Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: A tale of two farmer agitations

The second farmers’ agitation began in February 2024 and unfolded over 400 days at the Punjab-Haryana border. It was cleared up forcefully by Punjab Police last week. Its main demand remains unmet — of a legal guarantee for MSP. The evictions and arrests of leaders of Farmers’ Protests 2.0 have barely touched a chord, in Punjab or elsewhere.

In the backdrop of these two protests with dramatically different end-points and trajectories, is a state of difficult and tangled predicaments. Despite the success of the first round of protests, and amid the abrupt collapse, almost mid-sentence, of the second, Punjab’s crises go on — the success of the first farmers’ movement in making the Centre bend brought only a temporary sense of closure and relief.

This is a state that has been unable to shake off the sense of political and economic standstill that settled heavily on it after the decade it lost to militancy in the 1980s, and one that is still finding it difficult to break through the long plateauing of the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s.

In retrospect, there were several visible differences between Farmers’ Protest 1.0 and Farmers’ Protest 2.0, which can help explain their different graphs in Punjab.

To begin with, the first agitation had a specific trigger, which set off MSP-related fears, in the three farm laws that the Centre tried to push through without adequate consultation. And in the laws’ repeal, it had a demand that was specific and concrete. In the case of the second agitation, however, given that farmers in Punjab already benefit from government procurement at MSP, especially for wheat and rice, the demand for a legal guarantee was less urgent and more unwieldy — it was aimed more at mitigating diversification’s risks and future-proofing a minimum sense of farmers’ security.

Farmers’ unions took centre-stage in the first round of protests, but at the same time, they were constantly forced to respond to mobilisations that were spreading in Punjab’s villages and also in its cities. These mobilisations were bringing together sections with otherwise different and even conflicting interests — farmers and arhatiyas, traders and landless labourers and non-agriculturists. That sense of common ground between the peasant, Sikh and Punjabi identities in an agriculture-centric economy may have only been momentary. But, if only briefly, it induced an artificial unity among farmers’ unions under the umbrella of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), which brought under its banner over 500 such outfits. The second time, the protests were led by a breakaway of the SKM, and another union that, in the first round, was not a part of SKM activities. This time, there was no papering over the divisions within farmers’ unions, and little left-over unity.

More broadly, from the first agitation to the second, the leadership of the farmers’ unions seemed unable to build on the people’s trust — an early warning of this came when candidates put up by the unions lost their deposits in the 2022 assembly election held only a couple of months after the first agitation ended in their victory. That sense had only grown since — that the farmers’ movement, even as it had successfully tapped into deeper and wider discontents to win the argument on the three farm laws, was ill-equipped to address the problems that gave rise to them, from drug addiction and unemployment to migration, from industries by-passing the state to a services sector that has not taken off, and an education system that failed to keep pace with change.

Even as the farmer leaders were unable to widen their agenda and connect the dots, the political crisis that fed into the first agitation has only been deepening. Earlier, popular alienation from politics-as-usual — Shiromani Akali Dal and Congress, traditional rivals in Punjab, were seen as corrupt, and worse, collusive — had resulted in a landslide for the Aam Aadmi Party, the relative newbie. It won 92 of the 117 seats in the Punjab assembly. Today, the AAP seems to be on unsteady ground even as other political players remain mired in troubles of their own making.

The SAD is steeped in inner-party conflict that also roils Sikh institutions that combine religion and politics — earlier this month, the SAD-controlled SGPC removed Jathedars of the Sikh takhts who, in December, had decreed the removal of Sukhbir Singh Badal as party president, declaring him sinner or “tankhaiya”, and dictating reorganisation of the party. The Congress story still features an unseeing high command and a still unchecked local jostling. The BJP is trying — but has a long way to go — to spread into the empty political spaces.

The AAP, which had extended loud support to the first farmer agitation, has now, as the ruling party, removed the farmer-agitators by force from the protest sites. But that its strong-arm action was met with silence may or may not be an indication of support for the government it leads.

Having lost its grip in Delhi, the party that won a large mandate in Punjab in 2022 by painting itself as the “outsider” and benefiting from the people’s resentments against the established players, is increasingly borrowing from a discredited playbook.

Cases of “bulldozer justice” — a mis-governance model perfected in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh — are growing in Punjab. The Bhagwant Mann government is short-circuiting due process and demolishing houses of those accused of drug-related crimes in the state.

Much has changed between the two farmers’ protests in Punjab. But they also book-end the same back-sliding.

Till next week,
Vandita