(Samaj Weekly)
Stand in solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Indian farmers!
Make 8th December 2020 Bharat Bandh (National lockdown) an historic success!
Despite agriculture being a state subject, not a federal one, the ruling right-wing Hindutva government at the Centre led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi have enacted three Farm Laws in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made millions of farmers rise up in arms against the government. After conducting more than three months of state-level protests, blocking railways, toll plazas, and corporate run malls in the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, the farmers have now surrounded Delhi at its borders. Police barricades, roadblocks and water cannons couldn’t stop them from reaching the national capital. The Punjab and Haryana farmers have now been joined by thousands of farmers who come from several other Indian states such as UP, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan.
Protesting under the collective leadership of Samyukt Kisan Morcha and All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), these farmers gave a call for Bharat Bandh (National lockdown) on 8th December 2020. With the active solidarity of ten central trade unions, the All-India Motor Transport Congress (an umbrella body of 10 million truckers) and the students of various universities in India, the farmers protests are now taking the shape of a people’s movement. The movement’s main demands put forward to the government is unconditional withdrawal of the anti-farmer legislations.
What has angered the farmers so much? Despite Modi’s reassurances to the farmers that these laws will be in their best interest, nothing could be further from the truth. These farm bills, pushed through using his regime’s brute majority in parliament, ease and formalise the corporate takeover of Indian agriculture. They do away with guaranteed minimum prices for farm products, allow hoarding of agricultural commodities by the corporations, and facilitate entry of agribusinesses in the farming sector. Revealing their dubious intentions, these farm laws also block aggrieved farmers from approaching the courts for redressal.
The Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs) established by most of the state governments after enacting the Agricultural Produce Market Regulation Acts (APMR Acts) in 1960s and 70s, are meant to ensure farmers are safeguarded from exploitation by large retailers. In the main until September 2020 the first sale of agriculture produce could occur only at the state government regulated Mandis (market yards) established by APMCs. Only licenced traders could buy agricultural produce in auctions at these Mandis at government agreed minimum support price (MSP). Though the Government claims not to scrap the MSP, the farmers demand that MSP is brought into legislation as they are fully aware it has no intention of guaranteeing that price, either in newly proposed open markets nor in the increasingly redundant APMC markets.
The APMC established Mandis collect fees and levies on the sales, which are exempted in the newly enacted farm legislations. This not only puts the APMC-run markets at a serious price disadvantage, but also deprives the APMCs of revenue much needed to provide facilities to the farmers: cold storages, ripening chambers, auction halls, common warehouses, weighbridges, rest houses, drinking water and toilets etc. Taking advantage of the levy/fees exemptions, the unregulated private markets will be open for manipulation by the corporate houses such as Ambani, Adani and Monsanto.
The traders are part of the supply chain in the APMC system, who buy the crop from the farmers at the Mandis and sell it to the whole sale dealers and supermarkets in urban centres. These traders also act as ‘quick and easy’ moneylenders to the farmers, who obviously need capital to buy essentials like seeds, fertiliser and farm machinery, etc. Such loans are difficult to obtain from the banks due to bureaucratic procedures so they approach the traders instead.
The newly enacted farm laws will put the farmers at the mercy of the corporate houses and destroy their livelihood by making the Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs) obsolete, forcing electronic trading upon farmers who have no easy connectivity to the digital world, and doing away with the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system and government subsidies to the farmers. The farmers will have no legal recourse to settle the price dispute with the corporates, whereas this function is presently carried out by the APMCs. Apart from the global agro-corporations such as the monstrous Monsanto, the Indian MNCs like Reliance Retail (of Ambani) and Adani Wilmar (of Adani) in particular are expected to be the main beneficiaries of these new laws. According to study published by bloombergquint.com the new farm laws that boast of doubling farmers’ income in two years by deregulating agricultural markets may in fact further widen the inequalities in the sector. The study claims that by weakening the state governments’ price guarantee system, the laws may end up hurting small and poor farmers, who form 80% of the sector and 23% of those who live below the poverty line. All this paves the way for corporatisation of agriculture, displacement of small and marginal farmers from their lands making them join the army of landless peasants and urban industrial migrant workers.
Although the immediate spark that has triggered these farmers’ protests is the enactment of these three anti-farmer laws, the backdrop of this is the discontent fuelled by Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG) policies being implemented over the last three decades by successive Indian regimes. The so-called green revolution has made farmers heavily dependent on global corporations for agricultural inputs. The agrarian economy has been in a near collapse state since the early nineties owing to deregulation of markets as part of the neoliberal economic policies enforced under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Steeped in never-ending debts more than 330,000 farmers have committed suicide in India just only in the past couple of decades. Millions of small and marginal farmers and landless peasants have also had to migrate to urban centres to work in industries for very low wages and under unsafe working conditions in order to survive. The recent pandemic-induced exodus of migrant workers, who walked back from urban centres to their villages has brought to light the fact that they form the core of the informal sector, which is almost 81% of the Indian industrial workforce.
BJP IT cells’ social media has been conducting vicious campaigns against the farmers’ movement. It highlights the exploitation of the small and marginal farmers by the traders and money-lenders of Punjab and Haryana as an argument in favour of the Farm Laws. But in reality, the enactment of these new laws will never provide an exploitation-free system. Instead, they will rather replace the exploitation of the money-lenders with that of Ambani, Adani and Monsanto. The social media troll army of BJP RSS has begun branding the protesting farmers as ‘Khalistanis’ and ‘Naxals’. At the same time, they accuse the Jaat leaders of discriminating against Dalits and other backward castes. Despite the fact that caste discrimination within the Indian society is a bitter reality, it is ironical that the Hindutva Brahminical upper-caste supremacists should make such accusations. Hindutva forces, in their loyal service of the feudal/corporate classes, the international monopoly capital and IMF/WTO/World Bank, are making all kinds of unsubstantiated accusations against those leading the farmers’ protests. It’s high time for the people of India to forge alliances cutting across caste, religious and regional barriers and build a strong democratic movement with a united front against the pro-corporate BJP-RSS Hindutva government.
- Scrap the newly enacted anti-farmer legislations unconditionally
- Stop harassing the leaders of the farmers movement
- Freedom to all political prisoners
- Make the 8th December 2020 Bharat Bandh a big success
In solidarity
Indian Workers’ Association (COC), Great Britain 07/12/2020
