In the haunting words of Milan Kundera, “the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” For too long have the governing elite neglected the unremitting agrarian crisis confronting the nation. Driven to the wall, the farmers are now using the ultimate weapon of civil disobedience to thrust the misery of farmers into the consciousness of the heartless confederates of the market economy. The direct provocation for the protests is the hastily enacted farm laws which, according to the critics, do not facilitate the democratic participation of rural India in economic development but portends the subversion of its interests to accommodate the rapacity of Corporates. At the subterranean level, the protests are also about the collective trauma of the farming community that is at the lower end of the many hierarchies that define our society.

Living in a social milieu that invests reams of newsprint and aeons of TV time on food but which is ignorant or uncaring of the travails of the tens of millions of farmers and farmhands labouring to get food on our plates, we need to acquaint ourselves with some bare facts about rural India. Living in about 6,00,000 villages spread across India, farmers constitute over 60 percent of India’s population but are the invisible men and women in a country that has routinely privileged urban elitist concerns.  The small and marginal farmers, allied with millions of landless labourers constitute the overwhelming majority in rural India. According to the 2011 Census, 494.9 million landless labour and 120 million tenant farmers work in fields owned by others.

John Rawls in his acclaimed A Theory of Justice has defined justice as fairness in the distribution of life chances. In the most fundamental literal sense, life chances in the villages are considerably more precarious than in towns. The life expectancy for women is 74 years in urban and 69 years in rural areas and for men 71.20 and 66.40 years respectively. The infant mortality rate is 37 per 1000 live births in rural areas against 23 in urban areas. The adult literacy rate for females in rural areas is 50.6 percent compared to 77 percent in urban areas. Despite a higher labour participation and employment rate in rural areas compared to urban, the per capita income in rural areas is Rs 40.9 compared to Rs 98.4 in urban areas. The stark reality is that the farming community is India’s permanent underclass that provides the cheap unorganised labour that capitalist structures thrive on. The suicide epidemic among farmers is the most tragic manifestation of the protracted agrarian distress. In the last two decades, there have been more than 3,00,000 deaths by suicide of farmers in India, representing the largest wave of suicides by any one professional group anywhere in the world.

The moot question is: Do the farm laws which are a wholehearted embrace of the neo-liberal market economy address these life and death problems confronting rural India?

The answer lies in the 4 suicides and 78 deaths of farmers at the inhospitable protest sites around Delhi.  The ill-conceived laws are a brazen thumbs up to the ruling oligarchy which, having gained an economic stranglehold in urban centres, is now being offered rural India for commercial plunder. The laws also signal a clear and deliberate disengagement of the State from its hitherto proactive, life- sustaining interventions in agriculture.

Significantly, the farm laws do not represent the first invitation to the vendors of the neoliberal market economy to set up shop in the Indian countryside. Today, the multinational corporations are already in control of vital aspects of farming and farmers’ lives, having already supplanted the traditional varieties of seeds and other paraphernalia with their products and fixing everything from prices to markets. For the farmers, the farm laws are a dangerous extension of this iniquitous arrangement.

The Government claims that the laws will empower farmers to enter into prior agreements with agencies outside the APMC orbit for production, pricing and purchase of their produce. The laws also open doors for unrestricted leasing of land from small and marginal farmers and aggregating them into large farms for high-tech cultivation. The farmers, however, are convinced that the new laws are another egregious example of legislation loaded in favour of Corporates by facilitating what social scientists have called “acquisition by dispossession.”. 

The farmers believe that the laws will doubtlessly ensure windfall profits for the Corporate carpetbaggers and enhance productivity, but in the process, it will decimate employment opportunities for the landless labour due to mechanised farming, apart from leaving the farmers at the mercy of these powerful mercenaries and their boob-trap contracts. All that the new laws will achieve for the small farmer is to replace the Arhtiyas by a ruthless and impersonal group of predators driven solely by the profit motive. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know” is the overwhelming view among farmers.

On the contentious issue of MSP, the data shows that only 6 percent of farmers in India are covered by MSP and 84 percent of these farmers are located in Punjab and Haryana, which explains why the farmers of these two States are better off than farmers elsewhere, and why they are leading the charge against these laws. Importantly, data shows that it is the small and marginal farmers who have benefited most from the MSP, accounting for 70 percent of the paddy sales to Government, thereby giving the lie to the Government propaganda that only large farmers benefit from the MSP system. Clearly, the raison de’tre for these laws is to drastically abridge the role of the State and allow the private corporation buccaneers to take over agriculture. 

The governing dispensation seems clueless on how to deal with the farmers’ challenge to its hitherto untrammelled authority. The usual tropes of intimidation, persuasion, false propaganda, partisan legal intervention and mass distraction have failed to snuff out the protests. When teargas shells and water cannons failed, the protesters are being attacked as anti-national Khalistanis fanning anarchy which has only served to further steel their resolve. As intimidatory tactics, income tax raids have been carried out against Arhtiyas in Punjab. The NIA has been inducted to browbeat and subdue some leaders of the protests.  The PM attempted to propitiate the Sikh community with an unscheduled visit to Gurudwara Shri Rakab Ganj but the consummate showman’s ersatz act of religiosity cut no ice with the protesters. The Supreme Court’s ill-conceived intervention aimed at bailing out the Government has fallen flat and severely damaged its own credibility. It would appear that the Government has now decided to play the waiting game, hoping that the protests will wither away through sheer exhaustion.

In essence, the three farm laws signal the transfer of the agricultural sector to transnational corporations and the diminution of the State’s role. The ongoing farmers’ protests represent the most serious challenge to the neoliberal philosophy of unfettered capitalism that, until now, has been unquestioned. What we are witnessing on the outskirts of the nation’s capital are farmers resisting the subversion and replacement of the present system of agriculture with an extortionist neo-colonial, “free trade” regime which has much blood on its hands. It is nothing less than a second freedom struggle against “free trade” neo-colonialism.  Whether they succeed or not is anybody’s guess.

 (The writer is a retired civil servant)