What Happened to the Farm Law Movement? - Transcript

Intro [00:00:07]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:00:14]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen. I am a social anthropologist based in Oslo and also one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. In this episode, we focus on the afterlife and legacy of the massive farmers protests that rocked India from 2020 to late 2021. Often simply called the farm law movement protesting farmers demanded the withdrawal of three new laws that would have considerably liberalised agricultural production and trade in India. Their demands were eventually met after more than a year of protest in December 2021, when Prime Minister Narendra modi announced that these controversial farm laws would be repealed. This unprecedented policy setback for the Modi government in many ways makes the farm law movement India's most significant and successful farmers movement in recent decades. Yet since then, we have not heard much from the many farmers unions and organizations that made up this movement. What's become of the farm law movement and has it left any kind of lasting legacy? To address these questions, I'm joined by Amandeep Sandhu, award winning author, journalist and columnist. Most closely followed the farm law movement since it began in Punjab in late summer 2020. In addition to writing regularly for the Caravan Scroll and The Hindu, he's also been a fellow at Academie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and is currently a Homi Baba Fellow. Welcome, Aman.

Amandeep Sandhu [00:01:55]

Thank you so much.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:01:56]

So let's get to it. What has become of the farm law movement?

Amandeep Sandhu [00:02:00]

Thank you. You asked it that way because when you said afterlife, my heart skipped a beat, you know, I thought, we are not in the afterlife yet. So it's an ongoing movement. In fact, it was suspended, if you remember. It wasn't called off by the farmers. It's a long struggle, of course, and it's a struggle against all odds. But if, in my opinion, there were two targets of the original struggle, I think we achieved one partially and we did not really achieve the other one. The two targets being one was to, of course, repeal the farm laws and the government repealed them. But the second was also to motivate the country to stand up against a draconian government like we have today. And in that, I'm very sorry to say, the middle class of India, entitled over the last three decades, kept supporting it on social media, but did not get down on the streets. And that is that.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:02:59]

Let's go back in time a little bit. If we return to Modi's announcement that he was canceling these farm laws, this was in November 2021 on Guru Nanak Jayanti. And at least from where I was sitting, it seemed to come somewhat out of the blue. Until then, I think many of us who followed this had assumed that Modi would dig in, that he would refused to budge and simply try to wear the farmers down. But he didn't. And when this happened, I mean, a common assessment was that he scrapped these three bills for tactical reasons and also for electoral reasons that were important elections coming up in Punjab, which was the epicenter of the movement, but also in Uttar Pradesh, where the movement had also been strong, I mean, especially in the western parts of the state. So the speculation was that by scrapping these bills, Modi wanted to make sure that they didn't become too much of an election issue. Do you think this is a correct assessment of what happened in November, December last year?

Amandeep Sandhu [00:04:03]

Yes, absolutely. No doubt about it. I think the youth guru, Nanak Jayanthi, was to in some ways appease the Sikhs, who were a big part of in Punjab, was a big part of the protest. The timing was given, all the elections, state elections coming up, and they realised the government realised that the many ways in which they wanted to curtail the movement, including so much propaganda, including so much black mouthing the protest, had not worked. Finally, people had started seeing merit in the farmer's arguments. The country was swaying towards the farmers and they did not want that to happen and let the elections be affected. At the same time, you are right, Modi. In the last three decades of public life, he has never, ever taken back anything not as chief minister of Gujarat, not as prime minister of India. It's a very strange kind of leadership where you just keep pressing on and on and on in spite of people crying, you know. But he has been an iron fisted leader in that sense. So it was tactical, and I see no harm in that tactic as well. Mean that elections are important in a democracy and you want to win the elections. And so you give in to the farmers demand, which was a just demand right from the beginning. You called it liberalise farm sector? I don't think so, because I think it would have created oligarchs. You know, we use the term for Russia. In America, we call it big capitalists. But it's actually there is a duopoly in India. And the farm laws was geared to suit that duopoly. The Ambani and the, you know, one controls the retail market, one controls the storage market. So so it was against them and all the other benefactors in the whole agro processing industry, everybody who is in the network. But to basically rob farmers of their land and profit the corporations. So it was just struggle. It was withdrawn in time considering the elections. But what happened after that, including the very critical minimum support price law, which is what we can discuss next.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:06:30]

