Farmer Strikes in India: Interview with Sangeet Toor and Jasdeep Singh
Giacomo Bianchino
10/09/2021
Sangeet Toor (ST) is a cybersecurity analyst and writer based in Chandigarh. She is currently documenting the history of land rights and peasant struggles in Punjab. You can read some of her work here.
Jasdeep Singh (JS) is a software engineer, film writer, translator based in Chandigarh. He is an editor with Trolley Times.
Since September 2020, farmers in the northern parts of India have been protesting laws introduced by the ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). The protests have attracted millions of people, with last year’s march reaching as far as Delhi itself. With actions every week, and huge violence in response, this is one of the most profound instances of popular revolt in modern history. On the weekend of the 28-29 August, a huge action led to 1 farmer’s death and multiple injuries. MM’s Giacomo Bianchino Sat down with Sangeet Toor and Jasdeep Singh to talk about the most recent manifestations of the protest.
GB: Can you tell me about the strike and demonstration which took place in Punjab and Haryana this past weekend?
JS: I'll tell you a little bit about how things have been going. Almost every day there is some sort of action, but what has happened is in Punjab and Haryana, the two states which are the breadbasket of the region. There is this sort of like civil disobedience kind of thing going on. And so on Sunday, there was this protest planned in a city in Haryana (Karnal), which was to protest against the chief minister of the state (ML Khattar). But what happened? The police took a more violent action against the protesters, and I think 10 farmers were injured in that same charge and one of them died yesterday. So, in protesting that action, there has been a lot of outcry over media, social media; and on the same day, the traffic was jammed from Punjab, Haryana to neighbouring states. Yesterday also there was this two-hour call for a traffic jam. and today there is a meeting by the farmer unions on what to do about it.
ST: So it was not a planned thing. The event on Saturday was planned in Haryana, where the farmers gathered to, you know, protest against there was some event that Khattar has planned. So it was a protest against that. They were beaten up by the police, one of the persons died and other farmers were really, really injured. So in protest of that, in retaliation, the farmers of these two or three states have blocked everything. You know, that the roads that are going into Delhi, roads coming out of Delhi, within Punjab, Haryana yesterday, there were planned strikes for two hours, so the roads were also blocked.
GB: Would you mind giving us some context for the conditions that have led to this situation? What are the “Black Laws” the farmers are protesting?
JS: So I just want to give a little bit of background for the region, which is Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh. It's a river basin- Sutlej, Beas, Yamuna- three Rivers and a basin between them. It's the most fertile land, and the green revolution project was initiated here. What the government has done here is, most of the rice crop and wheat crop, which is grown here, is guaranteed to be bought by the government agencies at a fixed price, which is revised every year. So the farmers have an assured price for their produce. Although in theory it is done for 23 crops, in practice it is for two crops: wheat and rice. Because they are the most used and because they are used for the public distribution system of the nation- the poor get rationed rice and wheat flour. But what the government now has planned to do is to dismantle that system, which was in place for the last 60 years, which bought from the farmers and provided for the food security of the nation; for the labour of the working poor.
Punjab and Haryana have a history of better organisation, because it's a relatively advanced agri-economy. But still the average land holding here is five acres. So when we say farmer, it's primarily, in the western terms, peasantry. When we say “farmer”, for Australia and America, it's somebody who has say 500 acres, but here farmer means somebody who has five or 10 acres. Most people fighting on the protest side have less than 5 acres. So, the government has revamped three farm laws, planned them and implemented them in both houses of the Parliament. In the upper house it was resisted well, because Lower House government has majority BJP government, but in the upper house they do not have that kind of majority. But it was still pushed through.
