Farmers protest in India

On March 6, the protest movement launched by Indian farmers against the Modi government’s three farm laws marked 100 days of determined struggle. The farmers faced state repression, extreme winter and vicious propaganda in the 100 days of struggle. The Modi government was hoping that the protest movement would not be able to sustain in the long run and slowly fizzle out. But the opposite has happened. Thousands of farmers are still camping on the three main entry points of capital Delhi with their tractors and trolleys. The farmers are determined to continue the protest movement until the Modi government repeals all three farm laws and reduces the prices of electricity, diesel and fertilisers.

Thousands of female farmers marched towards Delhi from the villages of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh (UP) to celebrate the International Women’s Day with the protesting farmers. Many students, women rights activists and other sections of society from Delhi also joined them to show their solidarity. The mobilisation of female farmers is one of the biggest achievements of this movement.

Support for the farmers’ movement is growing across India – despite all the efforts of the Modi government to create divisions among the farmers. More than 250 farmers’ organisations still stand united across India. Even though the movement has not been able to decisively defeat the farm laws and force the government to repeal these laws so far, it has kept the Modi government under pressure. This movement has emerged as the most serious political challenge for the Modi government.

The Indian government did offer some concessions to farmers to end their protest. The government also offered to suspend the implementation of these laws for 18 months. But farmers refused to end the protests without the repealing of all three farm laws. There exists a clear mistrust between the farmers and the government. The farmers are not ready to trust the government and believe that the government will never repeal the farm laws once they call off their protests.

The main reason behind this mistrust is the failure of the government to deliver on past promises. Both the Congress and the BJP government made many promises to address the problems faced by the farmers for at least three decades. Successive governments made promises with protesting farmers on many occasions but never fulfilled these promises.

The farmers in India are angry because they are facing a serious crisis. The agrarian crisis in India has intensified in the last couple of decades. Indian farmers were experiencing an economic crisis when India was enjoying a high GDP growth of 7-8 percent for nearly 15 years. When the Indian economy was shining for billionaires and the rich, Indian farmers were engulfed by the dark clouds of poverty, debt, rising cost of production and declining incomes.

India’s economic boom and high growth rates haven’t touched the lives of poor farmers, landless wage labourers and peasants.

There were hopes that the BJP, led by right-wing populist Hindu nationalist Modi, would do something to overcome the agricultural crisis and improve the conditions of rural India. But nothing really happened on this front in the last six-and-a-half years of the Modi government. There were high hopes that Modi would deliver on his promises. But now these hopes and illusions have been shattered.

Two-thirds of India’s population depends on farming for their livelihood. But agriculture constitutes around 14 percent of the country’s total economic output. Despite the surge in migration to cities over the past two decades, more than half of the population still lives in rural areas. There were high hopes that Modi would deliver on his promises. But now, these hopes and illusions have been shattered.

Since the introduction of neoliberal economic policies called the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1991, Indian agriculture has suffered a lot as investment in agriculture was cut drastically. Dr Manmohan Singh was the architect of these policies as finance minister. He imposed these policies more rigorously when he was prime minister of India from 2004 to 2014. The sharp political decline of the Indian National Congress in the last decade is the result of such policies. Neoliberal policies have been the main cause of the current agrarian crisis, and undoubtedly rural populations and farmers are the real losers to neoliberalism in the country.

Rural India has particularly suffered, producing a specific form of neoliberalism. Rural development expenditure as a percentage of the net national product has been decreasing since the 1990s.

Government subsidies for fertilisers, electricity, and other farm inputs, as well as investment in irrigation, have all been slashed. Access to cheap loans for farmers has been limited. Price supports to farmers have been reduced, and the Public Distribution System (the provision of subsidised food) has been drastically curtailed. Peasants are losing land to capitalist industrialisation and land speculation. Land ceiling laws are reversed because they are considered constraints on capital flows into farming.

Peasants are being forced to leave their land because farming is not viable: the costs of cultivation are going up due to shrinking government support. These people are also adversely affected by the import of subsidised foreign farm goods. Highly indebted, many are driven to distress sales. This has produced a graveyard of people in villages who have committed suicide (at a rate of two per hour) because of their economic insecurity and inability to pay the bills.

Reduced government support for the plantation industry, such as tea estates, and reduced protection against foreign competition means that many units are going out of business, causing workers to live in poverty, and indeed in many cases commit suicide. Therefore, small and medium farmers have been facing a situation for three decades in which farming has become unprofitable, and consequently their standard of living has worsened to unimaginable extents.

A National Sample Survey report disclosed that, given the option, nearly 40 percent of farmers would like to quit farming. Of more concern has been the huge number of suicides among farmers.

As a result of heavy debts, stagnant crop prices and rising input prices, more than 250,000 farmers have killed themselves since 1995, “the largest recorded rate of suicides in human history” (The Huffington Post, 2012).

Despite the fact that the majority of the population in developing countries relies on agriculture, governments have directed their investment, resources and policies towards urbanisation and industrialisation, thus failing to address the needs of the rural population and perpetuating poverty.

The writer is a freelance journalist.