance secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), an important constituent of the SKM, said: “It is noteworthy that now the authorities in Delhi do not outright refuse us a protest venue. They negotiate, yes, but unlike in 2020, when they refused to let us come to central Delhi, today we’ve been able to breach that administrative obduracy and convince them that we have a right to take our demands to the people and the government. It is the result of our year-long peaceful agitation which compelled the government to withdraw the laws. Of course, elections were also a major consideration for the government.”

Eleven rounds of talks with the government failed. Then on December 9, 2021, in the SKM’s last meeting with the Central government, it was promised that important demands would be considered—the formation of a committee to explore the legalisation of MSP; consultations with stakeholders before the tabling of the Electricity (Amendment) Bill; withdrawal of police cases against protesters; financial assistance to the families of over 700 farmers who died in the course of the agitation; and action against those involved in the shooting of four farmers and one journalist in the infamous Lakhimpur Kheri incident.

Hollow promises

The SKM ended the agitation  two days later, on December 11, 2021, on the basis of those assurances. The committee on MSP was to be constituted with representatives from the SKM. This has not happened yet. Ajay Mishra Teni, Minister of State of Home, whose son was one of the main accused in the Lakhimpur Kheri incident, continues to hold his post in the Central government. It was clear that Teni would not be sacrificed by the ruling party: the U.P. Assembly election was approaching and dumping Teni would be a clear admission of guilt.

Inderjit Singh, AIKS leader from Haryana, said that the Prime Minister’s unilateral announcement of the withdrawal of the three farm laws was deliberately made on November 19 in 2021. It was Prakash Parva, the festival marking the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak. The announcement was done with an eye on the impending election in Punjab, whose were at the forefront of the agitation. It was another matter that despite the withdrawal of the farm laws, the BJP could not capitalise on those tactics. It had already lost the support of its ally, the Shiromani Akali Dal, on the issue of the farm laws.

Says Krishnaprasad: “The issue of MSP has become very critical.  Almost all crops have faced a serious crash in prices. One of them is potato. In the last season [October-November] it was procured at Rs.16 a kilo or Rs.1,600 a quintal. This season this has come down to Rs.200 to Rs.400 a quintal or Rs. 2 to Rs.4 a kilo. It sold in the retail market for Rs.38 to Rs.42. Potato growers in West Bengal and Bihar discarded their produce on the streets. Prices of cotton, mustard and red chillies also crashed. In Burdwan district, farmer suicides were reported.”

Highlights

• Farmers regroup to press for statutory MSP and assured procurement by the government.
• Unseasonal rain and hailstorm in northern India in late March ruin crops and deepen agricultural distress.
• Apart from the repeal of the three controversial and hastily passed farm laws, none of the other pressing concerns raised by the year-long agitation of 2020-2021 have been addressed.
• With the general election due in 2024, the BJP can hardly afford to ignore the farming community now and it possible that the Narendra Modi government will come up with opportune announcements before the Assembly elections in the Hindi heartland in 2023. 

The last straw

The crash in onion prices was the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back. In Maharashtra, over 10,000 farmers and tribal people led by AIKS leaders marched from Dindori in Nasik to Mumbai on March 12. They demanded remunerative prices for onion in particular, but also for cotton, tur (arhar), soya bean, green gram and milk. After that the government announced a subsidy of Rs.350 a quintal for onion. The government also agreed to waive loans of 88,000 farmers and set up a committee to ensure forest rights. The Chief Minister made an announcement in the Assembly. This was a major success for farmers.   

The 2023  build-up

The regrouping by farmers started in January. The Mahapanchayat of March 20 was preceded by a panchayat in Haryana’s Jind on January 26. It was attended by a large number of farmers from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and other adjoining States. That the panchayat was held on Republic Day was no coincidence, as Inderjit Singh explained.

