Rural Emancipation in South Asia Today
A reflection on the several faultlines that need addressing to further emancipatory politics in South Asia’s countryside.
Protest against forced displacement at Dera Sehgal near Muridke, Pakistan. Image: Hashim bin Rashid
The victory of the Indian farmers is only the tip of the iceberg of the unrest building across rural South Asia. Decades of state and market-led exploitation of nature and peasants, often rooted in colonial relations, is spurring diverse rural movements across the region. These movements exist at multiple scales, across different segments of the rural population, and represent a wide range of ideological standpoints.
Around half a century ago, Maoist peasant movements emerged across rural South Asia, whose cadres believed that rural emancipation was on the cusp, at the core of which was the agenda of land reform. While visions of what land reform would look like differed – collectivisation, land-to-the-tiller and land ceilings were among them – peasants in South Asia were reckoning with the precolonial and colonial inequalities that had shaped land and social relations in the countryside.
In the 1980s, the rural landscape and the hopes and dreams of rural movements transformed sharply. Military dictatorships in Pakistan and Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi’s emergency in India and the outbreak of Tamil oppression in Sri Lanka became anchors around which left-wing peasant movements across the region were crushed. In addition to state violence, peasants also faced another form of violence in the countryside: the Green Revolution. Enacted to counter the “Red Revolution”, the Green Revolution pushed through an alternate trajectory of rural transformation that accelerated forms of agrarian capitalism, dispossessing small peasantries and strengthening dominant land relations.
It is hard, even for Marxist scholars today, to remember that a different future for rural South Asia was possible. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that there are few intellectuals and activists that truly believe that another future is possible for rural South Asia today, when rural land, markets, and peoples are once again the sites for another resource grab by a range of local, national and transnational actors.
“Rural struggles are specifically taking places around several key areas: markets, land, labour and ecology.”
While no vision unites mass rural movements across the region today in the same way, South Asia’s rural movements remain creative sites for re-imagining the future of the countryside. They offer the possibility of a coherent, yet situated, emancipatory vision that confronts many of the contradictions facing rural populations today. Rural struggles are specifically taking places around several key areas: markets, land, labour and ecology. These struggles also contain contradictions of class, gender, caste and ideological orientation.
Contesting Rural Markets
Rural struggles around markets are often dismissed as the purview of large capitalist farmers. In particular, Marxist scholars have taken the lead in collecting evidence around how agricultural subsidies and support prices benefit the richest farmers, while leaving smaller farmers and landless populations out of the picture.
The Bharatiya Kissan Union(s) (Indian Farmers Union) in the early 1980s in north and central India received much criticism for being caste-centered organisations representing only those who benefited from the Green Revolution. Positions such as these have led to many progressives believing that rural politics around markets was not real politics. While left-wing parties could support such politics strategically to win the support of farmers, the real work of ideologically driven peasant politics lay elsewhere.
It is important to re-visit such positions, not just in the shadow of the Indian farmers historic victory, but also in light of the politics of left-wing peasant unions of the 20th century. Politics around the shape of markets was not just a side issue, and how could it be? Markets are an integral mediator for relations of production, and shape where accumulation takes place. This is something that the old Left very much understood. Soviet Union, for instance, advocated for the necessity of socialist primitive accumulation, a process whereby the state would appropriate agrarian surplus for industrial development.
Where rural surplus goes is not just a question relevant for the capitalist state and agribusinesses. It is very much a question that rural movements have organized around, whether in terms of the nationalisation of plantations, the re-territorialisation of colonial wheat and cotton markets, or demands around subsidies and support prices today. Rural movements across South Asia continue to organise around WTO negotiations, as well as regional and bilateral trade deals which promise to remove the few protections that remain in agriculture.
Bhagwant Singh Samaon of Punjab Mazdoor Mukti Morcha addressing a gathering in Sangrur on the rising indebtedness among rural women in Punjab. Image: The Wire.
It is time to take farmer organizing around markets seriously. Traditionally, both progressive and liberal policy circles have been united in seeing the traditional middlemen as the enemy of farmers. Often seen as the sole evil trader-cum-creditor expropriating peasant surplus, such a limited view ignores the role of the state and agribusiness in keeping agricultural producers poor. These views can often end up romanticizing the entry of agribusiness in agro-processing and agro-marketing, both of which are politically contested spaces for peasant and farmers’ movement in the region.
Moreover, it is also important to locate how working-class politics might intersect with markets. This requires taking a micro-lens into the transformations taking place within the countryside. For example, agricultural labour and Dalit organizers joined the Indian protests over the threat to commodity prices, which would make social reproduction a greater challenge.
It should also be noted that keeping commodity prices low remains an issue for smaller farmers, who are often net purchasers of food, despite continuing to cultivate parts of their land for subsistence. The fact that subsistence production has continued despite rapid commercialization, decades of Green Revolution technologies, and liberal market reforms is important to recognize – and remains an organizing principle for a range of rural movements that advocate peasant agroecology, such as the Karnataka Rajhya Raittra Sangha (Karnataka State Farmers Association) in India and Movement for Land and Agrarian Reform (MONLAR) in Sri Lanka.
