Non violent, mammoth protest by the Indian farming community without a relent has entered its fourth week . It is a protest by all ages, cuts across regional, ethnic, linguistic, gender and faith based identities, coalescing the protestor into one voice. They are braving the frosty winter at the inter state entry points to the capital Delhi. while rewriting the history of passive resistance, taught by Mahatma Gandhi to his followers; they are lodged in makeshift camps with a supply line of food provisions and needed medical cover. They are with a resolve to continue till the withdrawal of the controversial farm laws. Negotiations between the government and the protestors have not borne any result .
The farmers are protesting against the recently promulgated three Agriculture bills. Agriculture, otherwise a state subject, the centre exercising the concurrent jurisdiction enacted these laws and brought in some exceptional changes in the farm practices while doing away with the minimum support price . The support price had worked as a protection to the farmers against the volatile price fluctuations in agricultural produce. The government would procure the food grain from the farms and channel it into the distribution system to reach the end consumer. In this whole operation the government relied on the fiscal instrument of subsidy to provide support price to the producer with a view to cover his cost and essentials and to ward of consumer from the growing food inflation .A norm and a practice stemming from the state’s responsibility to meet the ends of social and economic equity, not exceptional to the Indian government alone . The laws at the same time provided an opening to the private sector to make a direct purchase from the farm rendering the old age role of market committee system redundant. It may well hit the state governments with a loss in the Market committee fees and deny a valuable platform to them to connect with the farmers. Agriculture market committees all over the sub continent had been playing a meaningful role in the trading of agriculture produce, connecting buyers and sellers through informed choices based on the market forces while providing the provincial governments with an oversight to watch the interest of the grower and consumer at the same time.
Another radical move has been the provision of contract farming which to a prudent farmer would reduce his status from an owner to a sharecropper and in the ultimate to a bonded labourer. It is the subsistence farmer of less than five acres of land who is the bulk producer of the food grains in India .
Contract farming is the norm with the giant agribusiness conglomerates the world over. It gives huge powers to them to pre-determine the price, the nature and scale of the crop,its timing, the corporate makes provision of inputs while the owner , lessee, provides the labour and the land ,giving up his right to make decisions about his farming. The contracting corporates not only hold control over the value chain from farm to the consumer but they more often own supply chain of storage and the transportation, leveraging maximum influence on the price structure of the final agriculture produce. Conglomerates like the Cargill, Monsanto, Nestle, Bunge are too well known for vertical and lateral linkages of so many business systems. They have the capacity and the means to move from one value chain to the other.
The Indian farmer could vividly foresee the role and intent of the local corporates with a precedent of Gujrat Model, where the marshy and the state lands had been doled out to known corporates adding force multiplier to their economic worth over time. What is applicable in an industrial based Gujrat may not have been replicable in the agrarian Punjab . The BJP government in this regard has a dim view about the Indian diversity in this regard.
History of corporate farming is too well known in the sub continent and its gory tales are not as yet forgotten. The European farmers, riding on the crest of the French and the British East India company introduced contract farming with indigo plantation in the 18th and 19 th century in Bengal. These were highly profitable ventures but turned the farmers into bonded labour. They were caught in huge indebtedness on account of loans doled out by the contracting firms on exorbitant interest rates .It ultimately led to a violent reaction and the indigo revolt ‘ Nil bidroha, ’ was within no time spread to many districts in Bengal. The revolt was quelled with ruthless force by the British.
The on going farmers movement is a nemesis of the ruling party’s thoughtless majoritarianism with very little room for the counter point. Only last year with the abrogation of Article 370 of the constitution, the status of Jammu and Kashmir had been altered. The Centre further unilaterally down graded the status of the state into union territory .More than a political move , it was indeed a move to denigrate self esteem of the Kashmiris. Moves like amendment in citizenship act to single out Muslim migrants has not gone well either. Huge gatherings at JNU and Shaheen Bagh humming heart warming Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib’s poetic elixir meant little to the ruling brass. Prime minister Narendra Modi seems to be in a dilemma . His every such move characterised by a bizarre uniformity glosses over the hard fact that the unity of his country lay in the acceptance of its innate diversity.
The writer is an author, a public policy analyst, former federal secretary. Currently adjunct faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences, LUMS
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