Tens of thousands of farmers blocked major roads across India on Saturday, in a continuation of a months-long protest movement against new agricultural policies that they say will strengthen corporations and devastate them financially.
The ongoing demonstrations indicate that the energy of the protest remains strong, as the government and farmers remain stuck in an impasse after several rounds of negotiations between them have failed to produce major advances.
Protesters used tractors, trucks, tents and boulders to block roads during a three-hour “chakka congestion” or roadblock across the country, according to Reuters.
The roadblocks were created at more than 10,000 locations across India on Saturday, according to Avik Saha, secretary of the All India Coordinating Committee Kisan Sangharsh, a federation of farmer groups.
“We will continue to fight until our last breath,” Jhajjan Singh, an 80-year-old farmer at a protest site in Ghazipur, told the Guardian. He said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi “should know that he will either remain or we will.
Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed across the country to deal with the protests. Although the farmers’ demonstrations were largely peaceful, on January 26 a group of protesters went off a demonstration route and fought with police in Delhi, an incident that resulted in hundreds of injuries and the death of a demonstrator.
Farmers’ leaders condemned the violence, but security has since increased. According to the Guardian, police have put iron stakes and steel barricades around protest sites to prevent farmers from entering the capital.
Why protesters are mobilizing
Protesters have mobilized against three agricultural reform laws passed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata (BJP) Party in September; Together, the laws aim to deregulate India’s agricultural industry.
As Jariel Arvin of Vox explained in December, while the government says this is necessary to modernize the economy, protesters argue that it will only intensify its economic precariousness:
Under the new policies, farmers will now sell goods and contract with independent buyers outside government-sanctioned markets, which have long served as the main locations for farmers to do business. Modi and members of his party believe that these reforms will help India modernize and improve its agricultural industry, which will mean greater freedom and prosperity for farmers.
But Protestant farmers are not convinced. Although the government has said it will not reduce the minimum support prices for essential crops like grains, which the Indian government has established and guaranteed for decades, farmers fear they will disappear. Without them, farmers believe they will be at the mercy of large corporations that will pay extremely low prices for essential crops, plunging them into debt and financial ruin.
“Farmers are so passionate because they know that these three laws are like death sentences for them,” Abhimanyu Kohar, coordinator of the National Farmer’s Alliance, a federation of more than 180 apolitical agricultural organizations across India, told me in an interview. “Our farmers are making this move for our future, for our own survival.”
The protests drew constant international attention, in part because of their size. As Reuters notes, although agriculture accounts for only about 15 fathers of India’s GDP, about 50% of the country’s workers are farmers – and hundreds of millions of farmers have participated in street demonstrations and strikes since last fall.
Farmers had a powerful voice in Indian politics – and they don’t want to lose it
Experts say the government’s attempt to change agricultural policy has hit a third obstacle in Indian politics, revealing tensions created by modernization, while threatening to undo market rules for farmers that have been in place for decades.
Since the 1970s, an elaborate system of agricultural subsidies and price guarantees, organized through a system of markets known as mandis, has been a central feature of agricultural policy in India and, as Arvin noted, has essentially helped provide farmers a kind of secure internet.
Aditya Dasgupta, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, specializing in Indian politics, says these policies are the product of the large-scale mobilization of farmers, agrarian unions, movements and parties that became politically powerful during the Revolution Verde, the country’s huge jump in agricultural productivity, which occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Farmers’ protests today refer to this tradition of protest and display of agrarian power, but the context is very different,” Dasgupta told me. “India is urbanizing, agriculture is responsible for an ever smaller share of GDP and the main source of political and economic support for the governing party BJP comes from large urban companies.”
“So, in a sense, this is not just a conflict over specific policies, but also a major focus on the sectoral base of political power and whether or not farmers remain a politically powerful interest group as India urbanizes” , he said.
While it is unclear what kind of compromise or concession can ease tensions over current reforms, experts like Dasgupta point out that the underlying dynamics that gave rise to them – questions about who should retain power in India’s evolving economy – are likely to remain to long term.