Gurmeet Singh lies on a hospital bed in Rajpura, a city in north India’s Punjab state, while being bandaged. Singh, a fifty-one-year-old veteran who served in the Indian Army for several decades, was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet by police during a farmers protest near Punjab’s border with the neighboring state of Haryana. He is one of the hundred farmers injured as a result of police intervention since the ongoing protests began. Three additional farmers have lost eyesight due to police munitions.
Since February 13, thousands of farmers have been marching toward the nation’s capital, New Delhi, to protest the increasing corporatization of the country’s agricultural industries. The police, under the administration of the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the march. The demonstrators are demanding the implementation of a policy known as the Minimum Support Price (MSP) that protects small farmers from market fluctuations by subsidizing staples like wheat and rice.
The MSP was introduced in the late 1960s during a moment when India faced a severe food deficit. And while the program helped to stave off famines, the government has failed to fully support it in recent decades.
Sajad Hameed
Thousands of farmers have been marching toward New Delhi since February 13.
As of 2019, the latest year for which data is available, farmers’ average debt burden in India is more than $892, nearly half of the country’s average annual income. The total outstanding loan on farmers increased from $116.16 billion in 2014 to $282.68 billion in 2021-2022.
During the pandemic in 2020, farmers launched a thirteen-month-long agitation against the Indian Government, which is led by BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi, over three contentious farm bills that would have eliminated state-backed price floors for crops. Farmers say that more than 700 participants died during these protests. Now, more than two years later, farmers belonging to more than 200 different agricultural unions are once again marching to protect their livelihoods. “Legalizing MSP guarantees farmers a minimum price for their produce, ensuring fair returns on investments and labor,” says Jagjit Singh Dallewal, leader of Sanyukt Kisan Morcha, one of the 200 farm unions that are spearheading the protests.
Sajad Hameed
Farmers stand near a barricade erected by police at the Punjab-Haryana border.
Although Modi’s administration has been in talks with the farm unions since the announcement of the march, hundreds of police officers have been stationed at the Punjab-Haryana border to prevent the farmers from advancing toward the capital. Dozens of protesters were detained, and the central government instructed several states to establish makeshift detention centers to hold the arrested farmers. The Haryana government, in some districts of the state, suspended mobile Internet and other telecommunication services during the march. This media blackout included blocking the Twitter handles of two independent journalists who had been posting from the frontline.
Aditya Menon, a prominent journalist and political observer who has been reporting on the farmer protests for the last four years, noted that the repression of social media occurred at the same time protest leaders were meeting with government officials. “[The farmers’ leaders] came out of the meeting to find that their Twitter handles had been withheld,” he told The Progressive.
Sajad Hameed
Authorities suspended Internet services in several districts within the state of Haryana, where the protesters have been halted for now.
In 2020, as farmers camped on the borders of New Delhi, the Modi administration relented and withdrew the three contentious farm bills. Now, with India’s general elections coming up in April and May, the government is exercising heightened caution in order to mitigate any factors that could erode support for Modi.
In Haryana, authorities have strategically deployed barricades and concertina wire, and embedded large nails into the roads, in order to manage and control the protesting farmers who are attempting to breach the border of the state. Drones were used to fire teargas shells to dissuade farmers from advancing towards Delhi.
Menon believes that the farmers’ movement has emerged as a key plank for anti-Modi politicians to influence voters ahead of the elections, where more than half of India’s 912 million electorate are expected to cast ballots. “The opposition has struggled to significantly sway public opinion,” Menon says. “The strategic timing of the protest offers a last chance for the opposition to exert a substantial impact on the political landscape.”
Sajad Hameed
The protesting farmer are demanding an increase to government subsidies for crop sales that would ensure a sustainable livelihood.
Rahul Gandhi, a leader in the Indian National Congress, the country’s main opposition party, recently expressed solidarity with the farmers and spoke to Gurmeet Singh in the hospital. Gandhi, who denounced Modi’s “dictatorial attitude,” said the prime minister had “only cheated the farmers in the last ten years.”
The farm leaders and unions could energize the rural vote bank, while the government’s response may influence urban voters, shaping their perceptions and, consequently, their electoral choices in a country where more than 50 percent of the population is employed in the agricultural sector and more than 70 percent depend directly or indirectly on agriculture.
Sajad Hameed
More than 50 percent of India's population works in agriculture.
Despite being the cornerstone of India’s economy, in recent decades, an alarming number of farmers have died by suicide. From 1995 to 2020, more than 400,000 farmers died by suicide due to mounting debt, with a significant surge in suicides over the past seven years. This worrying trend has led farmers from south Indian states including Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu to rally behind the protesting farmers in the north. “The only reason [the BJP] does not grant us the MSP is that they are close friends with the corporate sector,” said Baaj Singh, a thirty-two-year-old farmer-leader from Punjab, whom we met at the protest.
As of February 21, protesters were still being pelted with rubber bullets and tear gas. The government has spoken to farmers on three occasions, but insiders say the talks have been hostile, making farmers even more frustrated. While experts like Menon are closely monitoring the protest, the primary struggle for protesters like Baaj Singh remains the physical task of overcoming the barriers to be able to reach Delhi. “This is more than just a battle against [Modi],” says Singh. “It’s a relentless fight against his corporate cronies.”