Tens of thousands of farmers blocked highways across India on Saturday as a continuation of a month-long protest movement against new agricultural policies that they say will empower and financially destroy businesses.
The ongoing demonstrations indicate that the energy of protests remains strong as the government and farmers remain in a gridlock after several rounds of talks between them have failed to produce major breakthroughs.
Protesters used tractors, trucks, tents and boulders to block roads during a three-hour “chakka jam,” or roadblock, across the country, according to Reuters.
According to Avik Saha, a secretary of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee, a federation of peasant groups, blockades were set up on Saturday at more than 10,000 locations across India.
“We will keep fighting until our last breath,” Jhajjan Singh, an 80-year-old farmer on a protest site in Ghazipur, told The Guardian. He said the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, “should know he will stay or we will stay.”
Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed across the country to deal with the protests. While the farming demonstrations were largely peaceful, a group of protesters broke away from a demonstration route on Jan. 26 and fought with police officers in Delhi, an incident that resulted in hundreds of injuries and the death of one demonstrator.
Farm leaders condemned the violence, but security has increased since then. According to the Guardian, the police have placed iron spikes and steel barricades around protest sites to prevent farmers from entering the capital.
Why are the protesters mobilizing
Protesters have campaigned against three agrarian reform laws passed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in September; together the laws are intended to deregulate the agricultural industry in India.
As Vox’s Jariel Arvin explained in December, while the government says this is necessary to modernize the economy, protesters claim it will only add to their economic precarity:
Under the new policy, farmers will now sell goods and contract with independent buyers outside of the government-sanctioned marketplaces, which have long served as the primary locations for farmers to do business. Modi and members of his party believe these reforms will help India modernize and improve the agricultural sector, which will mean greater freedom and prosperity for farmers.
But the protesting farmers are not convinced. Although the government has said it will not lower minimum support prices for essential crops such as grain, which the Indian government has set and guaranteed for decades, farmers are concerned they will disappear. Without them, farmers think they will be at the mercy of large corporations who will pay extremely low prices for essential crops, driving them into debt and financial ruin.
“Farmers are so passionate about knowing these three laws are like death sentences to them,” Abhimanyu Kohar, coordinator of the National Farmer’s Alliance, a federation of more than 180 non-political farmers’ organizations across India, told me in an interview. “Our farmers are doing this movement for our future, for our survival.”
The protests have received sustained international attention, in part because of their size. As Reuters notes, while agriculture makes up only about 15% of India’s GDP, about 50 percent of the country’s workers are farmers – and since last fall, hundreds of millions of farmers have participated in street demonstrations and strikes.
Farmers have had a powerful voice in Indian politics – and don’t want to lose it
Experts say the government’s attempt to change agricultural policy has hit a third trail in Indian politics, revealing tensions created by modernization, while market standards for farmers that have been in place for decades threaten to be unraveled .
Since the 1970s, an elaborate system of agricultural subsidies and price guarantees, organized through a system of marketplaces known as mandis, has been a central feature of agricultural policy in India, and, as Arvin noted, has essentially helped to give farmers a kind of safety net.
Aditya Dasgupta, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, specializing in the politics of India, says these policies are the product of large-scale mobilization by farmers, agricultural unions, movements and parties that gained political power during the Green Revolution, the giant leap forward in the country’s agricultural productivity that took place in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The farmers’ protests today hark back to that tradition of protest and display of agricultural power, but the context is very different,” Dasgupta told me. “India is urbanizing, agriculture accounts for a smaller share of GDP and the main source of political and economic support for the ruling BJP party comes from major cities in the city.”
So, in a sense, this is not just a conflict over specific policies, but also a bigger flashpoint over the sectoral basis of political power, and whether or not farmers remain a politically powerful interest group while India urbanizes, he said.
While it is unclear what kind of compromise or concession could ease tensions over current reforms, experts such as Dasgupta point out that the underlying dynamics that gave rise to this – questions about who should retain power in the evolving economy of India – probably will continue to exist. long-term.