Farmer unions in Punjab are most active- they were already sort of planning a protest. They can mobilise a lot of people. The farm laws are basically to make way for corporate farming, so that corporations can have clusters for 4000-acre farms and they can provide seeds and then they can make way for an agribusiness economy. Right now it's a family farm or small farmer-based agrarian economy in this region, and all over India as well. So, what these laws are doing is they are benefiting the corporations, which are mostly cronies of the government, BJP government, Adani, which people in Australia are also protesting, and also Reliance. These are the two figureheads which people are actively protesting against.
ST: What peasant protests of the pre-partition India were to the British Raj, the farmer protests are to the BJP Raj. Laws are exploitive with next to nothing as a legal remedy for farmers against big corporations. One of the laws is about contract farming and the contracts are 'one way'. A big corporation can drag a small farmer to the court but not vice versa. A government official titled Sub Divisional Magistrate or SDM will intervene on behalf of the farmers instead. The incident in Haryana was ordered by an SDM. He ordered the police to 'break their skulls'.
GB: Something really similar happened here in Australia in the 1990s. We had a very similar system where the government would buyback surplus agricultural product in order to regulate prices, make sure that there was a persistent market for farmers. They started to dismantle that system in about 1995, and since then, basically, a third of the smaller farmers have left the industry; which is now increasingly concentrated in the hands of agribusiness. So there is precedent for the fears of these farmers.
JS: So, these farmer union leaders, they have studied what has happened globally. So they gave examples of this- “this has happened in America and some farmers went away and agribusiness took over; this has happened in Australia, in Europe,” they say, “this even happened in Bihar state where this old system was dismantled and farmers were sustaining themselves a little bit better, but they lost whatever they could, their livelihoods.” So, in Bihar state this has happened. They put the example of Bihar state if the new system you are going to put in place was put into place in Bihar state, and it has not worked there, why are you doing it?
GB: Is there any antagonism in the movement between the people that own the properties and the people the work the properties? Or are the farmers’ properties too small for that class antagonism to actually emerge?
JS: Oh, well so in the West, it's more divided on the line of who is who, who has land or doesn't have land, but here it's also divided on caste lines. Most of the land owning community is technically maybe middle caste by the Hindu system, but they are general caste or they are the upper caste or the dominant caste groups. People who are protesting on the grounds by caste are dominant caste groups; most of them have some pocket of land. They are small farmers and they fear that they are going to become farm labourers. So that’s what they are protesting against. But in this movement, farm workers are supporting the farmers. Even though back here in Punjab, they are at loggerheads with each other. So farm workers want more wages. Farmers want to give lower wages. So those kinds of skirmishes are already there, tensions are already there. What the farmers want is an assured price for their produce, where the government is giving them minimums for price or something like that. Paddy sowing is done by farm workers who are landless either from Punjab or are native people (who are mostly Dalits- landless and low-caste) and then either migrant labour who come from U.P. and Bihar, who sow paddies at a lesser wage. So, what some villages did is, in a village community they announced an upper limit for paddy sowing per acre- you can’t go above it- so they sealed the wage for farm workers. So farm workers protested that “this is like a Black Law for us.” If the government is sanctioning Black Laws for you, you are sanctioning Black Laws for us. So there has been tension between farm workers and farmers, but still the farm workers are sort of in solidarity with the farmers, in the sense that they will lose on the public distribution- distributed food- which is provided from this system of government buying from the farmers. In addition to that, overall the agrarian economy will dwindle. So, they've see that with farmers losing their land, there will be more labour power and hence, labour wages would dwindle as well.
ST: In addition, the agriculture in Punjab is such that there are only two kinds of labour left; two kinds of labour work left. One is paddy sowing which is done manually and the other one is cotton-picking which is also done manually. Cotton picking is only done in the cotton belt of Punjab. So, in rest of the Punjab, the only manual labour which is done by the labourers which is on a large scale is the paddy-sowing; everything else is done by machines. Now, what happens is when the paddy-sowing season comes, they really want to get this labour done so they can make some money. So their kids have days off (if the kids are going to school or colleges); they also bring the kids into the fields who sow badly. So, there is this competition, and the high class or high caste farmers are undercutting them or locking the wages and putting them in competition with the labourers from Uttar Pradesh North, Bihar. So the local labourers get really agitated; especially because they have been living together in a village for so many years and they are not being preferred over the other ones. So those are the various, you know, various dynamics there.
