The Indian Farmers’ Protest
Oats for Breakfast and Jamhoor in converation with Navyug Gill on the ongoing farmers’ protests in India.
Episode Transcript
Divyani: My name is Divyani.
Adam: I’m Adam.
Divyani: You’re tuning into Oats for Breakfast, an eco-socialist podcast based in Toronto.
Adam: We want to begin by giving a shout out to our latest Patreon supporter, Ryan Mascall.
Divyani: Thanks, Ryan, for your generous support and thanks to all the people who support us on Patreon and make the production of this podcast possible.
Adam: Oats for Breakfast is a member of the Harbinger Media Network. If you like our show, be sure to check out the other podcasts on the network, by going on harbingermedianetwork.com.
Divyani: This episode of Oats for Breakfast is being produced in partnership with Jamhoor, a Toronto-based media organization that amplifies marginalized and progressive voices from South Asia. Check out our content by going to jamhoor.org.
Adam: In this episode, we are going to be chatting with Professor Navyug Gill about the ongoing farmers’ protest in India.
Divyani: Navyug Gill is an assistant professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His research interests include labour and agrarian politics in South Asia. So, first of all, welcome to the podcast.
Navyug: Thank you very much, happy to be here.
Divyani: Since August of last year hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have been engaged in mass protest. What are the farmers protesting and what is the government seeking to achieve?
Navyug: So, what they are protesting is basically the deregulation and privatization of the agricultural sector. In June of 2020 the government promulgated three agricultural bills. There was no impending agricultural emergency. Unions, farmers and labourers were not consulted in the drafting of these bills, and they were imposed during a pandemic lockdown.
And the farmer and labour unions immediately began to mobilize against these bills, and that continued throughout the summer. It escalated in September when the bills were passed into law, and the protests went further in Punjab and Haryana. And then in November, we saw the historic march on Delhi, where farmer labour unions brought tens of thousands and indeed hundreds of thousands of people, to the outskirts of the capital and they’ve been sort of camped out in three makeshift cities ever since.
So they’re protesting the privatization of the agricultural sector. What the government is trying to do is basically create a private system of agricultural procurement. The three laws in essence – the first law, what it does is allow corporations to buy crops directly from farmers at market prices. That goes against the existing system where farmers would sell their crops at guaranteed minimum prices in government wholesale markets called mandis.
The second law allows corporations to stock all commodities in unlimited quantities and that goes against the previous system where the government put in safeguards to prevent corporations from buying low, holding product, and then selling when high.
And the third law allows corporations to engage in lopsided contract farming without due legal recourse. What that means is they can sign contracts with farmers for a certain crop at a certain price, ahead of a season. And then afterwards, if the prices go up, they will buy all the crop they want. But if the prices go down, and they don’t want to buy as much as they want, as they agreed to, they will be able to manipulate the laws and actually not have any legal recourse for farmers.
So if there’s any kind of dispute and the corporation wants to back out of a contract, the issue is not taken to the civil court, it’s instead adjudicated by a sub divisional magistrate – which has far less powers. And also, we can’t imagine any kind of equality between a farmer and a large corporation.
So these are the three laws in sum – and like I said, they will create a parallel private system alongside the public system of government procurement at minimum prices.
And the fear is that once this sort of private system is created, it might hold some enticements for a year or two or three – which will get farmers to sell in these private markets, but after a while, when the public markets are no longer receiving farmers’ crops, they will inevitably collapse. And at that point, farmers will be at the mercy of these corporations. And also, I think in a broader context, this jeopardizes the public distribution system, which is where the Indian government has access to grain that it then sells at subsidized rates to the population – something like 40% to 60% of Indians depend on the public distribution system.
And with these laws we can see that getting atrophied and withered away, and then eventually, also kind of collapsing. So, actually, all aspects of these laws are a problem. There is actually nothing redeeming about the – I mean it’s not sort of hyperbolic, or you know, some maximalist position to say so. These are simply a corporate hand over.
And the government is following a sort of very naked, neoliberal trajectory of, as I said, deregulation and privatization. It is for the enrichment of corporations. It’s to withdraw government involvement from the public sector.
So in effect, we’re actually witnessing a kind of primitive accumulation or an attempt to engage in a kind of accumulation by dispossession and obfuscation. And that’s why farmer labour unions are fighting back.
Adam: I’d actually like you, if possible, to kind of situate why were these laws passed by the current government and whether or not they are viewed by the Indian public in the way that you described them – whether they have support beyond the farmers who are protesting them?
