Like national movement, Tractor Nationalism, too, is anti-colonial, underpinned by the sacrifices of the people, and is about democracy, social justice, secularism and federalism
The significance of the farmer movement’s success lies in not just forcing Modi to eat his words; it is, in fact, about winning a vital battle in the bigger war afoot for India
Before Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb ordered the beheading of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, after offering him the choice between death and Islam, the Guru composed these lines: “The truly enlightened ones/Are those who neither incite fear in others/Nor fear anyone themselves.” The Guru’s spirit of defiance and sacrifice defines the farmers who amassed outside Delhi four days from today last year, demanding and, ultimately, compelling Prime Minister Narendra Modi to repeal the three farm laws he had rammed through Parliament.
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But the farmers are not going to immediately dismantle their bivouac. They will mull over strategies to wrest from Modi a legal guarantee for providing Minimum Support Price for all crops. From insisting the three laws were here to stay, to opening negotiations with farmers, to now promising to annul them, Modi’s incremental retreat is reminiscent of how Gandhi gradually bent the British government’s will. Gandhi became a mass leader on peasant power, demonstrated first through his 1917 Champaran Satyagraha.
The significance of the farmer movement’s success lies in not just forcing Modi to eat his words; it is, in fact, about winning a vital battle in the bigger war afoot for India’s soul. It is about providing an alternative vision to the militaristic nationalism anchored in Hindutva. Call this vision peasant patriotism, or, better still, Tractor Nationalism, which shares all the five attributes of the national movement. Fundamentally anti-colonial, the national movement, underpinned by the sacrifices of the people, was also about democracy, social justice, secularism and federalism.
An estimated 700 farmers died during the protest. These deaths mock those who praise Modi’s sensitivity in rescinding the three laws. The toll of 700 might seem exaggerated to many. But what cannot be doubted is that 460 farmers perished between December 2020 and August 2021, their deaths confirmed by economist Lakhwinder Singh and Baldev Singh Shergill in their study. Even this lower count underscores Modi’s callous indifference to people’s misery, an attitude typical of colonial rulers and bygone emperors.
Modi’s quest for absolute power had him ride roughshod over the Constitution, which reserves agriculture for states to legislate upon, to enact the three new farm laws. Their retraction is a blow for federalism. It is also a blow against globalisation. The latter because the three laws were an outcome of India agreeing at the 2013 World Trade Organization meeting, under the developed world’s pressure, to structurally alter the agriculture sector. Aspects of globalisation comprise the 21st Century strategy of neo-colonists.
Out of the 460 confirmed deaths, Singh and Shergill found that 80 per cent were marginal and the rest small farmers. This belies Modi’s self-avowed concern for small farmers, and his government’s spin that the movement represents the interests of big farmers. Rather, it is rural India’s growing impoverishment that has bubbled over into a protest. The 77th round of the National Sample Survey shows the average farming family’s debt mounted from R47,000 in 2013 to R74,000 in 2019. During the same period, its monthly income crawled up from Rs 6,442 to just R10,218. Worse, nearly two-thirds of this income comes from non-farming activities, including wage labour.
Economist YK Alagh has calculated that agricultural income witnessed a decadal decline of 14.4 per cent in the economic liberalisation era, beginning 1991. This is the era in which corporates became behemoths. Their interests dominated government policies, which facilitated their entry into just about every sector. The three farm laws were perceived as the corporate sector’s cannons brought in to breach the bastion of agriculture, and snatch away farmers’ land and occupation. No wonder, farmers burnt the effigies of the Ambanis and the Adanis to express their outrage.
The threat from corporates loomed large because the middle, small and marginal farmers have been economically battered. Their shared plight had them to forge an inter-class alliance, further bolstered because of the landless labourers joining them. The latter have seen work opportunities dip because of the mechanisation of agriculture, which is bound to intensify with the entire gamut of farming activities becoming corporatised. All these groups feel they are condemned to migrate to cities, where the shrinking job market cannot absorb them. The farmer movement’s success may arrest the growing lumpenisation of India, a factor behind the mushrooming of vigilante groups.
The inter-class alliance could bridge India’s notorius caste divide. Landless labourers are mostly Dalit; the peasants largely Jat. Among the farmer leaders are Darshan Pal, a Brahmin, and Jagmohan Singh, a Kshatriya. The multiplicity of classes and castes in the movement has shifted the political pivot from identity to economic interests. This is also because farmer leaders have kept at bay the few, including Khalistanis, who wish to harness the movement to religious politics. All this rejuvenates the idea of composite (or secular) nationalism, weakened by the rampaging Hindutva.
The triumph of farmers has come despite the media disparaging them. Therein is a lesson for Opposition, who crib about the media’s support for Modi: Democracy is not just about electoral politics. It is as much about the politics of protests, which overwhelmed, even if ephemerally, authoritarianism and majoritarianism—and spread the fragrance of democracy as conceived by Tractor Nationalism.
The writer is a senior journalist
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