BJP’s overconfidence dented by farmers’ movement

Be it Hindu farmers, Sikh farmers, Muslim farmers, Dalit and upper caste farmers, large commercial crop producers  and the cultivator with less than a one acre plot, the tenant cultivator and agricultural labourer, the movement constructed a new identity of the Indian “kisan” as a democratic, federal, secular identity.

By Shikha Mukherjee

Debate is intrinsic to the idea of democracy. Challenging the opposition on the necessity of debate, by questioning the right to debate by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha on the day the winter session of Parliament begins and the three farm laws are repealed by both Houses is as much a reflection of its authoritarian-patriarchal mind set as it is a flagrant violation of democratic norms.

Union parliamentary affairs minister, Pralhad Joshi questioned the intentions of the opposition over the debate demand. The right to debate and the issues on which the opposition and indeed the nation chooses to debate is not open to being interrogated on the grounds of intention. This is in blatant contradiction of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assurance that the issues would be debated in Parliament.

The discussion that the BJP overruled, by using its numerical majority in the Lok Sabha and steamrolling the repeal through Rajya Sabha reflects that the “government is terrified,” and “does not have the guts,” as Rahul Gandhi said, to face the opposition on the floor of the House. This is another way of saying that BJP’s majority has become insufficient to handle the crisis, that Jurgen Habermas identified as a recurrent or rather, “endemic” event in modern states, “which arise from the fact that the state cannot simultaneously meet the demands for rational problem solving, democracy and cultural identity.”

Questioning the intentions of the opposition will not end the crisis for the BJP vis-à-vis the farmers movement. The movement will not retreat on the demand for a legislated guarantee of Minimum Support Price for 23 crops that is applicable across the country. In fact, the demand for MSP is being raised from the unlikeliest of quarters like the tea producing companies that are in a state of endemic crisis because the market invariably buys the tea at prices that are lower than the cost of production, which means that the tea companies incur losses routinely by growing and processing the leaf.

The farmers’ movement is about guaranteeing financial viability of cultivators, of all sizes, castes and creeds. The demand for a legally guaranteed MSP for a current list of 23 crops across India, which entails extending the Mandi system, now applicable in Punjab, Haryana and parts of Uttar Pradesh, to all states is the solution that farmer organisations have been seeking from Congress, coalition and BJP governments for the past 20 years. As Hannan Mollah, the general secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha, explained that if UP rice farmers were to receive Rs 3300 per quintal through an MSP mechanism, they could cover the investment cost of the crop, pay off some of debts and keep aside enough to pay for the cost of replanting in the next season, without having to take a loan.

An assurance of a financially secure future and basic livelihood represented by the farmers’ movement is a basic demand and entirely legitimate, much like minimum wages. The demands are in fact solutions, like guaranteed MSP. And implementing the demands would, the farmers’ movement argues, end the scourge of farmer suicides, an estimated one lakh in the past seven years of the over 4 lakhs who have died in the past 15 years.

It is necessary to note that the farmers movement is not an anti-reform, anti-capitalist ideological confrontation. On the contrary, the farm sector is looking for a solution that allows it to be profitable/viable in the market. To argue that such interventions by the government would create a permanent burden on the exchequer is untenable. All the wealthiest countries, including the United States, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, have found creative solutions to supporting the much smaller numbers of farmers in their economies.

To argue that interventions to retire the estimated Rs 13 lakh crore debt and make the farm sector viable in India would not be effective and would bankrupt the economy is to advocate a political philosophy that is not just conservative but hopelessly obsolete. It is the responsibility of the State to ensure food security as a part of national security. Failing to do so is a serious misinterpretation of what constitutes national security.

If the Modi regime had bothered to listen to some of its party leaders, including the irrepressible Jat leader from Western Uttar Pradesh and feisty former governor of erstwhile Jammu and Kash