Yeah, these are crucial issues. But if I can just linger on this question of the election and the timing of Modi's decision to withdraw these bills, it seemed to work in the sense that when I was following the election campaigns, the farm laws didn't seem to be much of an election issue. And at one level, that's not entirely surprising. I mean, mass movements in India often do not always connect with elections and electoral success, not only in India, but in many places in the world. But I was still somewhat puzzled by in this crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, the farm laws and even the plight of India's farmers more generally were, in the campaign, overshadowed by many different other themes, including among the jobs in Western U.P.. In your assessment, why did these concerns that had taken up so much public space in India for so many months, why did they evaporate so relatively fast in this election campaign phase?

Amandeep Sandhu [00:07:34]

I would offer 2 or 3 reasons for it. We must understand that the farm laws themselves, and this is what I pointed out right in the beginning, could not create a larger solidarity with other concerns. In India, for example, industrial workers, you know, they have brought in the for labor codes that will affect about 250 million workers. And yet there has not been a consolidated protest from that side. The farm movement could not bring them in. You know, though, they kept using phrases and slogans which included workers, but they were not coming in here. Similarly, say the native population of the country, the Adivasis, or a movement that happened two years back, just before the farm movement started, the anti citizenship law movement. It could not bring them in. The farm movement was very clearly aligned in the in the first time in in India's history. It was aligned not on religion, not on caste, not on gender, but on the idea of work. This is our work and this is how we are defined as farmers. So that was good. But it was the job of the leadership of the farm movement to bring along allies from other quarters of the country who are also suffering the same government. And that did not happen. So the primary farming areas of India, the Punjab, Haryana, Western, they remained the hotbed of the farm protest. But also at the same time, there are millions of other farmers in India who are small and broken down and they don't have unions and they don't have organisational abilities. They also could not really participate. I mean, once in a while doing a pan, the national strike or standing up in front of your office and shouting is not enough. We needed to get them on the street, you know? Next reason. I think what happened in U.P. in particular was that everybody made law and order a big issue there, all parties. But that was not the big issue. The fact that there had been this two years of COVID pandemic and people had got rations and people had managed to survive, even obliterated the ghastly deaths that happened during the pandemic, the bodies flowing on River Ganges, even that was forgotten. And just on the basis of welfare schemes, we could call it that, people remained with the BJP. Third, and the most critical thing is that the opposition in U.P. did not work consistently for the five years they were not in power. You can't just show up in the last three months and hope to win an election, not in a state that BJP rules. It just doesn't work like that there. But that is what the Samajwadi Party and the industrial local did. And even though they had an alliance with each other, their own ticket sharing their own leaders that they projected were not the best kind. So that also affected their chances. So overall, the people of the state, in my opinion, voted out of desperation for BJP, not out of. Okay, we really expect some development here in the future. That is what my assessment is at least. And if you see that in Western, especially the farmers movement did bring the results, the two parties won some seats, but it is also matched by the same number of seats almost in far eastern Uttar Pradesh. We must know that this is a state with 220 million people. It's like think half of Europe, you know, so. So that makes a big difference. How do you manage to spread a word against a very strict and draconian government to this big constituency of people and see them vote for yourself? The opposition couldn't work it out.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:11:38]

We can get back to this election issue in a little bit, But before that, let me just return to something that you brought up now, and this is the question of the creation of larger solidarities. If we look at the years with Modi as prime minister, there's been a large number of popular movements on many different issues. There's been the farm laws, but as you mentioned, also the Citizen Amendment Act and also were related to what's been happening in Kashmir, quite many popular movements of significant size. But it seems as if they don't consolidate into something bigger. And you mentioned this idea about the difficulties of creating alliances across social groups and that this was something that the leadership of the movement I mean, the responsibility to work towards such alliances in a sense, is part of what it means to be spearheading popular movements. I'd like to hear your reflections on the difficulties of forging such alliances and what kinds of strategies that might provide a way forward if one is to consolidate these quite many different but also somewhat dispersed popular movements that have emerged under Modi.

