Farmers’ Protest and Indian Democracy

In September 2020, the Indian Parliament passed three agriculture reform bills concerning the pricing, sale, and storage of farm products, without following parliamentary procedure or consulting farmers’ organizations (Jebaraj Reference Jebaraj2021). These laws deregulated and privatized India’s agrarian economy by allowing private corporations to purchase crops at market prices without paying taxes, stockpile essential commodities in unlimited quantities, and engage in contract farming while denying farmers legal recourse (Dubal and Gill Reference Dubal and Gill2020). The BJP asserted that the reforms would provide farmers with more choice within the agricultural market by giving them the option to sell directly to private companies while freeing them from traditional wholesale “mandis,” or markets. Yet many farmers feared that the reforms would lower prices for their products, incentivize the hording of essential goods, and remove an essential safety net (Aljazeera 2020).

The likely outcome of the reforms would be a collapse of the mandi system, which currently guarantees farmers a minimum support price (MSP). During the first few years of reform, private corporations would likely purchase agricultural goods at a price surpassing MSP, which would secure them monopoly power in the market. They could then set prices far lower than MSP, which would likely have devastating consequences for Indian farmers, 85% of whom own less than five acres of land (Aljazeera 2020). These farmers, who have been overwhelmed by debt and suicide in recent decades (Swaminathan Report 2006), would need to compete in a market that favors corporations. Many farmers would likely lose their land, their livelihoods, and their way of life. In response, protesting farmers have demanded that the central government repeal the three farm laws and legalize a national MSP index for farm produce. And to achieve these goals, they are prepared to occupy Delhi for years (Mander Reference Mander2021).

The agricultural reform bills represent a continued privatization of India’s economy, including the agricultural sector, which accounts for 18% of India’s GDP and employs more than 60% of the workforce. For decades, the Indian government has largely ignored farmers, activists, and scholars who called on the government to follow its own recommendations by adopting the reforms proposed in the Swaminathan Report (2006). The report, which addresses problems with the mandi system and MSP along with environmental issues and farmer suicide, concludes that farmers should be given access to and control over basic resources, including “lands, water, bioresources, credit and insurance, technology and knowledge management, and markets.” The report also recommends an increase in MSP to at least 50% more than the weighted average cost of production and an expansion of covered crops beyond paddy and wheat. Rather than adopting these reforms, the BJP has passed laws that open up the agricultural market to private corporations without addressing the underlying problems in the agricultural sector. The likely outcome of these laws would be the collapse of the public agricultural system, which would jeopardize small farmers’ livelihood and the nation’s food security.

The protestors have been wary that privatizing India’s agriculture would lead to a monopoly, for monopoly power is quite common in India, as currently 20 firms account for 70% of all corporate earnings (Economist 2020). Protesting farmers have claimed that the laws use the language of choice and freedom to hand over the agricultural market to private corporations, like Mukesh Ambani’s group, Reliance Industries, which enjoys monopoly power in telecom, oil, and retail, and Gautam Adani’s group, which enjoys monopolies in infrastructure, including airports and ports (Dubal and Gill Reference Dubal and Gill2020).

On November 26, 2020, the movement emerged nationally through two distinct organizational tactics. First, farmers joined trade unions in a massive nationwide one-day strike, with 250 million participants (Joy Reference Joy2020). Second, tens of thousands of farmers from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan participated in the Delhi chalo (Let’s go to Delhi) march. Predominantly peaceful protestors confronted a militarized police force that attacked them with tear gas, batons, and water cannons at the Punjab-Haryana and Haryana-Delhi borders (Slater Reference Slater2020). Police also erected barricades and dug trenches in an effort to block the farmers (Rahar Reference Rahar2020).

Nevertheless, after two days of marching, the farmers entered Delhi and established protest camps on the outskirts of the city. For more than a year, farmers organized sit-ins with some 300,000 supporters gathered outside Delhi at the Tikri, Singhu, and Ghazipur borders (Sandhu Reference Sandhu2021). Farmers also confronted the government through nonviolent actions, including surrounding the homes of politicians, closing down government buildings, opening up toll plazas, and stopping railway lines (Dubal and Gill Reference Dubal and Gill2020). Last, farmers engaged in direct actions against Ambani and Adani conglomerates and their subsidiaries by boycotting petrol pumps and megamalls, and disconnecting cell phone towers (Dubal and Gill Reference Dubal and Gill2020).

The BJP government reacted to the ongoing protest by erecting militarized borders around the protest camps and arresting hundreds of protestors (BBC 2021). It also charged journalists with sedition, shut down internet services in Delhi and Haryana, ordered Twitter to suspend the accounts of noncompliant news organizations (Roy and Purnell Reference Roy and Purnell2021), and halted water and electricity to the camps (Kumar Reference Anuj2021).

