Farmers Agitation

Rejecting and Reinventing Indian Republic

  “They may kill me but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body but they will not be able to crush my spirit”. These statements of Shaheed Bhagat Singh still echoes in the minds, hearts, ideas and soil of India. Though the colonisers killed him and finished his body, but the spirit of Shaheed Bhagat Singh continues[Read More...]

Farmers Are Tillers, Not Killers

Kangana Ranaut again and again is attacking the Indian farmers as terrorists. She has done that in response to the world famous pop singer Rihanna and famous environmentalist girl Greta’s support to farmers movement. Sachin Tendulkar and other pro-BJP forces also joined the chorus. Most of these forces are pro-monopoly houses and hardly have any engagement with the agrarian production.[Read More...]

Are The Farmers Making Delhi Irrelevant?

The irony of this is lost on a government drowning in its testesterone: with every nail studded barricade installed at Tikri, Ghazipur or Singhu, Delhi is making itself progressively redundant to the ongoing course of events, and perhaps even to the future shape of things in India. A subterranean tsunami is slowly building in the country and the power elite,[Read More...]

The political impact of Kisan Andolan

Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait’s tears has changed the dynamics of not merely farmers movement but politics particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Till January 26th, it was clear that the protesting farmers were largely from Punjab and those in power with their daily calculators at hand were visualising for a political profiteering from the prolonged movement. They had[Read More...]

India: Whose sovereignty is it anyway?

The questions of national sovereignty are dominating debates in Indian politics today. The Indian media has become the voice of the BJP government led by Mr Narendra Modi. The government and media derides anyone as anti-national if one question’s the government of the day. The students, youths, religious minorities, Dalits, tribals, Kashmiris, human rights activists, lawyers, rationalists, writers, journalists, comedians,[Read More...]

Reflections on the farmers movement

Identity politics cannot subsume real politics. Hindutva built on Hindu identity cannot stop emergence of a challenge built on solidarity of the oppressed classes. Mandir Masjid can polarize and keep the people divided in the name of Hindu Muslim. But the challenge can come from somewhere else (Sikhs), though not on the basis of identity. Challenge can come from anywhere[Read More...]

The Kisans Are Right. Their Land Is At Stake (Part 2 of 3)

In the previous part of this article we saw that the Indian rulers are actively preparing the legal groundwork for parting peasants from their land. In the following part we place this in an international context. The world economy is witnessing an intensifying drive by international investors to get control of land, including agricultural land, in the Third World. Why[Read More...]

Rural vs Urban Population in India

The Farmers’ Protest Movement has brought into sharp focus that India consists of two countries. One is the mighty sprawling urban India where all of us fortunate live spoilt by consumerism and wanting more and more at the cost of others. The other is the weak scattered rural population who are waiting still since 1947 independence to survive poverty, hunger,[Read More...]

Why the Nation—and Yes Even the Government—Should Take Pride in the Resilience and Unity of the Farmers’ Movement

What has happened in the context of the farmers’ movement in India in recent days has brought joy and pride to its increasing number of supporters. A movement that can spring back to a position of such great and increasing support and strength within just a few days—less than a week—of terrible victimization tactics surely deserves congratulations and praise for[Read More...]

Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington D.C.

On December 18, addressing a Kisan Sammelan (farmer conference) in Madhya Pradesh by video conferencing, Narendra Modi declared: We are compelled to do things which should have been done 25-30 years ago…. The new laws that have been made for the farmers are in the news for some time now. These agricultural reforms have not come about overnight. Every government of[Read More...]