Navyug: Yes, so, I mean, why there were passed in the sense – the Indian government has, and it’s a kind of bipartisan sort of position, which is the neoliberal agenda since the early 1990s, to slowly but surely privatize and deregulate as many of these sectors of the economy as possible. And so anybody that’s been observing India knows what’s happened with healthcare, and private hospitals, everybody knows what’s happened with education, and the flourishing of these private schools, transportation, energy – we can go through sector after sector.
So one of the last sectors is agriculture, where the government still had a large sort of role to play in, like I said, procurement and distribution. And in fact, last year, India was in recession, this coming year, it’s going to be in a recession. One of the only sectors that is buoyant is agriculture, because people need to eat. And that part of the economy is actually still producing gains.
So the government has had its eye on this – and when I say government, this is both a Congress and BJP bipartisan consensus. The BJP happens to be in power now, and they’re the most sort of vicious authoritarian right-wing party. And so they decided to enact these laws in the middle of a pandemic, thinking that people would be too preoccupied with the lockdown to effectively mobilize an opposition. And that’s where they I think grossly miscalculated, because the farmer and labour unions immediately knew the implications of these laws and engaged in this broad-based mobilization over the summer.
In terms of the Indian public, I think we should say Indian publics – sort of pluralize that. Vast numbers of Indians support this protest, and one of the remarkable aspects of the mobilization is the fact that they have traversed many of the divides of Indian society and maybe we can talk about this later, but the protest cuts across caste, across religion, across regional lines. It’s farmers and labour unions at the forefront but they’ve been joined by urban workers, by transporters, by students, by government employees, by professionals. Huge numbers of people see the dangers of these laws and have a kind of, we could say, cultural empathy for farmers. There’s something primordial about the people that produce that food that you eat even if you live in a city, and you see their kind of plight, there is a kind of sympathy.
And that sympathy is there, despite all of the poison, the government has sort of hurled at this protest in attempts to delegitimize it. So the government might have their supporters, they have the big corporate houses that finance them, they have the media that is aligned with them, and they, you know, have these economists and think tank people that are supporting the laws. But I would say that the vast majority see the danger and support the farmers.
Divyani: For the listeners, I was hoping if you could expand on the BJP, the current regime in India. Like not just this particular protest, but then also in the larger – you know, like all the laws that they’ve been passing in the last couple of years, how does all of that fit together. And as you said, a lot of work is going into dividing the protests – all kinds of allegations. So could you speak a little bit about that as well?
Navyug: Yes, sure. So the BJP, I guess, the listeners would probably know bits and pieces of how this is a kind of right-wing Hindu majoritarian party. The current Prime Minister is known actually to – was Chief Minister in Gujarat in 2002 when there was a massacre against Muslims. He was actually denied a visa to the US for a number of years. And he’s a kind of devoted follower of the RSS, which is the overarching sort of para military group that fuels the ideology behind all of these right-wing Hindu groups in India. The BJP is the kind of political party and the RSS is the paramilitary-cultural organization.
And this is a party that is determined to make bold moves to transform the country and over the last 7 years, it’s engaged in a number of these kinds of actions. We can think back to the demonetization of high value currency notes. Overnight something like 80%, 85% of the currency was demonetized. The claim was that this was supposed to get rid of corruption but it actually had really devastating effects for the poor and actually destabilized the economy in a very serious way.
The Citizenship Amendment Act, and National Registry of Citizens Act were these two later initiatives performed by the BJP to redefine who counts as an Indian and to change the way religion was used to admit refugees from the neighboring countries. There was massive opposition to that. They imposed their will nonetheless.
Last year, we saw the revocation of article 370 in the constitution which changed the status of Jammu and Kashmir. Massive opposition to that. There’s been long standing resistance in Kashmir for decades, actually. It’s a brutal military occupation. But they’ve sort of pushed that (the revocation) through as well.
So on a number of fronts, they have kind of put forward their agenda, and by the way, these are not very – these are not like secretive positions. This is what they’ve announced in their program prior to elections, and they’ve won majorities. So this is their kind of plan, and they’ve put it forward.
Now, these farm laws were one element in it, and they, I think assumed that they could kind of continue in that trajectory of making a bold move and pushing through what they saw was kind of necessary change. And that’s where they were caught off guard, because the opposition has been so tenacious, it’s been so well organized, it’s become so popular. And now, they are kind of stuck having to confront something they haven’t confronted before, which is, the most sustained and largest opposition to their agenda. And that’s why they’re kind of sort of scrambling now, I think, and we’re at the impasse that we are.
