I’d like to start with an event which at first sight seems to have nothing to do with the farmers’ struggle, but I’ll explain how it does. After the countrywide lockdown was imposed in the last week of March 2020, life came to a standstill. But by April, there was a massive exodus of migrant workers from towns and cities thoughout India, tens of millions of them, trekking back hundreds of miles to their home villages, mostly on foot, a few on bicycles, a few catching lifts from trucks for part of the way. They encountered searing heat and brutal treatment from the police – beatings, being locked in stadiums converted into open-air prisons, sprayed with chlorine disinfectant – but still they persisted.
So who were these people, and why were they undertaking this journey in the midst of a lockdown? In fact, these were family members of some of the very same people participating in the farmers’ struggle: small and marginal farmers, and especially agricultural labourers. Unable to make a living in their villages, they’d migrated to towns and villages looking for work, and the only employment they’d been able to find was unregulated and extremely exploitative, often through labour contractors, and with absolutely no security. Some of them slept in their workplaces, others got together and rented a small room in a slum, packed together like sardines. When the lockdown was declared, employers suspended production and contractors vanished, often without even paying workers for the work they had already done. Living from hand to mouth with hardly any savings, what could they do? Those who lived at their place of work were booted out at once, those in rented accommodation soon followed. With public transport suspended, they decided to walk to their villages.
But hadn’t they left their villages precisely because they couldn’t make a living there? An interviewer asking this question got this answer: ‘If we’re going to die anyway, we’d rather die with our families at home.’
What this spectacular long march highlighted was three linked crises. One is the crisis in agriculture, which was in a dire state even before the three new farm laws. Rich farmers constitute about 15% and the remaining 85% are medium, small and marginal. Every single day farmers are losing their land and joining the already large number of landless agricultural labourers. Every single day indebted farmers and agricultural labourers are committing suicide, and the rate of dispossession and suicide has accelerated under the present government. The only lifeline they have is their land, which they can hang onto only so long as they get paid a minimum support price for their crops.
And what awaits them if they lose their land? No new industrial jobs are being created, and even existing jobs have been destroyed in the past few years. Graduates are competing to be employed as waiters or unskilled workers. The kind of employment these migrant workers have is practically all that is available. Working for agribusiness companies might be an option for some, but not everyone would get those jobs, and even those who do would find the terms humiliating. This points to the second crisis: the crisis in employment. Looking at the labour laws before they were ‘reformed,’ also during the lockdown, you would have thought that they gave Indian workers strong rights, and they did. But the laws applied to less than 7% of the labour force. The rest had to fight to survive, and could lose their jobs any time, especially if they tried to organise or ask for higher wages. After the ‘reforms’, hardly any workers are protected; they have to conform to the demands made on them by employers or risk losing their jobs.
The third element in the crisis is the virtual absence of social security. There is the Public Distribution System, which offers a few food items and kerosene for cooking at highly subsidised rates to below-poverty-line households. These entitlements had been expanded by the Food Security Act under the previous government, but it is not being implemented properly. However, it is better than nothing, and migrant workers could expect to get their rations back in their villages. Then there is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or NREGA, also enacted by the previous government, which offers 100 days’ employment in public works at the minimum wage to one person per rural household per year. It’s not much, but it has been a lifeline for some of the families of the rural poor, and some migrant workers who returned to their villages tried to get get employment through this scheme. Unfortunately, NREGA too is not being implemented properly. For the vast majority of the population, an abyss opens up beneath their feet if they lose their job or their land. No wonder the rate of suicide is so high!
When we look closely at the farmers’ struggle, we see cracks that may be closing but still need a lot of repair work to be done on them. I’ll just look at three. One is divisions resulting from religious communalism, which has been promoted assiduously by the government. There is not much hostility between Sikhs and Muslims – in fact, Sikhs had even come and prepared food for protesters against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminates against Muslims. But some of the Hindu farmers from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have been supporters of a Hindu nationalist agenda, and may even have participated in anti-Muslim pogroms which resulted in ethnically cleansing Muslims from Muzaffarnagar in Western UP in 2013. When an interviewer asked some of the farmers from UP a question about these riots, one said, very quietly, ‘They shouldn’t have happened’. Another said, more loudly, ‘There are no Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian divisions here, we are all farmers.’ But we can’t take such declarations at face value. It remains to be seen if these divisions have been healed, and I suspect a lot of work remains to be done.
The second division is between caste Hindus and Dalits, who have suffered terrible oppression and still do, but have been participating in the protests. The vast majority of rural Dalits are landless, but some rent land and cultivate it. For them, of course, the Minimum Support Price is even more crucial, because they have to pay rent on top of everything else. Others demand plots to be assigned to them from common land, which they fear will be swallowed up by agribusinesses if they take over. Yet others feel the wages they are paid as labourers depend on their employers – the farmers – getting a decent price for their crops. The laws attack landless Dalits from another angle too: their families would be dependent on the PDS, which would be disrupted by these laws. So they are protesting alongside the farmers. But again, it remains to be seen if the caste oppression they suffer will be mitigated by the solidarity generated by this joint struggle. The more left-wing farmers’ organisations are making a conscious effort to promote such solidarity, but I’m sure more work will need to be done.
Last but not least, women. When the Supreme Court asked the protesters ‘Why don’t you send the women home?’ there was outrage among the women protesters, who have played a prominent role in the struggle. In fact, if you include the women whose husbands are farmers, which you should because they too work on the farms, there are more women farmers than men. When men migrate in search of employment, it is women who take over running the farm, and in the tragic cases where the men commit suicide too, women take over. Some of the women participating in the protests have been vocal in denouncing the devaluation of women promoted by Hindu nationalist ideology, and it seems likely that the farmers’ struggle will provide momentum to a parallel struggle against a deeply patriarchal and misogynist culture.
In fact, if we stay with women, they have been pioneers in exploring one important solution to the agrarian crisis, namely forming cooperatives. Wherever they have formed cooperatives, they have been able to earn more than farmers working on their own, and this experiment could be developed and expanded to solve many problems. Agricultural cooperatives which include landless labourers on an equal basis would not only be able to negotiate better prices, they would also be able to share machinery and tractors, thus reducing debt. They could diversify production, set up repair workshops, and create storage and processing facilities. They could even produce their own renewable energy and organic fertiliser, thus solving some of the major problems farmers suffer today. The possibilities are endless.
(This was a presentation at a panel discussion on ‘Farmers’ struggles from India to the US’ on 27 February 2021. The other panelists were Vikas Rawal (also speaking on India) and LaShauna W. Austria, speaking on farmers’ struggles in the US. Swati Birla was asking the questions and chairing the discussion. The entire discussion can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3L8TJXdAY )