New Farm Bills and Farmers’ Resistance to Neoliberalism

Structural Change: Ongoing Agrarian Crisis

Agriculture in India employs nearly half of the workforce (Agricultural Census 2010–2011). However, the agricultural sector’s contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) has decreased from 54% in 1950–1951 to 14% in 2012–2013 (data.gov.in, n.d.). At the same time, the non-agricultural economy does not create jobs fast enough to absorb the agrarian surplus population, and the jobs on offer are poorly paid. Thus, agrarian labour, non-agrarian labour and agrarian petty commodity producers have benefitted very little from India’s high economic growth. Furthermore, in the past 7 years, there has been a direct decline in non-agriculture employment. Hence, farmers, as well as labourers, are now compelled to stay in agriculture (Kannan & Raveendran, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified this situation. The lockdown from late March 2020 affected the non-agricultural labourers badly by forcing them back to doing whatever they could in agriculture. In 2019–2020 the proportion of the population working in the agricultural sector increased (Jha & Kishore, 2021). All these point to the emerging dismal agrarian scenario.

Continuously, the agricultural sector has been witnessing a fall in profitability in the wake of neoliberal reforms (Surjit, 2008). The reduction in state subsidies on inputs such as fertilisers, electricity and high-yielding varieties of seeds in the reform period of the 2000s has led to a decline in the profitability of the agricultural sector (Acharya & Jogi, 2004). Since state subsidies on inputs rationalise the ratio between the output price and the input price in favour of farmers, any reduction in these subsidies has adversely affected farmers because they have had to pay more for inputs. That is why the price per tonne of urea, diammonium phosphate (DAP) and muriate of potash (MOP) and high-yielding variety seeds has been increasing substantially over the years. Besides, farmers have been facing an erosion of real incomes because the rise in the aggregate price index for consumer goods has been significantly higher than the rise in the price index for agricultural commodities (Mishra, 2007; Posani, 2009). This has resulted in declining relative living standards of farmers, particularly for small and marginal farmers (86% of farmers own less than 2 ha of land) whose incomes are clearly inadequate to meet consumption expenditure, particularly, on education and health, which have been privatised gradually after the 1990s. Small and marginal farmers have experienced significant hardship from the late 1990s onwards. To supplement insufficient incomes, a growing number of farmers (particularly small and marginal) simultaneously work in urban jobs in the informal sector (Kumar, 2021). Declining profitability combined with the rising cost of agricultural inputs and increasing cost of healthcare and education have led farmers into a debt cycle, and hundreds of thousands of farmers have committed suicide over the past three decades across India.

These developments in Indian agriculture, particularly in north-western states, profoundly changed agrarian social relations within the villages, by reinforcing the relations of domination and the situations of marginalisation, in particular, of caste and gender, concerning land ownership and agricultural work. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Green Revolution (GR)-inspired mechanisation and industrialisation of agriculture mainly benefitted farmers from the dominant castes (like Jats who were at the forefront of the movement) in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh (UP). The GR technologies strengthened male Jats’ hold on land ownership. Put bluntly, if the upper-caste Jats constitute the majority of landholders, then the Dalits constitute the majority of Punjab’s landless workforce. Despite having a share of around 32% of the state’s population, only 3.5% of Dalits own any agricultural land. On the other hand, according to the National Sample Survey of 2011–2012, 86% of agricultural labourers in rural Punjab are Dalits. Further, women Jat farmers are hard to find across the region. Similarly, in Haryana and western UP, most Dalits are landless, and Jat males are landowners.

While, initially, the GR-led industrial capitalist agriculture brought prosperity, it could not sustain its momentum for a long time. Despite the continuous increase in the cost of inputs, agricultural machinery, labour and day-to-day living costs, agricultural production remained either stable or declined in the 2000s. In 2002–2003, for the first time in the post-GR era, the growth of agriculture in Punjab actually declined at an annual rate of 2.38%. Most importantly, the GR-led model of agriculture also created environmental crises by depleting and polluting groundwater, making soil infertile by monocropping, killing friendly insects and producing new pests and pathogens which destroy crops. Finally, the GR model revealed its contradictions and was rendered as unsustainable. The cascading crises of economic immiseration and ecological degradation became more conspicuous than ever (Kumar, 2018).