Adam: Can you tell us how many people are protesting? Is it really concentrated in certain parts, or do they come from certain parts of the country, or is it popular – are there protesters all over the country? And then lastly, if I’m not throwing too many questions at you, just about the popularity of the BJP – they were, I guess, reelected in 2019, at the national level – and if the protests are so popular, or if the laws are so unpopular, why does the BJP enjoy so much support?
Navyug: Yeah, that is a lot, but let me try to get through it, and if I, by the way miss something, just please remind me. I think I heard something about how the BJP is delegitimizing this protest, maybe I’ll come to that too.
So where they’re located and how many people are protesting, and what’s happened – so I think we should see that when the laws were first promulgated in June, the BJP, you know, as I mentioned the sort of other policies that they’ve implemented, their modus operandi is, we announce something and we do it, right. And we don’t backtrack., we don’t give a single inch. And that’s been kind of the way they used to just kind of differentiate themselves from the Congress, but also it reveals their arrogance, right, that once we say something, it is right, and regardless of opposition, it must go forward.
So when they announced these bills, they were kind of determined that they were going to push them through, the opposition, like I said, started in Punjab, because that is the place where the previous system of government procurement and minimum prices was most intact, that’s where those public procurement systems existed.
And so these laws seek to overturn those, and so that was the kind of focal point of the resistance, but it soon spread to Haryana, to Western UP, to Rajasthan, and then to other states like Maharashtra, and Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh where farmers are mobilizing and they’re sending delegations and they’re sort of making demands within their own states.
By the way, one of the other aspects I should just quickly mention is that agriculture is supposed to be a state subject. And another sort of dimension of what the BJP has done, is, further centralize power in New Delhi, by overriding the right of states to control agriculture. And that’s why even in states that might seem less affected by these laws in particular, there is opposition because New Delhi is trying to usurp the rights of different states, and if this goes forward, we can only imagine the other ways in which the central government will try to become more powerful.
So it started in Punjab, and what happened was, the government announced these laws, and then would not tolerate any criticisms of them, and would not entertain any debate over them. And that’s why they ran it through a special session of parliament in September. And again, the people in Punjab were protesting, small scale rallies, demonstrations, marches, they engaged in a mass education campaign.
When that had no effect, they started blocking railways, and roads. They had public sort of encampments in major cities. They targeted the malls, the petrol pumps of the corporations that were poised to make the most profit from these changes, they travelled to the homes of politicians, none of that had any effect.
And the BJP kept insisting that these are simply either arrogant – sorry, misled rich farmers, or these farmers are too stupid to realize that these laws are for their benefit, and it was one or the other, right? Either they are rich people complaining or they’re morons.
Now in November when the protest turned towards the capital, then all sorts of other accusations there, that these people are separatists, these people are terrorists, these people are Maoists, they’re funded by Pakistan, they’re funded by China, and sort of every kind of slur you can imagine to delegitimize the protest. All of them failed, they were countered – very effectively by farmer and labour unions.
And what’s significant there is, at that moment, at the end of November – in December, the government was, for the first time, forced to come to the table, and actually begin negotiating. And what they’ve tried to negotiate was, you know, it went from saying that “these laws are perfect, they won’t change at all, and you people just don’t understand,” to “explain to us what you don’t like about these laws, and maybe we can discuss them.” And from there, they proposed certain amendments, you know, changing the certain kind of attributes around contract farming, or other elements finally, they proposed to delay the implementation of these laws by 18 months.
So they’ve actually shifted their position quite a bit over the last 5 or 6 months. The farmers and labour unions on their part, have been steadfast to demand that complete repeal. And nothing less than a repeal. So that’s the impasse for that, that the farmer and labour unions are demanding a complete repeal, the government, began by saying that these are perfect laws that will never change a bit, have substantially kind of shifted their position in the face of this opposition, but they are now just saying minor amendments or delay.
And so that’s the kind of crux of the conflict there. And as I said, the protest has grown and spread to these other states, the farmer and labour unions are saying that, it’s not just a matter of repealing these laws, and sort of protecting the MSP and Mandi systems in Punjab, but demanding that an MSP Mandi system exists for the entire country.
That farmers everywhere get a fair price for their produce, and not be subject to the whims of market volatility. And that’s what’s kind of drawn in, you know, farmers from other parts of the country that are demanding this, and joining the movement in the wrong way.
Now, as to the popularity of the BJP, yes, I mean it won an election in 2014, it was returned to power with 303 seats kind of majority. Now how do we make sense of their popularity?
This is a kind of messy question, maybe some political scientist person would be better suited to discussing, you know, electoral politics and how one sort of builds support among different constituencies.
You know, there’s two elements I just think to signal for your readers, one is, there’s a lively debate in India around the kind of manipulation of elections in the so-called world’s largest democracy, the electronic voting machines and the way that these machines can be kind of rigged to give a certain outcome.
