[When Modi backtracked on his agricultural legislation on Nov. 19, he hoped to disperse farmers who had rallied across northern India, occupied the highways outside Delhi and posed a potent political challenge ahead of crucial elections in states with large farming communities. Instead, he has emboldened farmers and invigorated other critics, including labor unions, who sense a rare opportunity to join hands and stymie the privatization agenda of a leader who has not often encountered setbacks through seven years in power.]
By Gerry Shih and Taniya Dutta
Here at an encampment in the dusty
outskirts of India’s capital, where tens of thousands of farmers have gathered
for a year to protest free-market agricultural laws, little has changed in the
days since Prime Minister Narendra Modi stunned the nation by announcing he would repeal one of his signature
policies and urged farmers to go home.
“Look around, nobody’s gone home,”
said Singara Singh Maan, a 60-year-old cotton grower from Punjab who serves as
a protest organizer. “If anything, more people are coming. We’re going to stay
until all our demands are met.”
With Modi on the back foot, Mann said,
farmers were raising additional demands: more guaranteed prices for crops. More
supply of free electricity. More subsidies for disposing of rice stubble
without setting them ablaze, a yearly practice that’s blamed for contributing
to the air pollution that blankets New Delhi.
For Modi, who has crafted an image
as a burly nationalist who could push through difficult policy changes and
fulfill India’s vast economic potential, that also means more headaches
When Modi backtracked on his
agricultural legislation on Nov. 19, he hoped to disperse farmers who had
rallied across northern India, occupied the highways outside Delhi and posed a
potent political challenge ahead of crucial elections in states with large
farming communities. Instead, he has emboldened farmers and invigorated other
critics, including labor unions, who sense a rare opportunity to join hands and
stymie the privatization agenda of a leader who has not often encountered
setbacks through seven years in power.
This week, as India’s Parliament
formally repealed the farm laws, national farmers’ leaders gathered in Mumbai
and declared their protests were not finished. Among their demands was the
withdrawal of laws proposed by the Modi government that would make it harder to
fire and hire workers — a demand of the country’s unions.
The labor proposals, much like
Modi’s agricultural laws, were something businesses and many economists argue
is necessary to boost India’s competitiveness and jump-start the liberalization
process that began 30 years ago, when Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao
loosened the state’s grip over the moribund socialist economy.
But it’s another sellout to India’s
billionaire capitalists, argued Amarjeet Kaur, the general secretary of the
All-India Trade Union Congress and an activist who helped the labor and farmer
movements combine forces.
Over the past year, Kaur said,
unions have organized busloads of workers to travel to the farmers’ campsites
outside Delhi, and they’ve held marches in solidarity in cities nationwide. At
a conference in August, farmers and workers vowed mutual support. They agreed
to block not only Modi’s farm laws but also his labor policies and other
initiatives such as measures to privatize India’s troubled electricity sector,
she said.
“We’ve gained a rapport and
understanding,” Kaur said. “Cementing the unity between the farmers and trade
union movement is a great gain of this historic moment.”
But while many on India’s left have
cheered, others, including longtime Modi supporters, are feeling deflated.
In recent weeks, some farmer
leaders who backed the laws as a step to fix the agricultural sector and rein
in the massive surpluses harvested every year criticized the prime minister for
choosing political expediency. In the coming months, several key states
including Uttar Pradesh are set to cast votes.
Gautam Chikermane, an economist and
vice president of the Observer Research Foundation think tank in New Delhi,
said the farmers movement, which was occasionally marred by violence, produced
“a new playbook” for blocking India’s economic progress.
The labor laws that are needed to
create jobs, he predicted glumly, will also be doomed.
“A small but entrenched group of
workers and trade unions will stall them, the opposition will ride them, the
judiciary will urge the government to hold them, and after another repeat of
violence and blockages, they too may end up being repealed,” he said. “After
the U-turn on farm laws, I am skeptical about any government’s appetite for politically
sensitive reforms.”
In the past 30 years, Indian
leaders, including those hailing from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, have
successfully advanced thorny legislative changes. But they often adopted a
slower, more deliberative process, which contrasted with Modi’s assertive style
today, said Gilles Verniers, a political scientist at Ashoka University in New
Delhi.
In 2014, Modi swept into office by
portraying himself as a leader with a knack for delivering growth and
confidently told U.S. executives on his first trip to Washington to hurry and
seize their chance to invest in India. In 2016, he abruptly eliminated much of
the paper currency in circulation in an effort to combat corruption and tax
evasion — but instead sparked widespread panic and massive unemployment among
India’s poorest.
“We have a party in power that does
not practice negotiation but uses policy announcements as theatrical events to
underline how strong and decisive the prime minister is,” Verniers said, adding
that the current government understood one thing above all: hard, electoral
arithmetic.
“This is a government where
politics always comes ahead of policy,” he said.
As the winter sun peeked through a
haze of pollution on a recent morning outside Delhi, farmers young and old
excitedly offered their theories on how they scored a victory.
Part of it was old-school retail
politics, said Pratap Singh, a 30-year-old from southern Punjab. Farmer leaders
and volunteers traveled from village to village in Punjab and parts of Uttar
Pradesh to convince the public that Modi’s laws would destroy their way of life
and help big business. Standing beside him, Singh’s friend Simiat suggested that
their movement’s efforts to curry support and funding from the international
community, and its social media campaigns, were decisive.
Mann, the protest leader who
cultivates a four-acre plot of cotton, wheat and rice in Punjab, said a key
moment for the movement took place in January, when farmers organized a tractor rally in Delhi
that led to clashes with police and farmers overrunning Delhi’s historic red
fort.
Mann said the incident was a public
relations fiasco for the farmers, who in the aftermath decided to retreat
outside of the capital and ban political leaders who might whip up the crowd
from speaking onstage at future events. In the 10 months since, there have
still been violent flare-ups between government supporters and
protesting farmers, but the movement has largely been peaceful.
In democratic India, Mann said,
battles were won and lost in the public’s hearts and minds.
“Patience and peace,” he said.
“Those were the two biggest weapons we used.”
Read more:
Deadly clash at India’s farmer protest point to growing
challenge for Modi’s BJP
India to repeal farm laws, a rare retreat by Modi in the face
of widespread protests
Clashes erupt as angry farmers enter India’s capital