Thus, the farmers’ movement of 2020 has its roots in the transformed agrarian and rural landscapes of the 21st century, which are increasingly defined by agrarian distress, ecological crises, de-peasantisation and semi-proletarianisation, deepening inequalities and precariat labour class (Baviskar & Levien, 2021). The Indian countryside has been going through tremendous economic and social suffering. This emerging agrarian landscape helps us to explain the broader coalition behind the farmers’ protests of 2020–2021 and their spectacular success.

Repealed Farm Laws: Liberalisation and Deregulation of the Agricultural Market

The three farm laws repealed in November 2021 aimed to deregulate the purchase, production and storage of agricultural commodities in a sector still largely supervised and organised by the state. It is indeed within the sarkari mandis (or APMC—Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee), the wholesale markets controlled by each state, that the farmers sell their harvests through the intermediary who is popularly known as the arthiya. These mandis had been designed as support structures managed by each federated state, to enable farmers to sell their agricultural produce at the MSP. With a call to ‘Boycott Adani–Ambani’, protesting farmers argued for a greater role of the state in agricultural marketing, including the extension of guaranteed procurement at MSP for many more than the three crops the government currently supports (rice, wheat and sugar cane) (Jodhka, 2021).

Sarkari mandis played a very important role in the prosperity of rural and agrarian development across the north-western states. Most importantly, the income generated by the activity of the mandis also makes it possible to finance a vast system of food (re)distribution at subsidised prices benefitting the poorest populations, the public distribution system (PDS). In the name of an alleged ‘modernisation’ of the agricultural sector, the reforms put an end to this system, and a private space for exchange was introduced, where the farmers would have negotiated directly with the buyers of the agribusiness. This sort of arrangement between farmers and private agribusiness has been in practice in certain sates of India since the beginning of the 2000s. However, this experience from these states (like Bihar) shows that the MSP was totally obliterated, and the arrangement favoured private players during the dispute resolution. Small and marginal farmers do not have the resources to fight with big capital corporates.

When farm unions and farmer activists found out about the way in which the BJP government had passed these laws quietly without any public discussion while (mis)using its majority in the parliament, the farmers clearly saw that the state was favouring the big private groups like those of Adani or Ambani against their land, their way of life, their identity and their dignity. It came as a surprise to many that farmers in rural Punjab clearly articulated their protests against the big capital. The farmers established a direct link between these reforms and the question of land ownership and its dispossession for the benefit of private interests. Once the sarkari mandis closed, for lack of funding, the farmers would have been left to the mercy of traders who unscrupulously fix a lower price for farm produce that they buy from farmers. Inadequate market facilities and institutional arrangements are responsible for low price realisation and instability in prices. In this situation, especially small and marginal farmers would have been compelled to borrow a large sum of money and would have got trapped in a cycle of an impossible debt to repay. And they would have finally lost their land. Gaurang Sahay’s article in this issue explains how the repealed farm laws would have further weakened the vulnerable position of marginal and small farmers. He argues that these laws would have enabled private traders and the corporate sector to manipulate the agriculture market in their favour, while, on the surface, it seemed like a movement of the landed. But the repealed farm laws would have impacted the landless too, who are likely to be rendered surplus to the new agrarian regime. This was the reason that many labour organisations also supported and joined the movement.

The Protests of 2020–2021: Composition, Technique and Regional Histories

Perceiving a threat to their existence, the Punjab farmers were the first to protest the three laws. They began mobilising in early July 2020. From July to September, the farmers’ unions held protests at the village level, marched towards residences of members of parliament MPs, members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) and organised rail blockades and squatted on tracks at many places across the state (Jodhka, 2021). Feeling ignored by the union government, farmers decided to march to Delhi. The farmers’ unions of Punjab coordinated with the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), a platform of nearly 400 farmers’ organisations from across the country and, particularly, sought support from the farmers’ unions in Haryana and Western UP (See this issue Suthar & Kumar, 2022). The unions gave a call to reach Delhi between 27 and 28 of November 2020. With their tractor trolleys, mini-trucks and Boleros, farmers marched to Delhi, facing brutalities and high-handedness of police on the way. While most of the Punjab and Haryana farmers camped on the Singhu and Tikri borders, farmers from western UP set up their camps at the Gazipur border in east Delhi, on the road connecting Delhi to UP, where they were also joined by the farmers from Tarai and Uttarakhand in large numbers. Farmers from Rajasthan and some from Haryana camped on the Shahjahanpur border in south-west Delhi. Soon, farmers from across north India joined the farmers from Punjab, Haryana and Western UP at Delhi’s borders. Within a few weeks, the protests spread to other regions of the country and took the shape of an all-India movement that was not merely confined to the farm laws anymore, but about larger agrarian issues such as farmer suicides, indebtedness, ecological crises, rapid proletarianisation and fight against the authoritarian right wing.

