Rethinking protest, religion, and democracy considering the Delhi farmers’s protest, or Kisan Morcha

Abstract

Farmers from Punjab and Haryana began a march to India’s capital, Delhi, in late November 2020. The central government had unilaterally passed three controversial Farm Bill on 20 September 2020, but concerns about the bills had been building prior to this, with a Farmers Union representative stating that the government had not done any consultation. The unions had organized to raise awareness about the bill and had staged a protest to the three ordinances on 16 September 2020. On 25th September, farmers’ leaders called a Bharat bandh, or All-India general strike, in protest of the newly passed farm laws. Shortly after announcing this strike, the farmers’ leaders realized their authority as protest organizers might be contested when Punjab’s political parties – the Shiromani Akali Dal Badal, the Congress Party, and the Aam Aadmi Party – began to use their sphere of influence to stir up popular sentiment. Punjab’s actors and singers, many of whom are from farmer and labourer families, tried to assist leaders of the unions like Joginder Singh Ugraha and Ruldu Singh by using their platforms to spread awareness of the issues with the laws. These attempts to rally support for the issue were met with resistance by union leaders who claimed the protest would be diluted, or overrun, by entities with less genuine commitment to supporting a prolonged protest against the farm laws. From the initial stage of organizing there were shared concerns about the impact of the legislation from a variety of economic, political, and cultural factors which, at critical stages, would threaten the frail alliances that slowly developed after protesters arrived at the border of Delhi. Since partition, Punjab’s governments have diligently invested in agriculture by increasing the amount of arable land, investment in irrigation, seed, fertilizer, and pesticide technologies. This strategy, not without its pitfalls, was able to ensure the state’s GDP growth year after year until about the 1990s. The economic liberalization of the 1990s in India coincided with political destabilization within Punjab. Since then, there has been a marked shift in Punjab’s prosperity. During these years, the Punjab state government invested comparatively less in its economy than other Indian states. This lack of capital investment caused Punjab’s economy to suffer a deep decline. At the same time, a number of sociocultural and health issues had been plaguing farmers and labourers for decades. The central government claimed to have penned the farm laws to address some of the challenges facing the entire agricultural sector, not just Punjab’s economy. Nonetheless, the stipulations around creating a free market led many to question whether the government was liberalizing the agricultural industry and exposing farmers directly to global market pricing. This created a sense of existential threat and anxiety around indebtedness as well as land insecurity, especially in Punjab and Haryana where government-regulated markets were seen as guarantees of livelihood for farmers with less than 1 acre of land. To some degree, the friction between farmer and larbourer interest groups, politicians, and entertainers was cemented in the economic and sociocultural context that developed after the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ in Punjab.