EDITORIAL: Scenes from India’s so-called Republic Day tractor parade, which led to clashes that left one protestor dead and hundreds of policemen injured, proved that farmers in that country have now taken the issue concerning controversial new agriculture laws to a point where the stalemate that has held since November is no longer sustainable. The Modi administration would now have to either use Tuesday’s protests, and the damage they did to India’s pride and image, to opt for the stick and force the new laws down farmers’ throats no matter how they feel about it. Or it could take a very embarrassing step back and scrap the new laws altogether; which would raise yet more embarrassing questions about all the chest thumping and the time wasted.
It is already pretty clear, after ten rounds of negotiations between farmer unions and government officials, that the former will settle for nothing less than a complete rollback of the new rules, which deprive farmers of the usual official support price for many important crops and amount to throwing them to the mercy of market forces and powerful corporations. So there’s no chance at all of delaying the reforms to get the protestors to calm down. And the usual tactic of starving them out – that is, ignoring them till they run out of rations and have no choice but to leave – has clearly not worked since the farmers claim that they came with supplies to last them a year at the very least. So the Indian government faces a situation where the second wave of the coronavirus is fast getting out of hand, the economy is experiencing its worst collapse since partition and the capital is under siege by farmers who refuse to accept a new policy which they say is in fact a “death sentence for agriculture.”
At the heart of the farmer-protest is the Modi administration’s penchant for going it alone. Just like the controversial demonetisation drive or even revoking the special autonomous status of Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, agriculture reforms were also undertaken without any input from the main stakeholders whatsoever. And in a country where about 65 percent of the population (of 1.3 billion people) depends on agriculture for its livelihood, even though the sector only accounts for about 15 percent of its economic output, removing the official support price for crops one fine day can immediately affect millions of households and add substantially to the poverty rate. India’s high farmer suicide rate, and the fact that this year the sector is more burdened than usual because of the large urban-rural migration that was forced less by the coronavirus and more by an inept union government, means that the government there is simply doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.
It was precisely because of such badly thought out policies that the Eurasia Group ranked India as the world’s fifth-highest “Geopolitical Risk” in 2020. And it is because such policies failed that the ruling party had to pander to the prejudices of Hindu nationalists to keep its overall approval ratings at acceptable levels. Yet if the ongoing farmer protests drive home one point, other than the fact that they will not accept the new rules of course, it is that segments hurt most by Modi’s policies have finally decided to take matters in their own hands. They have, in other words, been forced to force their will upon the government.
That is not to say that the Indian government should be made to subsidise agriculture forever. Rather, just like in Pakistan, this is a very complex matter and directly affects a very large number of families as well as the country’s bread basket, so it must be approached very carefully and in phases. Even representative governments that enjoy heavy majorities are bound, in working democracies, to be mindful of the needs of the people that are impacted by their policies. In our view, both the BJP government and farming sector are required to work towards delineating a course away from extremes—middle way—with a view to defusing this crisis.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021