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.

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.