Farmers Movement Archive

Centre in a bind over continuing protest

Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar announced on Wednesday, after more than 10 rounds of talks with farmers’ unions, that the government was ready to suspend the implementation of the three contentious farm laws. With that, the government hoped that the unions, determined to take out a tractor rally on Republic Day, would rethink their months-long agitation and vacate their blockade of the national capital. The reasons for the government’s compromise formula are not hard to find. The continued strike by the farmers’ unions, especially those from Punjab and Haryana, the Republic Day celebrations and the Supreme Court’s refusal to ban a proposed tractor rally were just the immediate reasons for the compromise formula. However, within the government there is a realisation that it had lost the communications game early in the day. “During the COVID-19 policy rejig, the aapada main avasar [opportunities in crisis] set of changes in laws governing labour, small industry, and agriculture were announced and while a lot of consultation on these had taken place over the years, the announcements were sudden,” said a government official. The size and heterogeneity of the protests meant that government interlocutors had to do hectic backchannel and overt negotiations with groups which may or may not have the freedom to act as representatives of all groups. Security implications More importantly, security implications of a border State like Punjab seeing a long-term, even peaceful, political protests of this sort were always going to be problematic. In fact, within days of the protests starting, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, whose party, the Congress, is supporting the cause of farmers, met Union Home Minister Amit Shah on the security implications with regard to the protests. While the accusations from certain sections that the movement was infiltrated by Sikh separatist elements was dismissed by the Ministers in charge of the negotiations with farmers’ unions after a backlash, the statements made by MPs and even the government of Canada and some lawmakers in Britain added a new dimension to the way the government viewed the protests. The indefinite continuation of a well-funded protest was making the government and the ruling party’s ideological mothership, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, also nervous. In an interview to the Indian Express , the second in command of the RSS, Suresh “Bhaiyyaji” Joshi, said it in as many words, that indefinite agitations by farmers was not desirable for any stable government. The extent to which the government has been willing to go, however, has also been determined by what happened when the Modi government in its first avatar tried to pass the Land Acquisition ordinance and faced a backlash. The ordinance was scrapped after an adverse response and accusations that the government was favouring crony capitalists over farmers and rural land owners. A similar narrative was building up over agriculture reforms too. With the Supreme Court having suspended the implementation of the three farm Bills for a couple of months, the government went a step further and offered the suspension for a year-and-a-half, if required.

The Hindu

2021-01-22

NEW DELHI