Amandeep Sandhu [00:12:54]

Now that's an age old question how to bring different groups together against a big power. And we know that the big power, especially this big power, is very, very, very powerful. They control all the institutions of the state. They control even the courts and the police. And it's just fear that what could happen to me personally and this is where I think the legacy of the farm movement is also there, because the thousands that remained standing on the borders of Delhi for almost 12 months and 15 months in Punjab, they had overcome that fear of what would happen to me or my family. You know, 733 people died. They sat and stood through bitter, icy, cold winter rains, through scorching summer heat, through monsoon floods, through even the second wave of the pandemic. But this stood and this sense, this resolve, this purpose is what is missing, what ends up happening in the infighting between all these other groups who are supposed to get to. Why only social groups, even political parties? It's been eight years now. We have not been able to forge an alliance between a few of the opposition parties to make the kind of network that is required to fight the BJP. And this is where BJP excels in breaking groups down into smaller and smaller fragments. And they use nationalism for it. They use the Hindu religion card for it. They use the cow for it. They use every trick in the book to do this. And as soon as something starts forming, then they break the governments by stealing elected representatives like happened in Madhya Pradesh, like happened in Goa, like happened in Karnataka. They are just very, very crafty at being politicians. And sadly, the collective intelligence of the country has not been able to counter that yet. Also see this a problem with the kind of voting system we have in place. This first past the post is not really helping the country. We need to have proportional representation. We need to have smaller groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, identity groups. Their votes should weigh in different ways. Otherwise, this is a 84% majoritarian Hindu country and there is hardly any chance for anybody else to get elected. So there is a change required at that level, which I don't think we can do now because the government will never allow us to do it. And in fact, they keep bringing one draconian law after another and nobody is even able to oppose it, even in the parliament. So we are in a very tough spot as a country right now. And it's not only because of mal governance or dictatorial governance, but it's also because as a country we are unable to rise in strength against it. And that is what I think as a legacy. We are talking about the farmers protests. Unless we get down on the streets, we can't fight it and that is what the country needs to learn. The protest got down on the streets. The farmers protest got down on the streets, was abandoned. Farmers protest succeeded. This is what we need to learn.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:16:14]

So there are clear lessons to be learned from the farm law movement along the lines of which you outline here. If I may turn to the Punjab just for short while this is, of course, a state that you are intimately familiar with and which was also the epicenter of the farm law movement in many ways the state from which it emerged. And now we come back to this issue of the relationship between movement and politics and the responsibility of political parties, and also constituting an opposition to the BJP that is in second in power. Now in the Punjab, the sun yoked Samaj morcha fielded candidates in most of the seats. As far as I recall. They ran, I think, as independents, but they all lost. And most of them, I think, also had to forfeit their deposits, which meant that they got relatively few votes. And I know that this decision on the part of some movement leaders to enter electoral politics was hotly contested. And many of the unions that were part of the movement, they opposed this decision. But it's still I suppose such a poor performance must have come as if not a surprise, then at least as a blow to the farmers movements. What's your assessment not just about the issue of standing for election, but there's also this broader issue about the relationship between popular movement on the streets and what goes on in electoral politics.

