Farmers Movement Archive

‘Rail roko’ by farmers passes off peacefully

Farmers, supported by khap panchayats, traders and workers’ unions, blocked rail lines at 44 points across Haryana, with a large number of women taking part in the Rohtak and Charkhi Dadri districts. Hisar, Sirsa, Jind and Rohtak accounted for more than half the protest sites. In Bahadurgarh, one of the sites of the sit-in agitation for the past two months, farmers blocked railway traffic at five points. Leading the agitation at Patuwas, farmer leader Raju Maan said they were ready to make any sacrifice to get the farm laws repealed. In Rajasthan, farmers brought a tractor on the track near the Ajarka station in Alwar district to block the movement of trains. In Khurja town in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh, the Gomti Express was stopped and farmers showered petals on the driver. “Passengers were offered jaggery and children were treated with milk,” said Rajveer Singh of BKU-Tikait. It was about after one hour that the train was allowed to move towards Delhi. At Modinagar, railway authorities prevented the passage of passenger trains. “Only a goods train passed through and there was no point stopping it. So, we garlanded the railway track. It seems the government didn’t want us to interact with passengers and convey our pain or it was too scared after the January 26 episode,” said Mr. Singh. Farmers sat on tracks and platforms across western Uttar Pradesh, including at Ghaziabad, Meerut, Shamli, Baghpat and Agra. According to the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, the umbrella group of unions which issued the protest, the Mumbai-Amritsar Paschim Express was stopped at Panipat, the Bandra-Haridwar special was stopped by farmers at Meerut, and the Utkal Express running from Puri in Odisha to Haridwar in Uttarakhand was stopped at Ghaziabad, because farmers were sitting on the track at Modinagar. About a hundred activists were detained at Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh, while 500 were detained in Telangana, according to the All India Kisan Sabha. It also reported arrests in Bettiah in Bihar, and at Bangarpet in the Kolar district of Karnataka. According to the AIKS, protests took place at 77 stations in West Bengal, 65 stations in Jharkhand, 55 stations in Telangana, 30 stations in Odisha, 23 stations in Andhra Pradesh and 21 stations in Rajasthan. There was “negligible” or “minimal” impact on running of the trains, according to the Indian Railways. On the bomb blast at the railway station in Nimtita, West Bengal, in which about 25 people have been injured, railway sources said, “This incident is prima facie a result of political rivalry between Trinamool and CPI, and may have some links to the internal feud among the TMC cadres.” (Inputs from Vikas Vasudeva in Chandigarh, Ashok Kumar in Gurugram, Mohammed Iqbal in Jaipur, Anuj Kumar in Ghaziabad, and Yuthika Bhargava and Priscilla Jebaraj in New Delhi)

The Hindu

2021-02-19

February 19 2021 00:00 IST