[News] The Farmers of India Have Won - This Victory Gives Confidence for Future Struggles

Thu Nov 25 12:03:04 EST 2021

View this email in your browser 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=ae4146b4c8&e=d206d0a40d> 

*This Victory Gives Confidence for Future Struggles: The Forty-Seventh 
Newsletter (2021)*

A farmer at the protest encampment at Delhi’s Singhu Border carries the 
flag of the All India Kisan Sabha, 21 November 2021. Subin Dennis / 
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social 
Research 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=cb1d2baf4b&e=d206d0a40d>.

On 19 November 2021, a week before the first anniversary of the farmers’ 
revolt, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi surrendered. He accepted 
that the three laws on agricultural markets that had been pushed through 
the parliament in 2020 would be repealed. The farmers of India had won. 
The All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), one of the organisers of the protest 
movement, celebrated the triumph and declared 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=ef1d4725c7&e=d206d0a40d> 
that ‘this victory gives more confidence for future struggles’.

Many pressing struggles remain, including the fight for a law to 
guarantee a minimum support price that is one and a half times the cost 
of production for all crops of all farmers. The failure to address this, 
the AIKS notes, ‘aggravated the agrarian crisis and led to the suicide 
of over [400,000] farmers in the last 25 years’. A quarter of these 
deaths have taken place under Modi’s leadership over the past seven years.

A tractor contingent on GT Karnal Road breaks through barricades and 
enters Delhi, beginning a confrontation between protestors and the 
police in Delhi, 26 January 2021.

A tractor contingent on GT Karnal Road breaks through barricades and 
enters Delhi, beginning a confrontation between protestors and the 
police, 26 January 2021. Vikas Thakur / Tricontinental: Institute for 
Social Research

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have produced four 
substantial dossiers that reflect on the agrarian crisis in India: an 
explanation of the farmers’ revolt (/The Farmers’ Revolt in India/ 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=5155b5a7cb&e=d206d0a40d>, 
June 2021); an analysis of the central role of women in both 
agricultural work and struggles (/Indian Women on an Arduous Road to 
Equality/ 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c0f197226d&e=d206d0a40d>, 
October 2021); a portrait of the impact of neoliberalism on rural 
communities (/The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India: Two Reports by P. 
Sainath/ 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=a486cb60c3&e=d206d0a40d>, 
October 2019); and a study of the attempt to uberise agricultural 
workers and farmers (/Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the 
Class Struggle/ 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=64daac3072&e=d206d0a40d>, 
November 2021). Our senior fellow, P. Sainath, has been a key voice in 
amplifying the agrarian crisis and farmers’ struggles. The section below 
is an extract from his most recent editorial 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=59ebaba07a&e=d206d0a40d> 
at the People’s Archive of Rural India:

What the media can never openly admit is that the largest peaceful 
democratic protest the world has seen in years – certainly the greatest 
organised at the height of the pandemic – has won a mighty victory.

A victory that carries forward a legacy. Farmers of all kinds, men and 
women – including from Adivasi [tribal] and Dalit [oppressed caste] 
communities – played a crucial role in [India’s] struggle for freedom. 
And in the 75th year of [Indian] Independence, the farmers at Delhi’s 
gates reiterated the spirit of that great struggle.

Prime Minister Modi has announced he is backing off and repealing the 
farm laws in the upcoming winter session of Parliament starting on the 
29th of [November]. He says he is doing so after failing to persuade ‘a 
section of farmers despite best efforts’. Just a section, mind you, that 
he could not convince to accept that the three discredited farm laws 
were really good for them. Not a word on, or for, the over 600 farmers 
who have died in the course of this historic struggle. His failure, he 
makes it clear, is only in his skills of persuasion, in not getting that 
‘section of farmers’ to see the light. … What was the manner and method 
of persuasion? By denying them entry to the capital city to explain 
their grievances? By blocking them with trenches and barbed wire? By 
hitting them with water cannons? … By having crony media vilify the 
farmers every day? By running them over with vehicles – allegedly owned 
by a union minister or his son? That’s this government’s idea of 
persuasion? If those were its ‘best efforts’ we’d hate to see its worst 
ones.

The Prime Minister made at least seven visits overseas this year alone 
(like the latest one for COP26). But never once found the time to just 
drive down a few kilometres from his residence to visit tens of 
thousands of farmers at Delhi’s gates, whose agony touched so many 
people everywhere in the country. Would that not have been a genuine 
effort at persuasion?

… This is not at all the end of the agrarian crisis. It is the beginning 
of a new phase of the battle on the larger issues of that crisis. Farmer 
protests have been on for a long time now. And particularly strongly 
since 2018, when the Adivasi farmers of Maharashtra electrified the 
nation with their astonishing 182-km march on foot from Nashik to 
Mumbai. Then too, it began with their being dismissed as ‘urban 
Maoists’, as not real farmers, and the rest of the blah. Their march 
routed their vilifiers.

… The hundreds of thousands of people in that state who have 
participated in that struggle know whose victory it is. The hearts of 
the people of Punjab are with those in the protest camps who have 
endured one of Delhi’s worst winters in decades, a scorching summer, 
rains thereafter, and miserable treatment from Mr. Modi and his captive 
media.

