Gorakh Bhagre, a farmer in Western India’s Maharashtra state, faces a dilemma: “If I sell my crops, what will my family eat? If I don’t sell my crops, how will we survive?”
Last year, private traders offered him a mere 5,750 Indian Rupees, or $75, for 551 pounds of soybeans. With no better option, Bhagre was forced to sell at this throwaway price. “I couldn’t even recover the cost of production,” he says.
Since then, fifty-year-old Bhagre has taken on seven different odd jobs to make ends meet. An Adivasi (Indigenous) landless farmer from the Koli Mahadev community, he works as a farmworker, mason, woodcutter, devotional singer, and other part-time gigs, including harvesting grapes. His situation, he says, is a direct result of “the massive corporatization of Indian farming.”
Despite Bhagre’s sixteen-hour workdays, he is determined to fight this system with non-violent protests. When India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi hastily passed three contentious farm laws in September 2020 that deregulated farming by completely opening it to corporations, forty farm unions with tens of thousands of members responded by leading one of the world’s largest demonstrations. The protest was called off on December 9, a full 378 days later, after the government repealed the laws.
When farmers weren’t allowed to enter New Delhi, India’s capital, they camped at the city’s outskirts. From November 26, 2020, the day the protests began, Bhagre—who lives 800 miles away from Delhi—joined more than twenty local and state-level protests and has even attended one in the capital.
Fearing the upcoming federal elections and intense fight put up by farmers, Modi announced the withdrawal of the laws a year later, on November 19, 2021. Farmers, however, didn’t stop protesting: They continued pressuring government officials to approve their demands, which included compensation to the families of the hundreds of farmers who died during the protests, entitlement to minimum support prices (MSPs), and revoking legal cases against the protesting farmers.
“The way he [Modi] brought laws was autocratic, and he repealed them in a similar way,” says Vijay Jawandhiya, an activist and farmers’ leader based in Maharashtra, referencing how the Modi government repealed the law in a parliamentary session that lasted less than five minutes.
Farmers remain livid as rightwing media and Modi’s party leaders labeled them traitors, anti-nationals, or terrorists. The protesting farmers also faced brute force, barricades, tear gas, water cannons, nails, internet shutdowns, trenches, name-shaming, legal notices, and several other forms of intimidation.
In his address while repealing the laws, Modi mentioned that “despite his best efforts, he couldn’t convince a section of the farmers.”
But, as Bhagre notes, “Not even once did Modi walk down to meet farmers.”
During the protests, more than 600 farmers died due to Delhi’s biting winter cold followed by heavy rains. From the onset, the protesting farmers responded with non-violent measures like writing hundreds of postcards, calling for a nationwide shutdown of economic activities, and road blockades. They even united many non-farmers as India witnessed a general strike of 250 million people in 2020.
Gorakh Bhagare has joined over twenty local and state-level protests to resist the three farm laws.
On October 3, an SUV belonging to Union Minister Ajay Mishra rammed through protesting farmers in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district, killing four farmers and a journalist.
In response, a caravan of farmers began traveling across India carrying the dead farmers’ ashes. Narayan Gaikwad, seventy-four, carried these ashes 1,000 miles away through twenty villages in Western Maharashtra. Accompanying him was a delegation of around 100 local farmers. They began making people aware of the callousness with which the government had treated the farmers.
“This movement helped build solidarity,” says Gaikwad.
Despite a year of protests, the government has yet to approve the legal entitlement to a MSP for all crops. MSP is a floor price determined by India’s Agriculture Ministry that protects farmers from volatile markets. Currently, the ministry authorizes an MSP for twenty-three commodities, but nothing codifies it, making farmers like Bhagre vulnerable to the free market. “Had the Government even assured an MSP,” Bhagre tells The Progressive, “I wouldn’t have had to work sixteen hours [per day].”
The government has claimed it is working toward an MSP framework. But, if progress isn’t made soon, farmer leader Gurnam Singh Charuni said, “We may resume the protest.”
While safety nets barely exist for the Indian farmers, activists say that the three agricultural reform laws would have made it difficult to survive. Lawyer Amol Naik from Maharashtra’s Mudshingi village, who is also a farmer, says, “These laws will benefit the corporations who will exploit the farmers by paying them less since there’s no mention of an MSP.”
Naik has traveled to more than fifty villages in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district to raise awareness of the draconian farm laws. “The legal language of these laws,” he believes, “is not easy to comprehend.”
India’s farm sector, according to Naik, has suffered one crisis after another. In 2006, the Eastern Indian state of Bihar passed a farm law that dismantled market yards—where farmers would sell their produce—and opened them to private traders.
Basgonda Patil, a farmer from Maharashtra’s Jambhali village, distributes a sugarcane snack after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the farm laws will be repealed.
In 2018-19, the income of Bihar farmers from crop production was around $15 less than the national average. Meanwhile, from crop production, they only make roughly $35 per month. “If these laws are good for farmers, Naik asks, “why are farmers in Bihar becoming poor and forced to work as laborers?”
Pro-government media claimed that the farmers who protested were wealthy. The government’s own data, however, suggest that more than half of India’s farmers are indebted with an average outstanding loan of $970 per household. Farmers earned $50 per month from crop production between July, 2018 and June, 2019, while the highest income came from wages, highlighting why farmers are demanding an MSP.
Gulab Shinde, a fifty-four-year-old farmer from a village near the city of Nashik, has spent his life protesting. When I met him at Azad Maidan sports ground in Mumbai on November 28, he said, “Even my grandchildren have started joining the protests now.”
Several thousands of farmers from Maharashtra’s villages had gathered in Mumbai as part of a protest which was also joined by Rakesh Tikait, one of the farmer leaders spearheading the movement.
Lawyer Amol Naik (center) has traveled over fifty villages to raise political awareness around the farm laws.
Like Bhagre, Shinde is dependent on the rains. During this year’s farming season, when Shinde had to water his soybeans one last time, he reached out to a wealthy farmer, who asked Shinde for 112 pounds of soybeans in return for five hours of water supply. “This is what happens when the government doesn’t help farmers,” he told me. “Our issues are complicated and won’t be solved merely by repealing the laws.”
Farmer-activist Jawandhiya adds, “The farmers are in the same position as they were before these laws. But now, the entire world has taken cognizance of their protests. This is a big victory.”
Indeed, it is a victory borne out of the efforts of thousands of rural farmers’ dedication—farmers whom the mainstream media never bothered to talk to. Fifty-four-year-old Mumtaz Haider led awareness sessions in rural Maharashtra in the middle of the COVID lockdown. “I would take the secret routes and reach the farmers’ fields,” she says.
Haider mobilized several hundreds of farmers at the district level. “Our biggest success was making the non-farmers in our village aware of why farmers are protesting.”
Mumtaz Haider, a farmer from Maharashtra's Rui village, led awareness sessions on the farm laws and organized local protests.
Haider has been patient with her younger counterparts, many of whom often lost motivation. “It’s a long haul, but today when these laws have been repealed, everyone realized how important local protests are,” she says proudly.
For protesting farmers’, however, this is not the end. Bhagre says: “We’ve shown the world that nonviolent protests keep democracy alive, and we won’t stop fighting ‘til we get a fair price for the produce.”