Against this backdrop, the contributors to this special issue situate the farmers’ movement within longer histories and patterns of agrarian change in India. They also contribute new insights that advance long-standing debates over agrarian politics in the Global South. They show that much has changed about rural India and farmers’ politics after the 1990s.

In explaining why the Punjab farmers could form a wider coalition across caste, class and gender, Eveleen Sidana and Sumandeep Kaur illustrate the ways in which music, songs, print and digital media created a broader appeal. By using the legacy of the earlier protests, the ‘Pagdi Sambhal Jatta’ movement of the early 1900s and the Muzara farmers’ movements in the 1930s, and the religious institutions like gurdwara and langers (common kitchen), the Punjab farmers’ unions and activists attempted not only to develop a broader coalition of disparate organisations but also tried to build a bridge between the past and present. The authors highlight that the lyrics of the songs expressed three affective genealogies of the history of Punjab, and the region’s passionate relationship with agriculture and peasant movements through the registers of despair, enthusiasm and betrayal. The form of the songs also instantiated and expressed a culture of protest that evolved in opposition to the colonial rule. Throughout the protest movement, the Jathas (groups) of 20–30 people were organised in villages and came to and returned from the protest site regularly. Poems and songs of enthusiasm were sung; a mela or fair-like environment emerged as protesters of different socio-religious and economic backgrounds got involved. The authors highlight the ways in which different protest sites had varied textures and styles of organisation. The Singhu border protest site was more performance oriented than the Tikri border protest site, which was more organised, and women were closely involved in the organisation. Protesters also conducted mourning rituals known colloquially as syapa when all else seemed to be ineffective. The authors assert that the movement has been a response beyond the call to repeal the farm laws by claiming a higher moral ground based on the passion for farming and mobilising the past through the affective registers of despair, enthusiasm and betrayal to resist the malaise of the present.

Sidana and Kaur also underlined the role of women. In order to assert their presence and contributions, women donned the leadership of the morchas and organised Mahila Kisan Diwas on 18 January 2021. One of the three Kisan sansads (an innovative strategy adopted by farmers) was completely held by women farmers. Their integral contribution to the agricultural occupation and rural households came to be acknowledged on the platform of the farmers’ movement. They were collectively acknowledged as the bearers of the losses post the GR, farmers’ suicides, increasing interest rate, and expensive education and healthcare.

While gurdwaras and langers along with the imageries and memories of the Sikh valour played an important role in the mobilisation of Punjab farmers, in Haryana and Western UP, khap and caste played the key role. Shamsher Singh’s article illuminates the surprising participation of the khaps in the farmers’ movement, particularly after the 26 January violence in Delhi on the eve of the Republic Day. ‘The khaps have been known to be parochial clan consolidations patronised by the politically dominant Jat community’. They have been controversial entities as they have issued diktats on honour killings, shown regressive attitudes towards women and practised oppression of the non-Jat communities. Their participation in the otherwise inclusive farmers’ movement came as a surprise, but their involvement also sustained the movement. The local protests in the villages and the toll-plaza protests that occurred along with the protests at the Delhi borders also became a part of the farmers’ movement. These had a pressurising influence on the government at the centre and state. The author brings out the doubleness of khap: while the entry of khap energised the farmers’ movement at both the local level and Delhi’s borders, khaps acquired more power and legitimation. The violence and atrocities against the Dalits got higher visibility during and post the farmers’ protests in Haryana. Shamsher expresses hope that caste institutions like khap will recognise the significance of united struggles and alliances with working-class and marginalised communities and might change for the better.

