NEW DELHI – Under a rain-soaked canvas, half a dozen elderly women bake roti on a wood baking sheet – flattening the dough, turning the golden bread from dawn until the sun turns into Delhi’s night smoke. Anyone who enters the place receives rice and cooked vegetables and, to accompany it, a yogurt drink with cumin flavor.
Across the road, Jagjeet Singh, a burly man with a large pouch and a light purple turban, shakes a pot of coffee with milk from 5 am to 5 pm. In the evening, Mr. Singh switches to hot milk flavored with turmeric and cloves – good for the cold, good for the day’s exhaustion. He spends about 260 liters of milk daily.
“Now this is coffee,” he said, as his coffee pot boiled and he leaned over it to smell it. “You can even smell a helicopter!”
Music, games and free stuff, from fried snacks to thermal underwear and bottles of almond oil for hair, can be found around every corner. But the scenes that stretch for miles around the Indian capital do not come from a fair. They constitute one of the largest sustained protests the country has seen in decades, persisting through constant rains and dozens of deaths that farmers and the Indian media have attributed to climate, illness or suicide.
For six weeks, tens of thousands of farmers obstructed the city’s four main entry points. They are challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has crushed all other opposition and remains the country’s dominant political force, over his effort to reshape the way agriculture in India has been done for decades. The protests disrupted business across northern India at a time when the country’s economy was already in crisis.
Protesters are demanding that Modi repeal recent agricultural laws that would minimize the government’s role in agriculture and open up more space for private investors. The government says the new laws will free farmers and private investment, bringing growth. Farmers are skeptical, fearing that removing state protections that they already consider insufficient will leave them at the mercy of corporate greed.
“They sold everything else. Only farmers are left, ”said Ajay Veer Singh, 18, who has been protesting with his 67-year-old grandfather since the beginning in November. “Now they want to sell the farmers to their corporate friends as well.”
In Singhu, a village about 40 kilometers from the center of Delhi, where Singh is camped, there is no sign that the protesters are getting tired. Between rain showers, which significantly worsen the impact of winter temperatures dropping below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, young protesters tried to drain puddles while the elderly tried to stay dry. At night, they curled up in the back of their covered trucks or by the hundreds in large shelters, often with leaks.
Farmers transformed a 10-mile stretch of highway into a well-organized community. Many of the farmers are Sikhs and they said that their beliefs and sense of tradition helped them to make sacrifices to support the protests.
Protesters, which a leader estimated at around 50,000, organized a rotation to ensure that their numbers do not decrease. When protesters get tired or sick, they usually organize replacements in their village before they leave.
Singh said some 5,000 people alone from his village of 14,500 in the Faridkot district of Punjab joined the protest, almost 1,000 of them women. Asked if he was nervous about his grandfather’s illness or the coronavirus infection, he smiled.
“My grandfather is not afraid of the crown,” he said. “He fears for our future.”
The protests revealed the dire reality of inequality in much of the country.
More than 60% of the 1.3 billion Indians still depend mainly on agriculture for their livelihood, although the sector accounts for only 15% of the country’s economic production. Its dependence only increased after Covid-19 severely hit the urban economy and sent millions of workers back to their villages. Debts and bankruptcies have led farmers to high suicide rates for years.
Government support for farmers and market regulation, with guaranteed minimum prices for certain essential crops, helped India overcome the terrible famine of the 1960s to produce a surplus of grain in recent years. But with India liberalizing its economy in recent decades, Modi – who wants to see the Indian economy nearly double by 2024 – sees a role as big for the government as no longer sustainable.
Farmers, however, say they are struggling even with existing protections. They believe that market-friendly laws will eventually eliminate regulatory support and leave them desolate. India’s weakened economy offers them little chance of a different livelihood.
“The laws are an attempt at poor quality liberalization. You just promulgated them without thinking about the farmers, ”said Vikas Rawal, professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, who studies agrarian problems. “What you need to do is make agriculture profitable for farmers, striking a balance between public support, private investment and ecological concerns.”
At first, the Modi government tried to paint protesters as mistaken, fueled by fierce opposition or even by foreign hands – a tactic used against previous waves of demonstrations. More recently, the government’s willingness to negotiate suggests that it is against a highly organized and motivated movement.
As several rounds of negotiations failed, the farmers threatened to take their tractors to the capital. Modi’s ministers offered concessions on some issues, such as exempting farmers from penalties under a new air pollution law. But farmers insist on nothing less than repealing the laws and setting minimum prices.
With each passing week, the farmers said, they are growing embittered against a government that is resisting as protesters gather in the elements in the midst of a pandemic. Protest leaders say about 60 of its members have died of illness or suicide, although an exact number cannot be determined.
“I have just one message for him,” said Harjinder Singh, 48, a ninth-generation farmer, about Modi. “‘Fear of God.'”
Despite the difficulties, protesters found ways to gather support. Some have built elaborate stages, large and small, all over the tent city in Singhu, where agricultural and political leaders can hold demonstrations. During intervals of speeches, the organizers read the list of the latest donations from all over India and the world. Gifts were also sent from farmers in other parts of the country, from pineapples to almonds.
Demonstrators with technology experience disseminate videos and photos on social media to keep the crowds in villages energized and to keep donations coming.
Up and down the protest line, music echoes from the sound systems installed on the tractors and seeps into the openings of many tents. In one corner, an improvised gym was set up before being transformed into a “shopping center” by a help group that offered essential items such as toothpaste, thermal underwear and bath and laundry soap. At several points, there are even laundry stalls with washing machines.
Volunteers in medical tents take care of minor illnesses – paracetamol for headaches, amlodipine for blood pressure. “Diabetes is the worst,” said Manisha Sharma, 27, a paramedic who attended a medical tent.
Despite the size of the crowd and the chaos of so many people surviving in the cold and mud, the protesters try to remain calm, suspicious of provocations that may give the government a pretext to discredit the movement or repress in the name of law and order.
“Last night, we caught a young man who stole a cell phone,” said Harjot Singh, a protester who was helping to serve rice in one of the food stalls. They let him go unpunished, he added.
In interviews, many of the Sikh protesters portrayed agriculture and its struggle for justice as a duty, and the sacrifice and organization that made the protests possible as a religious service.
“It is cold and it is difficult to get water every morning for a bath,” said Shabek Singh, who was dressed in a deep blue robe and a large round turban. “But we are not going anywhere. We will make this our temple. “