Farmers Movement Archive

How UP Gate tractors reached Red Fort

GHAZIABAD: On Monday, the night before the farmers’ tractor parade scheduled on Republic Day, the mood at the protest site at UP Gate had turned sharply defiant. The route for the parade had been decided, after discussions between farmer leaders and Delhi Police, but talk at the site housing thousands of protesters on Monday night was that they were going to Akshardham. That’s exactly what they did on Tuesday morning, deviating far from the rally route to reach not just Akshardham but much deeper into Delhi – the central district of ITO and the Red Fort itself. On Monday night, Jagtar Singh Bajwa, member of the UP Gate farmers’ committee, had told this correspondent, “We don’t care what the administration, Ghaziabad police or Delhi Police want. We are taking our rally through Akshardham.” So, when the tractors lined up – more than 8,000, by ballpark estimates – in a 4km cavalcade on NH-9, little went along expected lines. The understanding with the police was that the farmers’ parade would begin at noon once the main Republic Day parade ended. But around 10.30am, a tractor suddenly broke away from the line and dashed into the layer of concrete barricades that has separated the protesters and police lines since the last week of November, when the protest against the farming laws began. The posse of Delhi Police personnel posted there resisted but yielded as the waiting lines grew more and more restive. A little after 11am, the cavalcade rolled down NH-9 into Delhi, for the designated route, a right turn into Anand Vihar and then towards Mohan Nagar. The farmer leaders were to be in charge of this. But within minutes, the parade moved off script. It began with some tractors towards the front of the line veering very close to each other, trying to break away from the queue. In front of the Ghazipur meat market, a handful of Delhi Police personnel tried to point the tractors to the route they were supposed to take towards Anand Vihar. However, scores of them raced past the overwhelmed cops. “We have been told to proceed towards Akshardham and take a U-turn towards Anand Vihar. We will have to see whether that happens. We are planning to march towards Delhi,” yelled a young farmer from his tractor in which five others accompanied him, all in their late 20s or early to mid-30s. While farmer leaders have camped at the protest sites continuously and taken all the decisions, the younger farmers had taken the lead here. The 500 volunteers the farmer leaders had claimed to have appointed weren’t visible along the route as tractors went helter-skelter and chaos unfolded. Once they had gone through the barricades on NH-9, next to the Ghazipur flyover, they could get on to the Delhi-Meerut Expressway unimpeded and hare down towards Akshardham and Sarai Kale Khan, from where they headed towards ITO and Red Fort. Delhi Police tried to stop them near Akshardham, but many tractors had already crossed that point by then. The number of tractors that veered off course became evident at Mohan Nagar, which was on the designated rally route. The rally had lost more than 50% of its participants by the time it reached here. BKU leader Rakesh Tikait, who has been leading the protests at UP Gate, argued that Delhi Police had barricaded the original route, which had triggered chaos and confused those driving the tractors, leading to many of them going astray. Tikait, who was in the group that stuck to the designated route and returned to UP Gate, sought to deflect the blame to Delhi Police. “It was all the fault of Delhi Police. They had on purpose barricaded the route agreed upon with an intention to create confusion. Because of this, farmers strayed into Delhi. How else do you explain that so many of them entered Delhi?” he asked. The gap in the way farmer leaders and at least some of the protesters were thinking became evident when the protesters began returning in their tractors in batches late afternoon. “Lal Qila par jhanda pheira aaye hum (we have unfurled the flag at Red Fort),” said Vishvedra Choudhary, who was returning in a tractor. Chandrpal Singh, a farmer from Moradabad, said, “We have done what we wanted to. The government now knows the farmers’ might. We always wanted to enter Delhi but were not sure if we would get the opportunity. When we saw hundreds of tractors proceeding towards Akshardham, we just followed them. We were stopped on the way and tear gas was fired at us, but we remained undaunted and drove right up to ITO.” Kripal Singh, another farmer returning from Delhi, was worried about others. ”We managed to get back but hundreds of farmers are still at ITO and Red Fort. Delhi police is closing all routes,” he said.

The Times of India

2021-01-27

Ghaziabad