DM Monitoring
The white hatchback slowed down as it approached the toll plaza. At the wheels was a middle-aged Sikh man and in the passenger seat an old woman with flowing grey hair. Seated behind were three more women, one middle aged and the other two much younger, who looked barely out of their teens.
Toll plazas in Punjab – sites of permanent sit-ins by farmers protesting against the new farm laws – have been closed for months, free for vehicles to pass through without paying any fee. Yet, the man stopped and gestured at the protesting farmers camping on one side of the highway, trying to catch their attention. One of them came over to the passenger seat window. The old woman thrust a Rs 500 note in his hands and caressed his head affectionately. Barely any words were exchanged. The car zoomed past soon after.
This was in Mehal Kalan at the border of Ludhiana and Barnala districts. But it could have been anywhere in Punjab, as Reportersfound while travelling through five districts across the state’s three regions of Malwa, Majha and Doaba. It is nearly six months since protests first erupted across Punjab against the three new farm laws of the Modi government. The andolan seems to be showing no signs of abating anywhere. It continues to rage like wildfire across villages and towns and cities.
The Kisan-Mazdoor Ekta flag is as ubiquitous as mustard fields, colouring the winter landscape of the state a bright protest yellow. The flags and stickers in support of the farmers are everywhere – on car bonnets, in balconies, at highway dhabas, outside shopping malls. Almost every railway station in the state has people camping outside, day and night. If the mornings are about marathon meetings with rousing speeches in the villages, the evenings see young boys on their gediyan – evening rounds – break into impromptu bike rallies in the cities, boisterously vowing their support to the protests. The fires in the langars, the traditional Sikh community kitchens, never really go off.
Most Punjabis – whatever their religion, caste, class, profession – not only support the ongoing protests, but are deeply invested in them. “We will fight till our last breath,” said Gurdev Singh, a farmer from Tarn Taran district. “We fought a long battle for our independence from the British. This, too, is a fight for independence, economic independence.” Nothing, people insist, would deter them. No price, they say, is too big to pay. “Whenever there is a war, there are personal losses and people have already died in the cold in Delhi, but this is a fight for our survival,” said Raghubir Kaur, a retired professor of Punjabi in Jalandhar’s Guru Nanak Dev University. “And each family in Punjab is part of this fight. There is no going back from this.”
Anxieties about a changing economic order lie at the heart of the protests. But the depth of support for them stems from a deeper source. Not Khalistan or Sikh secessionism as the Modi government has tried to insinuate. Instead, conversations with people in the state reveal deeper undercurrents of resentment against a government that is seen as majoritarian and dictatorial. The resentment is so visceral and omnipresent that it is difficult to imagine in today’s India, barring possibly Kashmir.
‘Rogue, thug, fraud’
On the foggy morning of February 16, around 100 farmers and retired soldiers from Punjab’s border villages gathered in Atari village in Tarn Taran district for a meeting christened Jai Jawan Jai Kisan. It was held at the memorial of Sardar Sham Singh Attari, a Sikh general who died fighting the East India Company. The occasion was the birth anniversary of Sir Chhotu Ram, a Hindu Jat leader widely revered by the peasantry in Punjab. The theme this year, the organisers said, was anti-communalism. Speaker after speaker tore into the government, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in particular. Nothing escaped the speakers’ fury: the government’s (now-shelved) plans of preparing a nation-wide National Register of Citizens, revoking of Article 370 in Kashmir, arbitrary internet blockades and more. “This government has sold out,” said one of the speakers as the crowd nodded in agreement. But the most popular slogan of the day was rather individualised, “Modi tere teen naam: luccha, gunda, bemaan” – Modi, you have three names: rogue, thug, fraud.
“This is not so much about the BJP as it is about Modi, Amit Shah and Piyush Goyal,” explained a farmer from a village in Tarn Taran, referring to the home minister and railway minister seen to be the closest confidantes of the prime minister. “There are others in the BJP who understand [the concerns of farmers], but these three have no understanding of agriculture, yet they are telling us what is good for us.”
‘Laws framed for corporates’
The Modi government has claimed the three farm laws, first introduced as ordinances in July, then rushed through Parliament in September, will unshackle India’s beleaguered agricultural sector by enabling farmers to sell their produce to private companies without any restrictions. But many agricultural economists disagree. They say the laws could reduce market transparency and leave farmers at the mercy of corporations.
In Punjab, talk to any farmer – small, big, medium, marginal – and they will deconstruct the laws clause-by-clause. Their biggest anxiety is what they claim is unstated but implicit in the laws: the end of the minimum support price regime under which the government buys certain crops at predetermined rates to cushion farmers against market volatility. Since most farmers in Punjab and Haryana sell their wheat and paddy to the government at such prices in state-run markets called mandis, they fear a rise in private transactions outside the mandis will weaken them and ultimately lead to their demise. “First the mandis will go,” said a farmer in Barnala district, “then the corporates will tell us, ‘sell us at whatever price we are offering you’ and we have to also because where else will we go.”