The farmers’ protest has challenged the BJP by showing the world how illiberal the government is, especially by critiquing the so-called godi media—that is, media that sits in the “lap” (?> godi) of government. Most national media outlets, in fact, have close ties to the government and are owned by the same corporations that control much of the economy (Reporters Without Borders 2019). Criticism of the government is increasingly rare. By labeling its critics as “antinational,” the government has effectively used sedition laws to crack down on dissent. As a result, only a few media organizations have maintained their independence (Goel and Gettleman Reference Goel and Gettleman2020). Mainstream media has effectively become a propaganda outlet for the BJP.

In response, protesting farmers have founded what is now India’s fastest growing newspaper, Trolley Times, which has allowed farmers to produce their own narratives to counter the BJP’s propaganda (Ramani Reference Ramani2020). The BJP, with support of numerous media outlets, has tried to define the protesting farmers as enemies of the nation—“separatists,” “Maoists,” and “terrorists” (Sen Reference Sen2021)—and as “rich famers” concerned “only with Punjab and Haryana” (Sainth Reference Sainath2021). Trolley Times has challenged this kind of coverage, and since it has been published in Gurmukhi and Hindi, it has also led farmers from Punjab and Haryana, who are linguistically diverse and historically divided, to forge solidarities as partners in a mass movement (Singh and Punia Reference Singh and Punia2020).

Although a majority of the protesting farmers have been Sikh, their membership includes Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists (Mander Reference Mander2021), and their practices reflect this diversity. The farmers have engaged in forms of protest based both in Gandhian practices of nonviolence rooted in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist concepts of ahimsa (Dalton Reference Dalton2012) and in Sikh practices of loving sacrifice for collective human flourishing [sarbat da bhala], especially langar (communal kitchen), shahidi (martyrdom), and seva (service) (Singh Reference Singh, Singh and Fenech2014). For example, during the Delhi chalo march, protestors broke through barricades and then cleared the very roads that the police had rigged to stop them (Bera Reference Bera2020). And after clashes with police officers, at least one Sikh temple fed officers who were still dressed in riot gear (Ghazali Reference Ghazali2020). These practices, rooted in a kind of egalitarian community building, have forged new solidarities across religion, class, language, caste, age, and gender (Mander Reference Mander2021), helping to create an inclusive environment in which Dalits, Muslims, and women are valued.

The protest camps have been likened to Begumpura (Dalit Camera 2020)—literally, “a city without sorrow”—an earthly utopia without caste and class oppression. Originally conceived by the Dalit poet-saint Ravidas (c. 1450–1520), Begumpura has been central to the political imagination of Sikhs, who have included Ravidas’s poetry in their scripture, and of oppressed populations across India (Omvedt Reference Omvedt2008). The protesting farmers have adopted the egalitarianism of a proverbial Begumpura while deftly staying clear of Sikh separatist aspirations for a sovereign homeland. The farmers have been more progressive than the larger Sikh community, and by drawing on the imaginary of an idyllic city rather than a separate nation or a Gandhian village, they have sought common cause with dispossessed people across India and perhaps transformed Sikh political aspirations in the process.

If only for a short time, the farmers’ protest has created an inclusive democracy, which includes the protest camps and rural support networks. At the camps, basic public services including schools and libraries, arts and music, and medical and dental camps, have been made available to everyone (Economic Times 2020). Communal kitchens have fed hundreds of thousands of people, regardless of religion, class, caste, or gender, thus undermining caste rules regarding interdining and building heterogenous coalitions. When possible, decisions have been made collectively with shared leadership that ensures representation of multiple member unions (Sharma Reference Sharma2020). Beyond the camps, villages across Punjab and Haryana have supported the protestors by sending essential supplies and organizing rotating batches of protestors (Sethi Reference Sethi2021). And families have agreed to divide their time between working in the fields and participating in the protest camps (Mander Reference Mander2021).

The work of farmer and laborer unions has been crucial to the success of the farmers’ protest, its networked democracy, and its ability to overcome previous caste and class animosities. Landowning farmers, who are high-caste Jats, have a history of oppressing landless farm laborers, who are primarily Dalits (Sinha Reference Sinha2020), but at this moment their interests have aligned against the dangers posed by the deregulation of the agricultural sector (Dubal and Gill Reference Dubal and Gill2020). In the summer of 2020, farmer and laborer unions led education campaigns about the farm laws in rural Punjab and Haryana (Dubal and Gill Reference Dubal and Gill2020), and they also came together to demand land and labor reforms (Sinha Reference Sinha2020). This solidarity has been evident in one of the movement’s slogans: “Long Live Farmer-Laborer Unity” (Kisan-Mazdoor Ekta Zindabad). This alignment of unions, which have been largely secular and socialist, has helped forge new solidarities across religion, class, and caste, and these solidarities have deepened during the protests, with farmers and laborers living, eating, and organizing together.