It is something that is on a lot of people’s minds, and on the other hand, I think we can’t underestimate how much the kind of population has been poisoned by years of right-wing Hindu chauvinist rhetoric that has kind of really – like I said, poisoned and pitted communities against each other and kind of turned elections into very kind of fraught, polarized struggle
And in that kind of calculus, the BJP I think in the last election got something like 36% or 37% of the popular vote but nonetheless, won a majority in parliament so they have popularity of a certain kind.
Now what’s really telling me – the last thing I’ll say is, there’s two upcoming elections in Bengal and Assam and I think lots of people are watching to see the outcome of these sort of state or provincial, I guess, elections in those two states. I mean every day there’s a different prediction but that I think will tell something about the effect of this protest on their popularity elsewhere because farmer and labour unions have sent delegations to those states encouraging people to vote for anyone but the BJP.
Divyani: There’s a lot of talk around that these laws are good and you definitely have touched upon them, but like large sections of the media including the ones in Canada, are arguing and I quote that “India is adopting a market based system to replace a Soviet-inspired model that benefited a limited number of farmers who feared losing their advantages.” Right?
So I think the question that’s on everybody’s minds especially here, is that, are they really as bad as – I’m sorry, are they really as good as the government is proposing? Or on the other hand, that are they really bad? Yeah, so if you could –
Navyug: Yeah. I mean, that framing, the quote that you read, it’s incredible that these are the kinds of things people can kind of come up with and print. It’s such a ridiculous framing. It’s almost embarrassing that they can sort of say something like that. And it’s ridiculous I think for two reasons to say that this is some Soviet-style system. There is no Soviet agriculture in India. This is nothing at all to do with the Soviet Union.
There is private property, these are small landholders, the vast majority owning less than five acres. Actually, people owning less than two acres of land. It’s not government collectivized ownership like the Soviet Union. So, it’s a poor analogy to kind of invoke the Soviet Union just in terms of how agriculture is organized. But also invoking the Soviet Union as if it’s like some backward way of conducting agriculture. What they’re trying to do is go back to 18th Century Britain, so shall we have that, shall we have like slavery capitalism? Right?
If the Soviet system is 50 years old, the kind of accumulation they’re trying to enact is like 200 years old, more brutal, more vicious. And so, is that kind of preferable? I think that the people that make these arguments have to be exposed as ideological zealots that the advocacy of market-based policies is not some, neutral objective analysis of the best possible system and therefore one should just adopt it because some technocratic analysis says that it is. No, it’s a deeply ideological position and the people that oppose it are also putting forward an ideological position. All of these are, well along the kind of spectrum are ideological. And once we see that, then we could perhaps evaluate it along the different criteria.
So it goes back to the question of, should the market rule people’s lives? Is that the best way to organize human affairs? Is that the best way to deal with the environment? Is that the best way to deal with social difference?
And I think there’s an abundance of evidence saying no. And I think maybe the two examples we can give, one in Bihar. In the state of Bihar in 2006, this was actually enacted. Bihar had a kind of public system of Government procurement. Wasn’t as extensive as Punjab but nonetheless, it was there. Public Mandis, and in 2006, they were done away with, and the entire system was turned over to private corporations.
And what did we see? Farmers’ incomes plummet, right? Because corporations could do as they please. They could control the entire supply chain and manipulate prices and Bihari farmers actually became more landless. An increasing numbers had to become migrant labourers in other states and it ended up as a kind of disaster. So that’s maybe an empirical example within India to show the impact of these laws.
The second is, the global dimension to this problem, the hypocrisy of the global north. That countries in the global north are demanding that countries in the global south like India end their supports and subsidies for their citizens while maintaining them for large agribusinesses there.
And so, if they want to get rid of subsidies and supports in India, the same Canadian or US or western European governments are maintaining them for their own businesses. They don’t let agriculture be subject to the whims of the markets here. So why are they insisting on protecting farmers in the Global North which are mostly agribusinesses and yet demanding that countries like India don’t do it for them? So that I think reveals the hypocrisy and reveals the kind of ideological terrain that the struggle is taking place on.
Adam: So in reading about the protests and about the three laws, there’s a lot of criticism about the government-run mandi system and the Minimum Support Price, the MSP. It’s easy enough to understand how the BJP would seek to liberalize agriculture and to spark, on the one hand, investment and, on the other hand, a concentration of wealth. But is there any merit to the idea that India’s laws surrounding agriculture and protecting small farmers need to be amended – need to be changed to encourage investment?
