Daily Times

If there was really a way for the Modi government to negotiate an end to the farmer protest that has paralysed Delhi, then protesting farmers wouldn’t be encamped just outside the capital since November. Therefore it is a little difficult to understand just what the Indian government means by implying that it is ready to talk to the farmers; even this late in the day. The protesters have simply rejected the legislation that deregulated the entire sector and gave it to corporations to enhance efficiency and cut losses, because they see it as more like throwing them to the wolves because big companies wouldn’t think twice before tossing a very large number of them out of work just to protect their bottom lines.

This has become a pretty big problem because about a two-thirds of India’s huge 1.3 billion population draws its livelihood directly from farming which means that there, just like here, this sector has the most families associated with it. And most of them struggled to survive even with government support; which explains the abnormally high number of farmer suicides in that country. One would have thought that the government would be a little sympathetic to the plight of the segment of society that gives the whole country its food, regardless of rain or sunshine, but it turns out that the Modi administration is far more concerned with pleasing powerful corporations that underwrite many of its election campaigns.

But the farmers must be given credit for their tenacity because they have simply refused to budge from their position regardless of the kind of pressure the government has tried to put on them; with includes everything under the sky including very harsh police action, on more than one occasion. Now the government itself is in a fix. It’s obvious that it cannot shove the new rules down the farmers’ throats, even though it’s proper legislation, and it can’t just back down and lose political credibility as well as its clout with powerful corporations whose money it needs every few years. Plus with crucial elections coming up in the country’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people and governed by the ruling BJP, it could find itself firmly stuck between a rock and a very hard place.

But the ruling party has only itself, and its dictatorial mindset, to blame for its present impasse. It will have to water down its anti-farmer legislation. The only question is how long it will take before realising it. *