Amandeep Sandhu [00:17:41]

So let me start by saying that the six Morcha did not represent the farmers movement. It was a spinoff from the farmers movement. They tried to use the farmers movement to win elections, but it did not represent the farmers movement. To me personally, the farmers movement, if I have to put a face to it, it would be the 70 plus generation, the grandfathers and the grandmothers who sat through those 1112 months. What happened here was clearly hubris, the Greek term for greed. They decided that they had won the protest. The leadership, the leadership did not win the protest. The leadership, these 32 unions who had got together, they were fighting like cats and dogs throughout the protest. It's because of the resistance and the resolution of these cadre that they were. So the people who were part of the movement that these unions had to stay together, they could not achieve it by themselves. None of those leaders could have achieved it by themselves. It was the people's movement. It was a popular movement. It was supported by the smallest village of Punjab. It was built organically, ground upwards. So for them to try to take credit of it and say that, Oh, now we should form a political party was to me very myopic because see, the argument they were presenting is that if we have to get change, we have to change the government, we have to come into government. I don't think that is democracy in democracy, governance has a role. Governments have a role, but protests also have a role. Dissent also has a role. The citizens also have a role. Everybody comprises democracy. Democracy is not only political parties. It is not only government. And this is what they stood against throughout the protest. The big leaders like Rajya Sabha and all that, they all kept saying, We will not allow politicians here. We will not allow political parties here. And then you want to become a political party. I mean, what an irony is that. And the reason they lost is simply that they went against their own word and people did not buy into them. And it is a very humbling and a very good lesson they drew from it. It doesn't matter if a few leaders are sacrificed, politically sacrificed, and sends a career as a sacrifice, but it is very important that people keep distilling the wheat from the chaff, so to say, because what you need at the end is representative leadership who stays by their word and these people could not do it. It was sad, actually, that they went that way because as I said right in the beginning, I had hoped and even in the talk that I'd hoped that this farmers protest actually finds out and stops the Hindutva juggernaut in India, it gives the BJP a sense that they can be defeated. It brings down their arrogance a little bit. The rest we can handle. But the arrogance with which they come and the way brazenly they implement their laws or whatever other whims and fancies, that is what is destabilising the country right now. The legacy of the farmers movement is the political consciousness that this movement has created. And I might be being a little harsh on myself for having participated in the movement. But as I talked to people, as I listen to students, as I give talks elsewhere, I keep sensing everybody is holding that development of the political consciousness at a higher level than the regular existence, but they're aspiring to get there. But how long will it take to reach there? When would the fear get out of their heads? When will they say, okay, even if we lose, we will stand up? That is the question that the country is facing right now. And Punjab, on the contrary, voted very differently. You see it yanked out the two legacy parties that were there. This also is the legacy of the farmers protest. That fear was over. So Congress and Akali Dal 70 years, they have messed the state. People threw them out, but it voted at the edge of its political choices right now because the new party, they have brought in the party completely untested. We don't know how they will deliver, what they will deliver, but if they feel I don't know what choices Punjab will be left with because they can't go back to the parties they have yanked out because parties are in my mind, they are over in Punjab at least. So Punjab, by being the epicenter of the protest and later on the glue of the protest, I call it the engine and the glue. It starts with Punjab. The engine is that and then it later on serves, it goes into the background, and so it builds the movement. I think itself has exposed itself quite dramatically. And what we are seeing in the last few months, wheat procurement this year, which is a global crisis actually because of the Ukraine-Russia war, how it is going on, how Adani's tentacles are reaching into Punjab again, you know, all those are scary thoughts that are coming to mind right now.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:23:06]

Can I go back and ask you, you mentioned this thing about one of the legacies being this partly consciousness raising, but also this is demonstrating that it is actually possible to forge some kind of popular movement that may confront the BJP on the terrain of popular politics. It's an interesting assessment. And I think in my reading, I think you would be absolutely correct. What I found to be also interesting with the farm law movement is that it generated a lot of international attention also, which farm movements don't really often do anymore. It, of course, had to do with, again, speaking about the Punjab, the considerable diaspora of Punjabis in different parts of the world, but also a sense of global civil society, increasingly looking at what's going on in India, because one knows that under Modi there are things happening that should be a cause for concern also for global civil society. Just very briefly, do you think this international or global dimension to this movement has made any impact? Has it made a difference for how things have unfolded, for better or worse, you might say?