Navyug: Yeah, so it’s a great question and it’s important. The thing to keep in mind is that these protests are not an endorsement of the status quo. The people that are opposing these laws do not want to just keep things as they were before. People have actually been demanding change for five decades. Right from the onset of the so-called Green Revolution in the late 1960s, people saw that that sort of capital intensive, ecologically devastating system of agriculture was unjust, was not viable, and would have terrible consequences. And they proposed all sorts of changes and they were largely ignored and even maligned. And so, this is what I think is most galling, right? That these are not agricultural reforms and the government has tried to spin this narrative that agriculture was in a stagnant state. Something had to be done and so here we are doing something. It’s not true.
People want all sorts of different changes. The one example I can give is something called the Swaminathan Commission which was a government-sanctioned commission in the early 2000s that was tasked with analyzing all of the problems in agriculture. And far from some radical activist document, this was a government official that did this, and they came up with a whole host of recommendations. And in the main it was about recalibrating the minimum support prices to make them adequately reflect the rising cost of inputs. But it was also about groundwater depletion, it was also about soil erosion, it was also about land redistribution and inequality, crop diversification. They had dozens of recommendations. The government received their commission, read it and shelved it. And it’s been ignored by the Congress and the BJP for almost two decades now. So something like that is very much on the table. There were all sorts of reforms that could have been enacted. And the kind of arrogance and the ignorance that you hear when people say “something had to be done,” it’s really kind of galling.
On the other hand, these laws will do nothing about the problems in agriculture. So by allowing corporations to stockpile commodities, or by allowing corporations to engage in lopsided contracts, or allowing corporations to procure crops at market prices, that will not alleviate groundwater depletion. That will not affect soil erosion. That will not help crop diversification. That will not affect farmer suicides and indebtedness. Right?
I mean just in the way I described these laws, all of them are about allowing corporations to do stuff. Right? And just by letting in the market and allowing liberalization – these are the kind of euphemisms – they’re not actually going to address any of those structural problems and I think what this protest is showing, it is exposing the sort of dishonesty of the government on the issue of reform. And I think there are people on the ground that have been very forthright in saying we’re not going to go back to this old model. And I think that kind of creativity as well as that determination is coming to the fore so that real meaningful change will be implemented once these laws are repealed.
I mean, the only thing I would add just because maybe most of your listeners are Canadian: there’s a bunch of problems in our healthcare system, right? There are all sorts of problems that we have in OHIP and different [health] coverages. Now, shall we solve those problems and try to affect patient waiting times or outcomes? Or should we just abolish it and let private interests run rampant? Right? It’s that kind of a dynamic.
Divyani: Because you brought in the Global North, and rightly so, we’ve been witnessing a number of solidarity protests all across the world but specially North America and Canada. Where do we locate these in terms of the larger trajectory of South Asian activism in Canada? Especially considering that in the first farm workers union in Canada, Sikhs were at the forefront of that as well – in the 1980s in Canada. Could you talk about that a bit?
Navyug: Yeah, that’s a fascinating dimension of the protest. I think when you see that – right from the beginning actually, from the summer of 2020 onward, when the protests kicked off in Punjab, there were parallel demonstrations, meetings, and debates that were happening in the diaspora, particularly the Punjabi Sikh diaspora across the world: Canada, England, the US, Australia and New Zealand, but also Italy, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere.
I think we should recognize that, one, the Punjabi community is quite politicized. And it’s a politicised and organised diaspora community. That history is actually quite old, it’s over a century and we could trace it back to the Ghadar Party in the early 1900s. This was a group of migrants settled on the west coast of Canada and the United States and elsewhere that was determined to overthrow British rule in India through armed struggle. And they rejected the approach of the Congress and Gandhi and organized across religious lines – Hindu, Sikh, Muslim. They were mostly labourers, working in the mills and factories, and they published a newspaper, they organized weapons, they tried to incite an uprising, and they were severely repressed. But what they signify is a community that is aware of the need to organize, that rejects borders as boundaries of a political affiliation.
So just because you happen to live in one country doesn’t mean that your commitments to another place cease. I think that’s what all nation states fantasize about, but the Ghadar Party rejected that logic and showed that just because you happen to be here it doesn’t mean that you should stop caring about something happening elsewhere. So I think from that point we can locate the Punjabi Sikh community in particular as being organized and committed to a kind of global outlook.