Similarly, in the western districts of UP adjoining Haryana, khap organisations played a crucial role in mobilising the Jat Hindu and Muslim farmers, who fell apart in the wake of the Muzaffarnagar riot in 2013. In the late 1970s, Baliyan khap organised the Hindu and Muley (Muslim) Jats under the leadership of Mahendra Singh Tikait and formed Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU; Gupta, 1997; Sahay, 2004), which organised a historical protest at the Delhi Boat Club in October 1988 (Dhanagare, 1988). Focusing on the rise and fall of BKU, Satendra Kumar brings out the ways in which the BJP government’s forcible attempt to remove the protesting farmers from the Ghazipur border injected new energy into the farmers’ movement and mobilised farmers across caste, class, gender and religion. The BKU used this opportunity to revive its village-level cadre and organisation constituting inter-caste and religious village committees emulating the late Mahendra Singh Tikait’s organisational skills. The BKU activists tried to reach out to Muslim farmers and labourers, the old allies as well as to young men and women, and landless labourers who were hardly a part of the BKU village-level cadre and committees in the 1980s. The BKU leadership successfully united farmers across classes, religions and the spatial divide of the rural–urban. These new solidarities challenged the BJP’s hegemony in the recently concluded legislative assembly elections in March 2022. Drawing on his recent research in rural Muzaffarnagar, Kumar argues that the recent farmers’ protests renewed the agrarian polity and have given a new life to the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), a ‘dying’ political party of farmers. However, the BKU has not been able to go beyond the Jats and its Muslim allies. It did not make enough efforts to expand its base among the emerging farmer caste groups such as Gujjars, Sainis, Gadarias and Moryas who had not been part of the farmers’ alliance built by the late Tikait during the 1980s when the New Farmers’ Movement (NFM) achieved its peak.

Continuities and Discontinuities: New Farmers’ Movements and Anti-Special Economic Zone Protests

The historical continuities between the NFM and the farmers’ movement of 2020–2021 are remarkable. For instance, many of the farmers’ unions involved in the current protests were also prominent in the 1980s, pressing demands for remunerative prices, cheap input, loan waivers, etc. Driven by the ideology of Bharat versus India, the NFM in the 1980s was led by rich farmers of dominant castes primarily represented large-to-medium farmers (kulaks) who neglected class differentiation and caste oppression within the countryside (Brass, 1994). Contrary to the recent farmers’ movement, in the NFM, women, Dalits and agricultural labourers were largely absent, and their demands for higher wages were given hardly any attention by the movement leadership, which was guided by the narrow interests of rich farmers (Hasan, 1994). It was generally acknowledged that Dalit labourers and their interests were not represented in the NFM. Most of the farmers’ movements were led by men, with limited women’s participation. However, there were significant differences between the more patriarchal north India, where women were not seen to be significantly involved (Gill, 1994) and the more liberal Maharashtra where women and women’s issues played a larger role (Lindberg, 1994). The NFM led by the BKU, the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangh (KRSS) and other unions were responding to the declining profitability of GR agriculture. They were also highly critical of the government procurement and MSP system that the farmers’ movement of 2020–2021 defended. In those times, the sarkari procurement and MSP were seen as using price regulation against farmers to ensure cheap food for urban India.

However, the strength of NFM began to disintegrate following the introduction of neoliberal policies in the 1990s. The expansion of neoliberal policies in the 2000s further emaciated the farmers’ organisations (Mohanty, 2019). It seems that for a short period, neoliberalism diverted the agrarian attention towards urban aspirations and weakened agrarian politics. But the articles of Sudhir Kumar Suthar and Manish Kumar and Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Alf Gunvald Nilsen complicate this picture. Suthar and Kumar’s article shows that the recent farmers’ protests of 2020–2021 were not isolated events but a continuation of the protests that started in 2015 when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government brought an ordinance related to changes in the Land Acquisition Act. The authors argue that the recent farmers’ agitations represent the emergence of an alternative hybrid form of farmers’ politics that brought together the left organisations along with farmer and labourer unions around the issue of land as a source of identity but not just a resource of livelihoods. Suthar and Kumar highlight that after the Mandsaur firing in 2017 (in Madhya Pradesh where agitated farmers were shot), the farmers’ unions from different parts of India came together and responded by forming the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), which was the first major step in evolving a unified organisational platform to bring together diverse political forces working on agriculture and farmer mobilisation. The umbrella organisation of AIKSCC acknowledged the fact that only a unified struggle can result in effective resistance to the neoliberal avatar of the state, which developed an insatiable hunger for the resources that are crucial for the livelihoods of small farmers, labourers and women. The mobilising slogan of ‘kisan mazdoor ekta zindabad’ (long live the unity between farmers and workers) that has been so audible in the recent protests of 2020–2021 reflects the legacy of the past mobilisations and the coming together of different organisations to resist the neoliberal policies.