And perhaps the most important thing the protestors have achieved is 
this: to inspire resistance in other spheres as well, to a government 
that simply throws its detractors into prison or otherwise hounds and 
harasses them. That freely arrests citizens, including journalists, 
under the [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act], and cracks down on 
independent media for ‘economic offences’. This day isn’t just a win for 
the farmers. It’s a win for the battle for civil liberties and human 
rights. A win for Indian democracy.

A farmer participates in the protests in his truck at the Singhu border 
in Delhi, 5 December 2020. Vikas Thakur / Tricontinental: Institute for 
Social Research

It is a win not only for Indian democracy but for peasants around the world.

During the past five decades, these peasants have experienced a 
combination of impoverishment, dispossession, and demoralisation on a 
global level. Two processes have accelerated their crisis: first, a 
trade and development model 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=60d32c79cb&e=d206d0a40d> 
pushed by the advanced capitalist states through the International 
Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation 
(WTO); second, the climate catastrophe 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=28a70d1170&e=d206d0a40d>. 
The IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme and the WTO’s liberalised 
trade regime have eroded 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=5d14d0416a&e=d206d0a40d> 
price supports and food subsidies in the Global South and have prevented 
governments from intervening to assist farmers and to build robust 
national food markets. Countries of the Global North, meanwhile, have 
continued to subsidise farming and dump their cheapened food in the 
markets of the Global South. This policy structure – alongside 
devastating climate events – has been fatal for agriculturalists in the 
Global South.

A farmer from Punjab protests during a tractor march on Republic Day on 
GT Karnal Bypass Road in Delhi, 26 January 2021. Vikas Thakur / 
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

During the credit crisis of 2007–08, the World Bank intervened to 
promote the entry of the private sector (largely big agriculture) into 
the ‘value chains’ from farms to stores. ‘The private sector drives the 
organisation of value chains that bring the market to smallholders and 
commercial farms’, wrote the World Bank in a key report 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=74f9164e4b&e=d206d0a40d> 
from 2008. In June of that year, the UN Food and Agriculture 
Organisation’s High-Level Conference on World Food Security opened the 
door for the World Bank to shape agricultural policy to benefit big 
agriculture. The next year, the World Bank’s /World Development Report/ 
argued 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=7ee0783a7e&e=d206d0a40d> 
for integrating agriculture in the ‘poor countries with world markets’, 
which meant delivering the peasants into an uberised 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c1ba05ccf4&e=d206d0a40d> 
relationship with big agriculture. Interestingly, the World Bank’s own 
International Agricultural Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, 
Science, and Technology disagreed 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=2d9ee16a62&e=d206d0a40d> 
in 2008, arguing that industrial agriculture degraded nature and 
impoverished peasants.

In September 2021, the UN held a Food Systems Summit 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=a36bae4302&e=d206d0a40d> 
in New York, which was designed not by farmers’ unions but by the World 
Economic Forum (WEF), a private body that represents big business rather 
than the big hearts of the agriculturalists. Acknowledging the crisis 
imposed by capitalism, the WEF now says 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=e67d083af3&e=d206d0a40d> 
that it has learned from civil action and would like to promote 
‘stakeholder capitalism’. This new kind of capitalism, which looks like 
the old capitalism, is about promoting corporations as ‘trustees of 
society’; it entrusts corporations with our well-being rather than the 
workers who produce the value in our society.

The farmers’ revolt in India fought against Modi’s three laws, which 
will now be repealed. But it continues to struggle against the transfer 
of policy making from democratic, multilateral, and national projects to 
corporations in the name of ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘trustees 
of society’. The repeal of Modi’s laws is one victory. It has lifted the 
confidence of the people. But there are other battles ahead.

A farmer who joined in the initial protest reads work by the 
revolutionary Punjabi poet, Pash, in his trolly at the Singhu border in 
Delhi, 10 December 2021. Vikas Thakur / Tricontinental: Institute for 
Social Research

At the protest sites, farmers set up entire villages, including 
community kitchens and libraries. Reading and musical performance were 
regular activities. Revolutionary Punjabi poetry from figures such as 
Pash (1950–1988) and Sant Ram Udasi (1939–1986) lifted their spirits. 
Navsharan Singh and Vikas Rawal offered us these stanzas from Sant Ram 
Udasi to close out this newsletter:

You must shine your light
in the courtyards of workers
who wither when there is a drought,
and drown when there is a flood,
ones who face devastation in every disaster,
and who find liberation only in death.

You must show what goes on
in the courtyards of the workers
for whom the bread is scarce,
who live in darkness,
who are robbed of
their self-respect,
and who lose, with their crops,
all their desires.

Why do you burn to shine your light only on yourself?
Why do you stay away from the workers?
These deprivations and oppression will not last forever.
O sun, you must shine your light on
the courtyards of the workers.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

Facebook 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=2600553760&e=d206d0a40d> 

Twitter 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=23bd95e52c&e=d206d0a40d> 

Instagram 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=cd1a371b1b&e=d206d0a40d> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20211125/9272cb8f/attachment.htm>