The movement also owes its success to the labor and leadership of women, which has been fostered in part by responding to women’s experience of gendered violence, at large and in the protests themselves. Women’s contribution to the farmers’ protest has been celebrated with headlines proclaiming that women have been “leading India’s farmers’ protest” (Bhowmich and Sonthalia Reference Bhowmich and Sonthalia2021), echoing the praise for women’s leadership at the 2019–2020 Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi (Contractor Reference Contractor2021). Nevertheless, women in the farmers’ protest, much like women in the Occupy Movement (Montoya Reference Montoya, Irvine, Lang and Montoya2019), have had to navigate threats of gendered violence. The movement has been progressive in many ways, but it still embodies gendered inequities (Tribune 2021). And Delhi is one of the most dangerous cities in the world for women (Thomson Reuters Foundation 2017). In response, some women in the protest joined forces with the nationwide network, Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression, and called on farmer leaders to make the movement safer for women by creating internal complaint committees for accusations of sexual misconduct, listening to survivors, and investigating potential offenses (WSS 2021).

Yet, when protestors return to their villages will these inclusive solidarities travel with them and lead to changes in religious, class, caste, and gender norms? What will become of women empowered by the protests when they return to rural Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh and refuse to be silenced in the fields, in public spaces, and in their homes? What will become of the farmer–laborer unity cultivated at the protest camps when Dalits demand that land reform, legalized through the 1961 Punjab Village Common Lands (Regulation) Act, be actualized (Misra and Bhardwaj Reference Misra and Bhardwaj2021)? What will become of the Hindu Jat and Muslim solidarity when protesting farmers return to Muzaffarnagar, the site of the 2013 anti-Muslim riots that displaced at least 50,000 people (Choudhury Reference Choudhury2021)? Will we see a new kind of democratic practice that seeks to build Begumpuras in the here and now? Or will these solidarities wither once the imminent threat of the farm laws passes?

Learning from the Farmers’ Protest

On November 19, 2021, Prime Minister Modi acquiesced to the farmers’ demands and announced the repeal of the three farm laws. On December 9, 2021, the farmers formally suspended their protest but warned that it would resume if Modi reneged on his promise (Aljazeera 2021). It was a rare retreat by the “veritable juggernaut” (Ganguly Reference Ganguly2020) of Indian politics, perhaps signaling the “twilight of this Raj” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai2021).

What can movements like the farmers’ protest teach us about democracy? In Gezi Park, a heterogeneous group of citizens engaged in a collective protest, creating “a radical democratic public space” (Inceoglu Reference Inceoglu2015, 538) that challenged authoritarianism. They established a “culture of mutual care” where “everything from food to water, medical treatment to books was free of charge” (Karakayali and Yaka Reference Karakayali and Yaka2014, 125). Similarly, the farmers created a “protest with compassion” (Mander Reference Mander2021), where many public services were accessible to all, forms of membership and belonging were inclusive, decision-making was collective, and citizens felt safe and empowered.

Both the farmers’ protest and those at Gezi Park made use of religion to create new solidarities, with the former embracing Sikh and various syncretic practices and the latter embracing Islamic practices (Damar Reference Damar2016). These protests demonstrate that an embrace of religion is not antithetical to liberal democracy and is not necessarily a harbinger of exclusion or oppression (Behl Reference Behl2019). Religious practices, in fact, might serve to protect liberal democracy by enabling coalitions across religion, class, language, caste, age, and gender and making possible the emergence of inclusive political subjectivities.

Although traditional approaches to social movements often reduce the politics of protest to “rational (collective) action,” some scholars suggest studying protests as a “moment of emergence” that cannot be reduced to its constitutive parts (Karakayali and Yaka Reference Karakayali and Yaka2014, 123), whereas others call for a “processual analysis of opportunities” (Meyer Reference Meyer2004, 126) that avoids mechanistic understandings. To understand movements like Gezi Park and the farmers’ protest (Jodhka Reference Jodhka2022), political scientists need to understand how, even for a short time, protests can be both places of being and becoming in which egalitarian political imaginaries can be envisioned and enacted, heterogenous political subjectivities can emerge, and robust solidarities rooted in inclusive social practices and norms can be created. The farmers’ protest demonstrates hope by highlighting the promise of democracy in action, precisely at a moment when an increasingly authoritarian regime seeks to close it down.