To evaluate different visions for agrarian markets, studying concrete social relations in the countryside, especially around production and exchange, is critical.
The victories of the Samyukt Kissan Mocha (United Farmers Front) and the Pakistan Kissan Ittehad around issues of subsidies and remunerative prices do not, in themselves, transform agricultural markets into spaces that can evenly benefit all farmers. However, the use of loose categories like “Green Revolution farmers” or capitalist farmers do little in the way of understanding what kind of transformation is needed in agrarian markets.
The important thing to remember is that neoliberal market reform can be resisted, and that farmers retain their own vision of agrarian markets, rooted not just in the principles of the so-called agrarian welfare state, but which also recognize the limitations of that vision and build upon it.
The Politics of the Rural Landless
Any rural resistance in South Asia today can only acquire momentum if it attends to the region’s vast landless population. Until the photographs of millions of desperate migrant workers returning to their villages during India’s pandemic lockdowns hit the global media, their stories and their struggles have continued to evade popular consciousness. Even scholars and activists interested in the rural have largely focused on the struggles of landed rural populations – whether represented as peasants, farmers or the dispossessed.
When the current Indian farmers’ movement, or other farmers’ movements like the Pakistan Kissan Ittehad, are asked about the rural landless or agricultural workers, the questioner often assumes an imagined landless subject: the proletariat. But Marx’s imagined industrial proletariat never emerged with the capitalist transformation of rural South Asia. Instead, the rural landless populations now traverse the rural, urban and transnational worlds, either as cheap or surplus labour, while also sometimes having a foot in land, as smallholders or tenants.
Agricultural workers’ unions continue to exist across South Asia, in the form of labour organizations, home-based worker unions, caste-based organizations and plantation workers unions. In addition to resisting predatory microfinance and struggling for fair wages and decent work conditions, rural landless movements are raising the land question again, as well as merging the questions of urban and rural labour – but from the vantage point of the rural.
One of the key sites to look at has been rural Punjab, in which landless Dalit populations have been struggling for access to village common lands under the Zameen Prapti Sangarsh Committee since at least 2014. Based on the Punjab Village Common Lands Act of 1961, landless communities in rural Punjab have reclaimed village land, and in hundreds of villages, they have even managed to occupy land despite police violence and social boycotts from landed farmers. While it may not be much, the land has been converted into cooperative landholdings cultivated collectively by previously landless populations. This has enabled the landless to produce for subsistence, freeing them from their reliance on landed rural classes for social reproduction and the everyday violence that it comes with.
It is also of note that farmers’ organizations have found themselves on both sides of the landless question. While the more ideologically oriented BKU-Ugrahan openly supported the rights of landless Dalits to village common land, other farmers’ unions burned effigies of the BKU-Ugrahan leader Joginder Singh Ugrahan. Despite opposition from within Jat landed classes, the BKU-Ugrahan has managed to retain its position as arguably the largest farmers union in Punjab.
BKU-Ugrahan by demanding the release of political prisoners in India, made a case for moving beyond single-issue protests and connecting different struggles against oppression. Image: Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta
While contradictions of caste and class continue to exist within ongoing rural struggles, this these alliance between the landless and the landed could bring forward more radical demands than the repeal of the three laws. While we are still a fair bit away from land redistribution returning to the political agenda, the age of proactive land struggles across South Asia could very much be on its way back.
The other interesting story is in Sri Lanka, where the children of plantations workers have been going to major cities, including Candy and Colombo, to demand the right to employment since the early 2000s. Brought in as indentured labourers from southern India, Sri Lanka’s plantation workers and their children remain a population marginalized by poor housing conditions and low wages.
Some plantation youth have attempted to seek work in urban Sri Lanka as a way out of the impoverished life in the plantations, but they have faced significant hurdles due to poor schools, isolated upbringing as well as racial prejudice towards plantation communities. While the struggles of plantation workers themselves are a significant and ongoing chapter in rural struggles in South Asia, these protests by their children allow us to link urban and rural struggles around the right to decent work.
Cooperatives in Northern Sri Lanka have become autonomous initiatives for the post-war rural reconstruction and provide an alternative vision for equitable agriculture markets in the country. Image: Northern Cooperative Development Bank
While the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India is a product of these often undocumented and unrepresented struggles on the ground, rural landless populations remain key in raising questions of land, dignity, employment and ongoing structural violence in a countryside that is facing its own crisis of ecological reproduction.
Ecological crisis: A Way Out?
One of the most interesting developments in rural movements in South Asia from the 1980s onwards is their recognition and response to the ecological crisis in agriculture. This crisis was propelled by the Green Revolution and industrial farming. The Green Revolution brought with it an increase in production per acre, mostly driven by the intensification of chemical usage in the fields, including fertilizers, pesticides, petroleum and water intensification. While earlier agricultural colonisation certainly led to biodiversity loss, agricultural practices brought in the mid-1960s, such as monocropping and tubewell use, have drained the soil of nutrients and healthy microbial lifeforms, while the water table has continued to sink across the region. Nature has been unable to regenerate itself in rural South Asia without massive investment, which comes primarily out of the pockets of farmers, big and small.
