The farmers began their march towards New Delhi on Tuesday this week, bringing their tractors and trucks with them.
On the outskirts of India’s capital, New Delhi, thousands of farmers are staging a protest to demand guaranteed minimum prices for their crops, debt relief and policy reforms.
More than 250 farmer unions are leading the protest, such as the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee (a platform with more than 150 unions) and the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), which has over 100 unions behind it. The protest is coordinated from Punjab and draws participants from various states like Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, crossing state boundaries.
The farmers began their march towards New Delhi on Tuesday this week, bringing their tractors and trucks with them. The Indian authorities have tried to stop the march by putting up barriers, nails and other heavy machinery on the highways leading to the capital.
At one point, the protesters tried to break through the barricades at Shambhu village on the Punjab-Haryana border, but the Haryana police fired tear gas to disperse them. Haryana, which is governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, shares a border with New Delhi.
The protest is a follow-up of the demonstrations that took place in and around New Delhi two years ago. Those demonstrations lasted for over a year and resulted in more than 600 deaths due to the authorities’ violent repression.
The protests ended after the government agreed to withdraw three agricultural reform laws that the farmers opposed. However, the farmers’ other demands were not addressed, and they have resurfaced now.
The main demand of the protest is a robust system to set minimum support prices (MSP) to shield farmers from market fluctuations. The protesters also want debt relief and limits on the privatisation of the power sector.
“I was here last time for the whole duration. We are here again because the promises made have not been fulfilled, for example, the MSP. When they formed the government, they promised to waive off the loans, but that did not happen. They promised to deliver justice in the case of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident [when protesting farmers were rammed by a car and killed in October 2021],” Sukvindra Kaur, 55, from Bathinda, Punjab told Aljazeera.
She added, “We were forced to hit the roads again over the same demands. The promises made by the present government have to be fulfilled by them, and tomorrow if there is any new government, why would they fulfil our demands? We never wanted to do it but farmers are committing suicide; they have huge loans. We are here to save them.”
Another farmer, Dharam Singh Sidhu, 60, vice president of Kissan Sangash Samiti for Ferozepur, Punjab, said that the teargassing of farmers and the firing of rubber bullets at the protesters was “undemocratic”.
He said, “Under democracy, everyone has the right to protest peacefully, but despite moving peacefully, they are barricading, shelling and opening fire at us. No farmers are engaging in any unlawful activity; we are protesting peacefully.”
The protest comes ahead of the upcoming elections in the next few months, which shows the political importance of the farmers’ plight, as they form a large voting group in the country.
