Farmers Movement Archive

Chaduni and Tikait: Firebrands of farm agitation

The protests that led Prime Minister Narendra Modi to announce his government will scrap three farm laws would not have been possible without the groundswell of support whipped up by two of the agitation’s unlikely leaders, Gurnam Singh Chaduni and Rakesh Tikait. Chaduni took the agitation outside the confines of Punjab to his home state Haryana, which paved the way for farmers to reach Delhi’s borders. Tikait planted the movement firmly in the political bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh.A firebrand, Chaduni organised one of the first meetings on September 10, 2020, in Haryana’s Pipli village to protest the three laws. The next milestone came when the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), a coalition of over 200 farmer unions, called for a march toward Delhi on November 26-27.The laws aimed to ease restrictions on trade in farm produce by setting up free markets, allowed food traders to stockpile large stocks of food for future sales and laid down a national framework for contract farming based on written agreement.Farmers maintained these changes will leave them at the mercy of big corporations, who would be in a position to dictate low prices.In Punjab, the movement was led by leaders such as B.S. Rajewal and Satvir Singh, but Chaduni was the one who built a movement in Haryana, said Kakkaji, a farm leader.Gurnam Singh ChaduniChaduni was among a handful of leaders who was part of the decision to forge a larger alliance at a meeting at Delhi’s Gurdwara Rakab Ganj. The meeting was attended by farm union leaders, including VM Singh, a former convenor of the AIKSCC, 78-year-old Balbir Singh Rajewal, a veteran farmer leader from Punjab, and Chaduni, who was the face of the farmers’ agitation in Haryana.“It was Chaduni who went from village to village, day and night, and explained the need to make the agitation bigger and bigger. This was after it was clear that thousands of farmers would move to Delhi,” said Sandeep Topra, an aide to Chaduni.Chaduni contested the 2019 Assembly election from Ladwa constituency in Haryana’s Kurukshetra region, campaigning on a mix of farmers’ issues and matters of local development, but lost. His wife, Balwinder Kaur, also fought and lost the 2014 Lok Sabha polls as an Aam Aadmi Party candidate.Chaduni’s native village, Charuni Jattan, lies in the Shahbad area of Kurukshetra district. His derives his surname from his native village, a customary practice. Chaduni is an iconoclast. In the middle of the march to Delhi on November 25, 2020, farm unions decided unanimously to sit peacefully on the Punjab-Haryana border due to resistance from the government and a crackdown by Haryana police. Chaduni gave a war cry, defied the sit-in plan, and instead pulled apart barricades in Ambala to reach Delhi with thousands of followers.“These laws will break the backbone of farmers. They will lead to distress sale of farm produce and make us bow to big corporations,” Chaduni told HT at the time.After thousands of farmers reached the borders of Delhi on November 27 last year, the Union government asked the protestors to move to Burari, a designated site on Delhi’s outskirts before talks on the demands could begin.Chaduni opposed it, likening Burari to an open jail. He is described as a fearless farm leader adept at winning street battles on farmers’ issues. “It is a victory of all farmers and it took the ultimate sacrifices of more than 600 farmers who lost their lives in this agitation,” Chaduni said.Rakesh TikaitWhen, after months of peaceful protests, hundreds of farmers marched to the Red Fort and clashed with police in the Capital on January 26 in a tractor rally that went completely out of hand, farm unions feared the violent episode could spell the end of their movement. Instead, Tikait, a leader of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, an influential farmers’ organisation, entrenched the protests firmly in his home turf, the politically crucial sugarcane belt of western Uttar Pradesh. Tikait began holding a series of “kisan mahapanchayats” or rural conclaves, which are respected village institutions of the landed Jat community where social decisions taken by elders are binding.Over 100,000 farmers have camped in five makeshift camps at key border points of Delhi. A turning point came on the night of January 28 this year, when news began to spread that authorities in Uttar Pradesh would descend on Ghazipur , a protest camp on Delhi’s border, to vacate it. The site was under the supervision of Tikait, an influential Jat farm leader from western Uttar Pradesh. Tikait cried before TV cameras, saying he would rather die than give in, which steeled the resolve of the Jats, a community that had benefited from the Green Revolution of the 1970s.The Tikaits belong to the Baliyan khap, a dominant clan among the Jats, most of whom are sugarcane growers. They voted overwhelmingly for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in past elections. This sugarcane belt was the ground zero of the deadly Hindu Jat-Muslim clashes in 2013, which helped the BJP politically. That religious divide is now seen to be cementing. A mahapanchayat in Bhainswal organised on February 5 saw heavy participation of Muslims.Tikait has built a campaign against the entire gamut of the Modi government’s economic reforms, calling them as anti-people and pro-corporations.“We will not rest till a law on MSP (minimum support prices) is passed by the government,” Tikait said. Tikait was instrumental in organising Jats as well as other communities through mahapanchayats (rural conclaves), which was his main strategy, said Ashutosh, the president of Kisan Mazdoor Jagran Manch, a farm outfit in UP’s Dadri.

Hindustan Times

20-11-2021

India