I think there’s two other kinds of more recent elements in that. The first is what you mentioned, the fact that this community, Sikh in particular, have been involved in labour organising, whether it’s as farm workers, or taxi drivers, or factory workers on the west coast and in Ontario and elsewhere. And then also, the second element would be post-1980s in opposition to the Indian government genocide against Sikhs in Punjab. Lots of people came as refugees or in the aftermath of that struggle and engaged in organizing here. And so, what we have is a community that has a long history of being organized. It has long-standing connections to Punjab and people are determined to raise their voice and engage in supporting this struggle in any way possible.
I think that another thing though to maybe keep in mind and maybe signal for the listeners is that the Punjabi Sikh community being politicized makes it the most visible. But these laws will devastate the lives of Hindus too. Hindus and Muslims and all people in India will be harmed by these laws. And in fact, when the movement started in Punjab, like I said, it quickly spread to Haryana, to Uttar Pradesh, to Rajasthan and elsewhere.
Vast numbers of Hindus have been standing shoulder to shoulder with Sikh. So it’s not a Sikh-alone movement, though the government has tried to spin it that way. But I think it’s incumbent on Hindus in the diaspora that they should organize through whatever mandirs or other sort of institutions and show that this is not some sort of monolithic community of Hindus against Sikh. I mean, that’s the government narrative. And I know in Canada they had some of these right-wing BJP types who have tried to organize counter protests, if you will. And I think that it shouldn’t just be Sikh that are challenging this – I know it’s happening but I think it should be encouraged and come to the fore more so that we don’t allow that kind of homogenization and that kind of communal polarization to take place in the diaspora, especially when it’s not true on the ground.
Adam: So in reading about this, I forget exactly what I was looking at, but I saw something about there being 250 million Indians on strike on one particular day. I don’t know if that was specifically farmers or if they’re extended to other unions. And I’m just wondering, given the size and the momentum that the protests have had, where do we expect this to go?
Do we think they’re going to be successful in preventing the laws from passing? And is there a kind of a best case scenario where other types of reform take place? Or is it more of a pessimistic outlook where we expect at some point, the government will have its way?
Navyug: Yeah. So I think – great points. I think that the 250 million number is optimistic. It’s a bit of a stretch maybe. What it is, is a – there was a call for – there’s a sort of almost annual call for a strike that happens across India and the parliamentarian Left parties make this call for a strike and they have power in a couple of places in the country.
But the strike is called and people participate in varying capacities. And so, it kind of gets turned into like – you get this 250 million number. But it’s not actually that or in the sense that it’s a kind of symbolic thing in most places. The main bazaar in a town might be closed for a few hours and then that counts as a strike.
But the focal point of the protest in Punjab and Haryana and Western UP and Rajasthan, we can say that tens of thousands of people were mobilizing and marching on the capital – hundreds of thousands, two or three hundred thousand. We can say that millions of people in those states were overwhelmingly in support of this protest and were engaging in actions in Punjab and Haryana, and elsewhere, shutting down toll plazas and petrol pumps and malls and the other things. And then hundreds of millions of people have exhibited and demonstrated support for their struggle. And it’s a sustained support, so it’s not a kind of one-day symbolic thing. It’s a kind of ongoing churning that we’re seeing in the country.
Now, what do we think this might achieve? Look, I guess what is it? The 150-year anniversary of the Paris Commune, right? This protest I think is storming heaven, it is actually overturning so many of the economic and cultural assumptions that we’ve taken for granted. It represents the most significant challenge to neoliberal logic in the world today. It serves as a kind of inspiration, I think, to the globe that an alternative future is not just possible, it’s tangible, it’s worth fighting for.
So the notion that agriculture is just automatically backward and stagnant, and that the future of these people is to be in one way or another, evicted from the countryside, and end up in cities and become workers is a fantasy. It’s a warped fantasy from the nineteenth century experience of a few places in Britain or elsewhere and that’s become kind of broadcast around the world and everybody is expected to kind of fulfill that trajectory. I think this protest challenges that and says, “No, the destiny of every peasant is not to be a proletarian. There can be other ways of organizing social and economic relations that don’t end up in that model.” So I think that’s the most significant thing, the inevitability of accumulation of that kind.
I think also the connections that are being built across the country are remarkable. The fact that this protest has traversed these given divides – like I said of caste, of class, of region, right? You have Jatts, which are farmers, and Dalits, which are landless labourers, coming together to confront neoliberal hindutva. These are two groups that have their own kind of tensions.
There is a kind of hierarchy in the countryside that pits farmer and labourer against each other. There’s a kind of vicious kind of caste discrimination and exploitation that goes on. Nonetheless, they have forged a bond because the immediate threat is so dangerous. Like I said, class: the fact that it’s gone beyond farmers and labours and encompass all of these other groups. Region: the fact that Punjab and Haryana and all these other places that – or states in this giant 80-year old country have nonetheless come across those lines and forged solidarity.