Farmers believe these legal changes are being driven by two corporations, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group and Gautam Adani’s Adani Group, which are patronised by the Modi government. Both the companies have denied the accusations – to little effect. “This is not a people’s government. This is a government for and of big corporates,” alleged Davinder Singh, a 32-year-old farmer from Raikot.
“This government is taking dictations from Ambani and Adani,” said another farmer from Amritsar. “Modi wants to sell the country to the corporates, we in Punjab will not let that happen.” Without minimum support prices, say farmers, it would be impossible to make ends meet. In a normal year, five acres of the land yield around 150 quintals of rice and 100 quintals of wheat, worth a little over Rs 5 lakh at the government-fixed prices. Having invested nearly one lakh rupees in seeds, fertilisers, machinery, “a family of four which owns five acres of land is just living hand-to-mouth,” said Balwant Singh Uppli, a farmer leader in Barnala.
Supporters of the farm laws argue the support prices had created perverse incentives to grow water-guzzling, environmentally unsustainable crops. But Uppli pointed out that growing other crops was economically risky because of market uncertainty. “Sometimes, the price goes up to Rs 50 [per quintal], sometimes it is not even Rs 2. How does one survive then?” Political scientist Jagroop Singh Sekhon said crop diversification in Punjab was “not possible if you don’t extend MSP to other crops”. Besides, as many in the state point out: farmers here were drafted into large-scale commercial wheat and paddy farming for the purpose of state procurement by the government itself as part of the Green Revolution when India started using high-yield seeds and chemicals in a bid to be food-sufficient in the 1960s. “People here feel they have been taken for a ride,” said Anirudh Kala, a psychiatrist based in Ludhiana. “For decades, you depended on Punjab’s farmers to supply grains to the rest of the country and with these laws, it’s like they are not needed now.”
A feeling of discrimination
Outside Ludhiana, in Gahlewal village, former sarpanch Avatar Singh echoed this sentiment – and even added why he thought that was the case. “For years we have fed this country, all we ask for now is some gratitude. But Modi and RSS hate the Sikhs, instead he is trying to teach us a lesson.” Sikhs form 60% of the population of Punjab. As historian Harjeshwar Pal Singh explained, the perception that “Punjab has been discriminated against by Delhi” easily segues into Sikhs feeling persecuted. “Ever since Modi came to power in 2014, Hindutva has become more pronounced in Indian polity,” said Pal Singh who teaches history at Chandigarh’s Guru Gobind Singh College. “In response, anxiety of the Sikhs is definitely increasing.” Indeed, according to a survey carried out before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, fewer Sikhs were favourably disposed towards Modi than even Muslims and Christians. Gursevak Singh, a farmer from Raikot, reflected this dual concern: “For sure, this is a farmers’ issue, but at the end of the day we are Sikhs, aren’t we? And we all know Modi and RSS want to turn Hindustan into a Hindu Rashtra.”
Said Pal Singh: “The farmers’ movement led by the unions is strong by itself, but Sikh sentiment gave it an even bigger impetus, making it a mass movement. A section sees the laws as an attack on the way of life in Punjab, or you could say, the Sikh way of life.” Parminder Singh, a retired professor of English from Amritsar, however, does not agree. The current anger, he said, had indeed transcended the farm bills, but it did not draw from Sikh anxieties as such. Instead, it flowed from Punjab’s legacy of standing up to rulers and dispensations seen as unjust. “Punjabis tend to see the Modi dispensation as tyrannical,” he said when we met at his home in Amritsar. “So, whenever movements of this scale arise, cultural and historical memories always pop up.” The account of the ninth Sikh guru, Teg Bahadur, standing up to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and paying for it with his life, for instance, is often invoked in conversations about the current agitation.
Kaur, the retired professor Punjabi from Jalandhar, explained: “There is nothing religious about this andolan, but we are obviously drawing inspiration from our glorious history.” Several Sikh farmers interviewed for this story tended to broadly share this idea. “Punjab has always defended this country whether the enemy was Aurangzeb or the British,” said Nirmal Singh, a sexagenarian farmer from Barnala. “We are doing the same now.” In the border village of Naushera Dhalla in Tarn Taran, Harpal Singh, a well-off farmer who owns 17 acres of land, said the prime minister’s zidd (stubbornness) in refusing to repeal the laws was a “textbook example of autocratic behaviour”. “Isn’t that what dictators believe that everyone else is wrong except them?” he asked.
