‘The Mode of Resistance Must Change’

The ongoing farmers’ agitation at the Punjab-Haryana border for the past year seems to have reached a new turn due to Jagjit Singh Dallewal’s fast unto death. Despite suffering from cancer Dallewal has been on hunger strike since 26 November demanding Minimum Support Price [MSP] as a legal guarantee, something which the Narendra Modi government promised to farmers to look into after a 13-month-long siege of Delhi by the peasant associations before the parliamentary elections. In truth ‘everyone talks of MSP as long as it is not implemented’. The government promises it only to pacify the protesters but conveniently forgets when the aggrieved are back in fields. MSP apart from Dallewal additionally demanded complete loan waivers, the implementation of a pension for farmers and agricultural labourers and the stoppage of periodic rises in electricity prices. As Dallewal is in critical condition his life should be saved first by helping to break his fast. The farmer leaders who have come with the movement should not let Dallewal’s hunger strike become a tragedy. One can hope not against hope that hunger striker Jagjit Singh Dallewal will not meet the same fate as G D Agrawal or Devaki Nandan.

There has been no dearth of sacrifices of farmers’ lives in the process of indiscriminate privatization and liberalization going on in the country for the last three and a half decades. Lakhs of farmers have committed suicide. This series is still continuing intermittently. Three farmers involved in the current agitation at Shambhu and Khanauri borders have committed suicide being upset because of the government’s non-responsive attitudes towards their movement. About 7000 farmers were reportedly martyred in the year-long movement against the corporate scripted three agricultural laws. They were the victims of police brutality.

Surprisingly, the apex court instead of intervening directly, reportedly accused the Punjab government of speaking in the voice of protesters as it urged the Union Government to consider the demands of farmers. Everybody expects the Supreme Court would show its eagerness to save the life of Dallewal. No, that didn’t happen. If anything, the sacrifice of farmers’ lives does not affect the ruling class.

Saving Dallewal’s life by withdrawing hunger strike does not mean ending the movement. A new way should be explored to continue the struggle. One way could be to do a group satyagraha fast in rotation for a certain period—three weeks or so. At least the labour unions should be mobilized as far as possible in diverse ways to support the peasants. Communists have a pet theory of worker-peasant unity in any broader mass movement and the farmers’ agitation has created an ideal situation to execute their theory.

 MSP, loan waiver, and cheap electricity should definitely be the immediate measures, but these are not solutions to the basic crisis. The farmer leadership has generally not been interested in creating the politics of opposition to neo-liberalism which has been the root cause of the crisis. For politics, they remain dependent on traditional political parties that in one way or another other are apologists of neo-liberalism. Then religion, caste, region and patriarchy continue to hinder the advancement of their movement.

The persons in authority in India find the solution to the agrarian crisis only in the corporatisation of agriculture. Despite massive corporatisation and huge subsidies farmers in Europe and America have to take to the streets again and again. The famous Seattle resistance against corporatisation at the WTO ministerial conference in November 1989, a decade after the Washington Consensus, is there for everyone to see. But the ruling parties and opposition as well in India cannot think of any alternative model other than corporatisation.

 16-01-2025
[Contributed by Prem Singh]

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 32, Feb 2 - 8, 2025