Recognizing this, movements across South Asia, albeit still small, have been developing and expanding the practice of peasant agroecology, which builds on natural farming practices. While Vandana Shiva’s model Navdanya Farm has garnered international attention, a number of rural movements, including the Karnataka Rajha Raitha Sangha (KRRS) in India, MONLAR in Sri Lanka, and the Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek in Pakistan, are expanding the agroecological practices through farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchanges. Established in Karnataka in 1980, KRRS, for instance, has drawn on Gandhian principles to advance the practice of “Zero Budget Natural Farming ”. The organization has also engaged in direct actions against the expansion of transnational agribusiness in the region.
These practices are in stark contrast to national and transnational approaches to dealing with both the ecological crisis in agriculture and the larger climate crisis looming over the globe.
“...it is important for rural movements not to align with right wing governments seeking to appropriate peasant agroecology as a tokenistic part of their nativist agendas.”
For Sri Lanka, it is the cost of fertilizer imports and a balance of payment crisis that seemed to have swayed the government into announcing a ban on the use of chemical fertilizers – before having to U-turn on the decision because farmers were not prepared and neither was the government. This is the kind of incoherent policy making that are standard practice in the region. Back in the 60s, the same governments accepted transnational interference to push through the Green Revolution, which was a means of countering movements demanding agrarian reform and land redistribution. The reality is that a transition to natural farming will take time and coherent policy making, which requires heeding the voices of rural movements, rather than making policies on a whim.
Moreover, it is important for rural movements not to align with right wing governments in India and Sri Lanka seeking to appropriate peasant agroecology as a tokenistic part of their nativist agendas.
The other side of so-called ecological policy making has been growing green grabs. The Pakistani state, for instance, has created national parks on community-controlled forest in Gilgit Baltistan and, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, evicted tenant farmers for commercial forests under the name of a billion-tree plantation. Both instances have been met with strong resistance. In the outskirts of Lahore, the government is also making ecological arguments to justify the displacement of hundreds of thousands of farmers for a new city. And this amidst a smog crisis which has made Lahore compete with Dehli as the world’s most polluted city.
With drought now a regular occurrence across the region, with around 40 percent of India’s farmland affected in 2019 alone, and Sindh’s farmers marching almost yearly for access to water, it is urgent that we transition to sustainable agriculture. Rural movements continue to take the lead on this. They are not just opposing the expansion of agribusiness, but are re-imagining what the relations of cultivation could look like for a sustainable future.
The Place of Food Sovereignty
In our conference with rural movement activists in South Asia, the term “food sovereignty” kept coming up as an emancipatory vision for the future. Not unique to South Asia, the idea of food sovereignty emerged in the mid-1990s from the practices of local, national and transnational peasant movements. Food sovereignty advocates putting food producers at the heart of the global food system, instead of corporate and capitalist interests. This has become an organizing pillar for movements across South Asia, with the dozens of organizations that are part of La Via Campesina South Asia and the Asian Peasant Coalition. After the revolution in Nepal, food sovereignty was also enshrined in the Nepalese constitution, largely due to the influence of the All Nepal Peasant Federation and other rural movements in the country.
MONLAR’s island-wide Seed Caravan for Food Sovereignty from Murukundi in the Northern province to Colombo covered a total 25 cities. Image: La Via Campesina South Asia
Food sovereignty is more holistic that the standard right to food, which puts the consumer or citizen as the key interest group that should shape food policy. While there is sufficient evidence to suggest that even the right to food is not shaping agriculture and food policies in South Asia, food sovereignty would mean seeing things from the vantage point of diverse and differentiated peasants, farmers and rural workers.
While critics of food sovereignty argue that it can place one rural class above others, it offers possibilities of bringing together landed and landless rural classes in South Asia. Food Sovereignty is one of the key visions that will shape emancipatory rural struggles in the 21st century.
Is Rural Emancipation Still Possible?
Going forward, it is important to craft a vision to shape and unify diverse rural struggles. It is clear that agribusinesses, international financial institutions, and policy think tanks are pushing their visions for the future of South Asian agriculture. We need ours.
The Indian farmers’ movements can point us in that direction. From their steadfast victory, many lessons can be learnt. Primarily, that strong grassroots organizing can even bring an authoritarian and fascist state to back down. On the borders of Delhi, a new infrastructure of protest has been erected by these protests. Being able to maintain a gherao for a year is arguably unprecedented territory.
Moreover, the movement made it clear that diverse and sometimes conflicting organizations can work together on a single agenda and not be scared away or bought out by the state. Officially, it was over 30 farmers unions protesting, but on the ground, it was dozens of movements and activist groups, representing different constituencies, that found the space to work within movement and find their voices. The Indian farmers’ movements’ victory has given hope to rural movements across South Asia.
The question is: can South Asia’s rural populations resolve the broader issues of market exploitation, land inequalities and rural landless, and ecological crises? This remains to be seen, but there are reasons to be hopeful.
Hashim bin Rashid is a doctoral candidate at SOAS University of London. He has worked as a journalist, teacher and progressive activist in Pakistan.