Within the farmers, there are categories - marginal, small, medium and big depending on the land-holding owned. Big farmers have yet to jump into the movement. In generic terms, they are more aligned towards Akalis or Congress or big political parties. The protests are mostly made up of marginal and small farmers. Then there is caste division - farmers own tractors and they can hop on one and go to Delhi protests. Farm laborers from the same village don't own tractors. They rent a bus or a small trailer to go to the protests. Their participation is limited logistically. Their participation is also less because the protests are still seen as an ego clash of 'Jatt' (power caste) with Modi. However, marginal and small farmers are not less miserable than their labourer counterparts. The economy, education, job opportunities etc. are equally crushing for them.
GB: The recent protests saw fissures emerging between different Chief Ministers, even within the ranks of the BJP. Does the farmers’ movement have a political allegiance to any major Indian party?
ST: Their [the BJP’s] allies have left them. So let's say, if BJP has some political allies in the state for example, in Punjab they allied with Shiromani Akali Dal, which is a local Punjab party that ruled for many years, but because of the farmers’ protest last year, Akali Dal had to break away from BJP- from an ages-old Alliance- because they saw themselves losing because of BJP’s stance and BJP’s inability or unwillingness to deal with the farmers’ issues. Similar things are happening in other states also within BJP ranks also, because there are not only just career politicians, but there are also politicians who see their families growing into this political field like the son of the CM becoming the CM in five years. These things are slipping away from their hands. The orientation basically is that in Punjab, there were originally 20 or 30 farm unions, and within those there are about 20 which are left leaning. They are the predominant ones also. But they don't push that agenda as such. But when they talk, it's being pushed, you know, how capitalism, how the corporate structure, is going to annihilate the traditional agricultural economies. So they talk about all those things from the stage. But ideologically, they feel that the current thing is, if you draw the analogy with 1930-1940s Germany, where they say that we need to oppose BJP, that is the only enemy for the time being, because they're only just a form laws, but also help communal, the kind of nationalism that they are posing the kind of danger that that they are posing for the minorities, we need to oppose that in addition, and we don't want them. Any other party is fine, but we've got to get BJP out of the park.
GB: What kind of state repression was used against the farmers? Why does the state rely on police more than the military?
JS: So people who have a better sort of land holding can get their sons and daughters educated, and they can move to cities and have other jobs. But people who have less land can't get their sons and daughters educated. So what they do is, for one son basically the army or police is a safe profession which they can perform, and the other son might go into farming. Even in the protest site, it plays out- because the police that are on the barricades are from the same caste background and same economic background. So even the government won't be able to crack down. Some people postulated that what happened on Sunday, this crackdown on protesters, was the government testing the waters to see how much support the farmers can garner if we crack down on them. So the retaliation by the farmers has been very positive and very aggressive. So now, they [the government] may sit back and say “no, we can’t crack down on them yet”. Because if they want to, there is a possibility that they may, if it comes to military action, the military might hire people like the British state did, right? So you ask workers to come right, right? You take Punjabis to the northeast.
ST: But then you risk you know, the crack within the military itself.
GB: How can we help from Australia?
ST: Amplify the protests and SKM actions. Build solidarity with the groups who protest peacefully in Australia (or anywhere in the world) for the farmer protests. We are in dire need of highlighting the apathy and repression of the BJP government.
Following are a few social media handles to follow:
SKM Twitter - @Kisanektamorcha
https://www.facebook.com/kisanektamorcha/
https://www.instagram.com/kisanektamorcha/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4mGFTV86AR8VeJmusu1QWQ
Note: Since the interview was conducted, an even larger protest has taken place in Uttar Pradesh