By focusing on the movements against special economic zones (SEZ) and land dispossession that mushroomed in many parts of India in the wake of the passing of India’s SEZ Act in 2005, Nielsen and Nilsen trace the ways in which the 2020–2021 protests relate to and are shaped by the anti-SEZ movements of the 2000s. The authors illustrate the historical continuities between the anti-SEZ movements and the recent farmers’ movement. Both movements have been against neoliberal policies that sought to remove obstacles to capitalist accumulation. In the case of the anti-SEZ movement, protesters targeted the emergence of a ‘land broker state’ (Levien, 2018) that sought to accelerate the commodification of land. In the case of the recent protests, farmers targeted a business-enabling state that sought to accelerate the commodification of agricultural production and trade; crucially, in both cases, movements have framed their critique in the language of land grabbing and dispossession, rejecting a development model that is hungry for land but spits out the people that live on it (Jairath, 2020). Yet, authors acknowledge that the two movements are separated by roughly 15 years, and that they, in effect, target two distinctly different forms of dispossession—one predominantly coercive, and the other predominantly market-driven.

The authors assert that juxtaposing the farm law protests with the anti-SEZ movements from 15 years ago arguably enables us to better grasp ‘the totality’ of India’s post-liberalisation political economy, and particularly, the ways in which it has evolved over the past two decades during which India’s neoliberal regime of dispossession has moved from a phase of emergence in the 1980s and 1990s to a phase of consolidation from the early 2000s.

Shray Mehta and Shreya Sinha’s article in this issue gives a twist to the historical continuities in the making of the recent farmers’ movement and its implications for policymaking. The authors put into perspective the relationship of the farmers’ struggles with the electoral politics in post-colonial India that has played a significant role in the stagnation in agricultural policies. The caste–identity-based fragmentation and mobilisation that has occurred in the past few years stemmed from the limitation of representation by the farmers in shaping the policies that have affected them. The farmers’ movement in 2020–2021 then becomes a cautiously optimistic evolution in the direction of regaining the farmers’ identity and bringing back agriculture to the centre of national politics. By analysing agrarian mobilisation in post-colonial India, authors indicate a historical shift and argue that apolitical agrarian populism has lost much of its political potency, and farmers have to pursue anti-authoritarian politics. This is an important observation and resonates with the emerging wider social mobilisations against right-wing authoritarianism across India over the past couple of years.

New Rural Politics? Resistance to Neoliberalism and Right-wing Authoritarianism

By highlighting different dimensions and aspects of the farmers' movement, the special issue, thus, underscores that the farmers’ movement was not only a response to the three farm laws. More broadly, the expansion of neoliberalism ravaged the ‘totality’ of the agrarian life in such a way that it created crises of livelihood, while mounting indignities on the farmers across classes. These economic and cultural brutalities pushed farmers and their unions to build an unprecedented alliance of farm and trade unions, cultural and religious institutions, and civil society organisations to resist neoliberalism and its ally authoritarian right-wing Hindutva state. This broader alliance is undoubtedly the most singular feature of the farmers’ movement.

The movement produced a surprising synthesis of the left organisations, Ambedkarites, khaps and Sikhism. Particularly, Sikhism played a crucial role in this farmers’ movement, through its institutions, such as the langar (common kitchen and collective dining), its socio-religious values and practices, like sarbat da bhala (the welfare of mankind), and its long tradition of fighting for social justice and defending the poor and vulnerable. This unprecedented alliance of disparate organisations anchored the farmers’ movement in a larger fight for democratic rights and against neoliberalism and the right-wing totalitarian Hindutva. The farmers’ movement has generated a new rural politics.

In sum, the contributions to this special issue offer new and diverse insights into India’s remarkable farmers’ movement. They provide details of their social composition, techniques of mobilisation and protest cultures, and their roots in long-term transformations in markets, ecology and agrarian political economy. These articles highlight the growing relationships between rural and urban and the ways in which agrarian and non-agrarian political economies shape each other. Together, they show the ways in which agriculture and non-agrarian are more closely linked than before and urge us to go beyond polarised lines of debate regarding agrarian politics and capitalism. Exclusionary and jobless growth has devastated the rural and agrarian and eroded democracy and secularism. Responding to these crises, the farmers’ movement reflects a change in the politics of India. The recently concluded legislative elections in Punjab and western UP have indicated the emerging new rural politics. Coming together of women, Dalits, Muslims and environmentalists in this new rural politics is a sign of hope. In a time of growing right-wing authoritarianism that is often anchored in the rural world (Scoones et al., 2018), the farmers’ movement of 2020–2021 has been about much more than agriculture and the three repealed farm bills. This time, the farmers have successfully resisted neoliberalism.