The role of gender – the incredible participation of women in this movement. Something like 30,000 to 40,000 maybe 50,000 to 60,000 women have been camped out on the outskirts of Delhi for three months. This was almost unimaginable six months or a year ago. And that these women have challenged their patriarchal household, they’ve challenged a patriarchal society. They have asserted themselves in all dimensions of this protest and are now challenging – like I said, the most right-wing authoritarian government in recent memory. So it’s a very much a feminist moment too.
So I think in in all those ways, the neoliberal market logic to the divisions in Indian society, to incredible kind of re-working of gender hierarchies, this is an incredible moment and I think we in the West should take it very seriously and I think do everything we can to analyze it critically, ask the difficult questions, but extend our overwhelming support. And if I have to say it, I think the movement will succeed. I have no doubts of that. Governments are powerful and impenetrable and impervious until they’re not.
Adam: And so, we’re now in the second-half of March. What should our listeners be looking to next, in other – yeah, what to do with protests, what to do with the government? Or is it too early to tell?
Navyug: Meaning our listeners out here in the west?
Adam: Yes. I mean, I guess all over the world.
Navyug: Yeah. I mean, I think of course – yeah. I think that – another maybe dimension we didn’t get a chance to talk about is how the farmer and labour unions have taken control of the narrative and have bypassed the existing systems of mainstream media through independent and social media to put forward their own perspectives and narratives.
These apps, Twitter, and Instagram and Facebook are controlled by these egotistical billionaires, right? Very arbitrary and beholden, actually, to the Indian government. Nonetheless, people have used them for their own ends and built connections and every day, people are giving live updates from the front lines. And the farmer and labour unions have their Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. They have a YouTube channel. Volunteers at the frontline created their own newspaper called the Trolley Times. A volunteer-run full print newspaper with online PDF versions that shares stories from the front lines.
So, one, is that we can encourage listeners to learn and engage about the protest from the people that are engaged in it. And they don’t have to just rely on the mainstream news channels, right? So that’s one thing.
Secondly, I think that in almost every large to medium – maybe even a small town in Canada and US and elsewhere, there will be people organizing demonstrations, protests, small-scale meetings, events, round tables, workshops, whatever. And I think that people should get involved. People should extend whatever – depending on their risk and capacity, do whatever they can to engage in the struggle. And it could be just attending something. It could be donating. It could be speaking from the stage. It could be singing a song. It could be any number of things. People should realize that it’s very rare to have a kind of opportunity to engage in a global struggle of this magnitude.
The last thing is I think people should take inspiration from this movement to transform the society they live in. Imagine these are people that are fighting against this right-wing authoritarian government, right? That has massive resources arrayed against them and yet and still they’re determined. So as we sit in the US or we sit in Canada, and we hear the same kind of neoliberal logic presented as inevitability, that everything must be liberalized, and privatized and it’s the only way – we should take inspiration from this movement and fight back and demand that our schools, our roads, our power plants, our hospitals should not be subject to the whims of the market.
And actually, there’s a better way to organize those resources and institutions for the welfare of all. That’s not some quaint idea, that’s not some outmoded idea, that is actually the way forward to save ourselves and to save this planet. So it should get us to fight for a different future here as well.
Adam: And in the short term in India, do we expect the impasse in negotiations to continue for a while?
Navyug: Well, the negotiations have actually stopped and the government is now refusing to negotiate. And so, we are at a kind of impasse, the labour and farmer unions are now figuring out – and I think this is a question that everybody that has ever engaged in political struggle has to figure out. Which is, how to escalate? How to identify pressure points, the vulnerabilities of the government and increase pressure on those areas, right?
Because in the end, they want to repeal these laws, so that’s what they’re having to sort out and it’s a matter of expanding the movement to these different states, like I said. It’s affecting the Bengal and Assam elections. Maybe blockading other roads, maybe blockading railways, shutting down the airport. Who knows what will come of it, right? There’s all sorts of options on the table. So they’re figuring that out and we’ll see if the government is brought back to the table. We’ll see if popular pressure mounts to get them to capitulate.
It is a very difficult task. It’s not easy to do this kind of thing and I think sometimes people in the diaspora get a little bit impatient because it’s like you have your demo and you make your statement and that’s about it. Maybe I’ll just say this last point that in the West, we are used to demonstrations that are actually about expression. One wants to express their displeasure at something. And once they sort of expressed it, you sort of go home. Right? And the government actually does a good job of saying, “We hear your resentment and we’re going to continue doing what we do.”