First, it was the second anniversary of  the unsavory episode of January 26, 2021, when the Panthic (projected as that of Khalistan) flag was hoisted at Red Fort, allegedly as part of a plan orchestrated to disrupt and discredit the SKM’s “tractor parade” on Republic Day. Inderjit Singh said that this was a conspiracy to finish off the farmers’ movement. It was another matter that it did not succeed. Rakesh Tikait of the Bharatiya Kisan Union made history that day on the U.P-Delhi border with an emotive appeal that recharged the movement. 

The second objective of choosing to hold the Jind panchayat on Republic Day was to counter the impression that the SKM had split and was battling differences within. This impression was sought to be created after some Punjab farmer outfits broke off to form a political party. With a fairly good turnout at Jind on January 26, the SKM was able to send across a message that the platform was largely intact and still popular with peasants.

Third, the emotive date was deemed fit for reiterating the demand for a legal guarantee for an MSP calculated at total cost of cultivation plus 50 per cent (C 2 plus 50) and assured procurement. This was one of the core issues of the movement.

Inderjit Singh said: “The issues remain the same and in fact the crisis has deepened. Only the farm laws were scrapped. Nothing else was done to ease the debt trap and boost meagre farmer incomes. We see many young Haryana men going abroad in search of jobs after selling off their small plots of agricultural land.”

SKM broadens scope of demands

The SKM has called a national meeting on April 30 to chalk out a plan for a pan-India movement focussing on MSP and State-specific issues. The SKM has broadened the scope of its demands: rescinding of the Forest Conservation Rules 2022 (the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes has also objected to the rules), constitution of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices with representation from independent experts and farmer organisations, and replacement of the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana with something that is more effective.

Says Avik Saha of Swaraj Abhiyaan, an SKM constituent: “Agriculture as an occupation is becoming impossible. The Central government did not fulfil most of the critical promises. The lives of farmers continue to be miserable. Even though the NCRB [National Crime Records Bureau] tries to fudge suicide figures, farmers know what is happening to them.... I know government economists will cite facts and figures to say that the crisis is not as bad as what I am saying. They can only throw production and acreage figures but not figures of earnings. The 77th round of NSO [National Statistical Office] showed proof of the dismal earnings. It is so dismal that it is difficult to imagine. A person earning Rs.15,000 in Delhi can’t believe that a farmer with two or three acres earns Rs.7,000 or Rs.8,000.” He said the SKM would organise huge gatherings in State capitals from April end. The “geography” of the movement will be wider, he said. 

Farmers and elections

In the run-up to the 2014 election, the BJP promised a guaranteed MSP for farmers if it came to power. After the party came to power, the Central government filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court expressing its inability to guarantee an MSP that was 50 per cent more than the cost of production. Eight years have passed since that affidavit was filed.

Kisan Mazdoor Mahapanchayat in Muzaffarnagar on February 10, 2023. The fall in the BJP’s vote share in the 2022 Assembly election is attributed to the Mazdoor Mahapanchayat at Muzaffarnagar in September 2021 which called for communal amity and the BJP’s defeat.   | Photo Credit: PTI

In December 2018, the BJP could not secure wins in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Of 424 rural seats in these three States, it won 153. In February 2019 the government announced the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana, under which Rs.6,000 is payable annually in three equal instalments. In Punjab, by many accounts the victory of the Aam Aadmi Party would not have won without the call by farmer leaders to defeat the BJP. In the election campaigns in West Bengal, too, farmer leaders campaigned against the BJP.

In the U.P. Assembly election in 2022, the Yogi Adityanath government was re-elected but the BJP’s vote share went down by two and a half percentage points. This was attributed to the farmers’ call, made under the banner of the Kisan Mazdoor Mahapanchayat at Muzaffarnagar on September 5, 2021, for communal amity and the BJP’s defeat.  

With the general election due next year, the BJP can hardly afford to ignore the farming community now. It is possible that the Modi government will come up with opportune announcements before the Assembly elections in the Hindi heartland later this year.