Farmers Movement Archive

Protesters of 2002 return to the front

Jind: Fired from the public health department in 2003 for joining the farmers’ three-month-long protest in 2002 against the INLD, Kandela’s Azad Singh (69) now fights yet another government for them. Even a 17-year battle for justice in the Punjab and Haryana high court hasn’t exhausted this senior. Azad Singh said: “In the 1980s, I was a general secretary of the Bhartiya Kisan Union (which leads the current agitation) before I picked up a government job in 1984 for a normal life. In 2001, it was a similar biting cold of December-January when the-then Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala refused to waive the farmers’ electricity bills despite his election promise and cut the power supply of Kandela and its next village of Shahpur.” In 2002, the farmers blocked the Jind-Chandigarh highway at Kandela. Being a former farmer union leader, Azad Singh attended their peaceful protest. But when the government came to know, it suspended him and then kicked him out in 2003. He continues to fight for his dues. The INLD government had to step down after three months of protest in which 70 farmers of Kandela and other villages took police bullets. All the families who suffered now camp on Delhi’s Tikri border, determined to win again. Azad Singh tills 2 acres. Fellow villager Bijender Singh (40) said: “I also got a bullet in 2002. Police must have fired 700 rounds that day. I was 22. I tried to rescue a cop from a burning police vehicle but, as soon as he came out, he opened indiscriminate fire and a shot hit me in the thigh. We keep going to the Tikri border. There will be no retreat.”

The Times of India

2021-02-12

Chandigarh