Farmers Movement Archive

Ahead of polls, farmers’ unions embark on anti-BJP campaign

On January 18 this year, a prominent leader of the ongoing farmers’ protest against three new agricultural laws, Gurnam Singh Charuni, “clarified” before a platform of farm unions leading the agitation that he would never organise political meets without permission after having done so once.Charuni, the firebrand leader of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, an influential farmers’ organisation and key force behind the protests in Haryana, had organised an all-party meeting to rally support for the farmers. The move went against the promise of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, a collective of farm unions, to keep the movement “strictly apolitical”.Also Read | ‘Going to Nandigram…’: BKU’s Rakesh Tikait says ‘BJP has robbed the country’However, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha appears to have dropped its stand of being equidistant from all parties, campaigning against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, especially in five states going to the polls in a few weeks.Influential farmer leader Rakesh Tikait, who is spearheading the protest against the contentious farm laws, is in West Bengal, where a fierce election campaign battle between the BJP and Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress is underway. On Saturday, Tikait urged people at Nandigram not to vote for the BJP, while mounting attack on the BJP-led central government. “There are elections ahead in Bengal. You need not come to Delhi. You ensure that the BJP is defeated in the polls. Don’t vote for them. Vote for only that party which can defeat the BJP,” he said.He was addressing a rally attended by a few hundred people at Nandigram, which goes to the polls on April 1. Political experts suggest it could be the fiercest of the constituency battles, with chief minister Mamata Banerjee taking on her protege-turned-adversary Suvendu Adhikari, who has been pitted against her by the rival BJP.“This movement (farmers’ agitation) has to be spread throughout the country across all districts. You will have to break barriers and barricades. This movement will continue till the time the kala-kanoon (contentious farm laws) is withdrawn,” Tikait said, while projecting Nandigram as a citadel of the farmers’ movement. Back in 2007-2008, Nandigram became the epicentre of a farmers’ movement that propelled Banerjee to power in the state in 2011, uprooting the 34 years of the Left Front government.Analysts say that there has seldom been voting on purely farmers’ economic issues, and farmers rather tend to vote along caste and religious lines.However, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha’s call for a campaign against the BJP has opened a new front of challenge for the ruling party, which is looking to unseat Banerjee in West Bengal.In a far cry from being an apolitical body, the SKM last month gave a nationwide call to “teach the BJP a lesson”. “We continue to be equidistant so far as support to any particular party is concerned. But we are against the government and it will be ridiculous to claim that we are not against the party that rules it,” said Avik Saha, national secretary of the SKM.In Nandigram, a “mahapanchayat” spearheaded by Tikait on Sunday is expected to draw large crowds and is being supported by six constituent organisations of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, the Left’s All-India Kisan Mahasabha and a clutch of civil society organisations.“We have been compelled to campaign against the BJP because the government has rejected all out demands and that is the only language it understands,” Saha said.Tens of thousands of farmers are protesting since last year, demanding a scrapping of three agricultural laws to deregulate markets and which promise to offer farmers more market access for farmers to sell their produce.Farm unions, however, say the laws will allow large corporations and supermarkets to dictate terms to growers and leave them at the mercy of big firms.Tikait has been holding a series of “kisan mahapanchayats”, which are respected village institutions of the Jat community in northern states such as Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, where social decisions taken by elders are considered binding.In these mahapanchayats, leaders such as Tikait and Charuni have built a groundswell of support for the agitation by raising local farm issues such as the problems of sugarcane growers aside from the larger demand of scrapping the farm laws.Analysts say the farmers’ campaign against the BJP may not influence the elections in a big way but it matters. “No state is going to the polls on the issue of farm laws. But the farmers’ agitation comes as an opportunity for the opposition,” says Barun Mitra, a teacher at the Calcutta University.With HTC inputs from Kolkata

Hindustan Times

14-03-2021

India