This is not just a demonstration. It’s actually trying to achieve something very tangible and it’s a fightback against a set of policies that’s going to devastate the livelihoods of millions of people. So it’s not something transient.
It’s actually sustained and people are committed when they marched on Delhi at the end of November, they said that we’re bringing six months of supplies and we’re in it for the long haul. And so, that’s why they’ve been able to set up these makeshift cities on the outskirts and they’ve set up schools and clinics. And, like I said, a newspaper and created this kind of infrastructure. And that’s maybe what we can learn from this in the West – that actually fighting for something takes a long bloody time. There’s lots of setbacks, but that’s why it’s called struggle. It’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to be quick. I mean the short term is a couple of hours, the short term is six months. It depends on what is short, right? But it’s ongoing. So it’s an open ended question, but I maybe reiterate my belief that this movement will be victorious.
Divyani: Okay. It’s the last question and then we’ll wrap it up But I just thought – because you said that this protest and this movement is serving as an inspiration to the world, right? And we’ve seen a lot of celebrities and politicians including Trudeau saying that how peaceful protest is a right, et cetera. But then the fact that the state is very violent here in Canada as well when it comes to indigenous people and then the state violence in India. How do we kind of connect that? And, you know, the hypocrisy of these states – like of these different governments? So if you could just briefly comment on that too.
Navyug: Yeah I think the state violence question is – before coming to that, I think that we should see these statements of sort of support for what they actually are. We should look at them very clearly and there was the initial kind of flush of excitement when a few MPs and congresspersons and of course Trudeau made those statements I think in December.
And then celebrities, Rihanna and Greta Thunberg and others, made statements I think in early February or at the end of January. The government statements by officials were primarily re-iterating the right of people to protest peacefully, without threat of violence. That’s all they were actually saying, that people have a right to protest and the government shouldn’t tear gas them.
Now as to the content of what they were protesting, there was silence. And actually, that is the crux of the matter that the government in Canada or the government in the US is actually at the forefront of pushing this neoliberal agenda down the throats of countries in the Global South.
So we should not be satisfied with these kind of mealy mouthed statements about human rights and protest from government officials. We should actually demand that the government change its policy through the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization, to demand countries in the Global South end their subsidies and support. That would be meaningful solidarity. That would be actually something worth fighting for here.
So enough of the kind of adulation of Trudeau or whomever else for saying some vague thing about protest. Because people – even if the government allowed people to protest perfectly, even if they didn’t tear-gas them, even if they didn’t issue this kind of crackdown and arrests, and if they didn’t shut down the internet, if they didn’t sort of kidnap people off the street, if they didn’t lock up activists, block internet accounts, there would still be a problem.
And that would be what these laws are going to do to people’s livelihoods. So I think it’s a question of moving from human rights to economic rights. It’s not enough to insist on the human rights of a group of people. What are the economic rights they have and look at the content of their demands. And that’s why I think the celebrity stuff was – again, I’m quite cynical about celebrities, so it’s fine if somebody sort of brings attention to something, but just remember that the attention is not enough. Right? One has to kind of push the agenda much further than that.
Now, in terms of state repression, absolutely. These governments are in lockstep with one another and they collaborate and learn from each other and engage in coordinated crackdowns and surveillance of their citizens who raise their voices?
I think that it’s a matter of – I mean if we take global solidarity seriously, it’s actually a matter of global citizens holding world leaders accountable regardless of where they are. Whether they’re their own, where there’s a greater responsibility or elsewhere, one should raise their voice but also then engage in the inglorious, thankless work of organizing against those policies of their governments. And then, like I said, figuring out where are those points that one can exert pressure to extract meaningful change.
Divyani: Wow. Thank you so much for joining us for the podcast. Adam, if you want to wrap it up?
Adam: In closing, would you just repeat the name that you mentioned. There are some media produced by the protesters in India. I don’t know if it was a YouTube channel or publication?
Navyug: Yeah. So the newspaper they have put out it’s called Trolley Times and it takes its name from the trolley that is hitched to the back of a tractor – a very humble instrument of cultivation and it’s actually in the trolley that thousands of people have been sleeping in for these last few months in these makeshift cities on the borders of Delhi. So they named their paper Trolley Times.
Divyani: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Oats for Breakfast.
Adam: Remember to subscribe to the show if you haven’t done so yet.
Divyani: If you are on iTunes and are interested in supporting the show, be sure to rate and review Oats for Breakfast. That will make it easier for us to gain more listeners.
Adam: Thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you again soon.
Navyug Gill is an assistant professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His research interests include labour and agrarian politics in South Asia.
Oats for Breakfast is an independent eco-socialist podcast based in Toronto.