Amandeep Sandhu [00:24:15]

But in Punjab or in India? No, not really. It's good that the world is thinking about it. I do see a very significant role of the Punjabi diaspora, but I also think that people in many countries are questioning the WTO mandates. They are questioning what IMF tells them to do. They are going against the general agreement on trade and tariff because they are seeing that they are not benefiting. Neoliberalism is not helping the world. Poverty is increasing. Food shortages are looming. Just recently, Argentina protested farmers again, took their tractors into areas even in Europe. You had it in Brussels when the farmers took their tractors and cattle there. I mean, in France two years back, there was garbage dumped in front of his palace. So all this is happening because we are realizing that the economic power in this world is shifting into the hands of what you call big capitalists or oligarchs and the poor number of poor are increasing. And there is a definite food shortage which is manmade, which need not be there and think this is creating another kind of unrest in the world. And this particular protest will go down in history definitely as one of those which took it head on, even succeeded, but sadly could not consolidate its victory. And so we'll need more movements to do that. But the day is not over yet. There's a long fight ahead. We don't know how it will show up in the next few weeks. Months. By 2024, general elections in India. We'll have to see that.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:25:53]

I wanted to ask you precisely about this neoliberal push. And as you said in the beginning, the movement isn't over. It's put on pause or suspended, if you like. If we look at the farm laws repeal bill, which is the bill that the government put forward to repeal those other bills that had caused such controversy. This bill is actually full of praise for the Modi government and its pro pharma intervention and policies in its own words. And it also keeps on actually praising those three original farm laws that this bill is actually then repealing. To me, this sounds very much like that. There's been no change of policy orientation on the part of the government that they put this on hold and that these laws will be back in some form or another in the not too distant future, because this is the kind of economic policy that the government is pushing. If and when that happens, are the farmers ready for another movement? Will they be able to return?

Amandeep Sandhu [00:26:56]

And we don't know. I never speculate. I don't play Oracle at all. We don't know. Of course, the agriculture minister has also hinted that the laws could come back. But just before that little pause, did you read the original farm laws? Did you see the language of those laws and the language of the rest of the Constitution of India? I mean, it doesn't match at all. This is not how laws are written in this country. This is not how they were written in the Constitution. This one obviously came from the desktop of some executive in some agrarian firm. You know, they were just bringing it on here. It doesn't even have the flourish, the sentence structure, the language, the beauty of the language. And some of the laws are very beautifully written. It had none of that. So they now want to keep praising themselves by saying, okay, we repealed it and this and this reason, it doesn't matter. I think this government is notorious for sidelining the constitution of the country anyway. So when you are sowing that, then you will reap it. Also, nobody will take you seriously. At some point in history, we'll all know that this was all garbage here. But again, to come back to whether there will be another movement like that, whether we will resist it like this, I can't say nobody saw the farm movement coming. I didn't see it. I had worked in Punjab for three years doing my book on it, and I did not see that. Within a year of the publication of that book, we have this kind of a massive movement. So these are things unpredictable in the future. But given the discontent that is brewing in Punjab and Haryana among the farmers and even among the industrial workers, among the Muslim population of India, among the Christian population of India, among the women, among the Dalits, among the tribals. I think it would be wrong to say that something could happen. People just don't go lying down. They do something about their absolutely helpless conditions as well. They try to move. So there would be some movement, I think, in this society. And in that sense, the farm movement would go in as a good example of how you can fight the state peacefully, nonviolently, democratically, without losing your cool. The spirit of those days was really beautiful.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:29:17]

And this is indeed no small legacy of a popular movement such as this. Amandeep Sandhu, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation on the legacy of India's farm law movement. And before we say goodbye for listeners who are interested in contemporary India, I recommend Amandeep's book from 2020 Bravado to Fear to Abandonment, Mental Health and COVID 19 Lockdown. It's not about the formula of movement, but about the impact of India's very harsh first wave of COVID lockdown that we've also covered in earlier episodes of the Nordic Asia podcast. Amandeep Sandhu. Thank you so much for being with us. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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