Shikha Mukerjee | Pivot or perish: India’s heartland sends signal

Twenty-first century India’s farmers have written themselves into the history of the country and into the international chronicles of historic protests. The farmers’ protest has called out the Modi government as essentially autocratic, and the BJP as unrepresentative of the farming poor, who are the predominant sector of India’s population and economy. Pivoting will require trashing the three laws -- Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce Act, the Farmers Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, and the Essential Commodities Amendment Act -- legislating the minimum support price mechanism into law for government and private buyers in agricultural markets, and rewriting the law on commercial rates for power consumed by farmers, cancelling fines for stubble burning. The remarkably controlled and peaceful farmers, especially from Punjab, as the Modi government ought to understand, have quit their fields at the beginning of the rabi crop season. Having harvested the kharif crop, which for the 86 per cent marginal and small farmers of India, is the crop they stock to feed their families and sell only the tiny surplus that is left over, missing the rabi season, which is irrigation and therefore power intensive, means that they are impoverishing themselves in order to change the rules enacted by the Narendra Modi government.