Aryaman Jain, Irina Cheema - Farmers’ Movement in India: A Moment for Collective Introspection / Gallery: One Year of Kisan Andolan

By Dilip -

With the Narendra Modi government, the American empire finally has at India’s helm, a reliable handyman unperturbed by factors such as the sufferings of common people. What previous governments since 1991 had failed to deliver... Modi has delivered with decisiveness. Since 2014, the government has dutifully gone about following the diktats of a fraudulent ranking system created by the World Bank to facilitate ‘ease-of-doing-business’ at the expense of India’s ecological security, indigenous communities and farmers. Protections for the environment, for workers and farmers have been peeled away layer by layer. 

In India, the federal structure under the Constitution lays down agricultural policy as a matter to be legislated by the states. Recognising this to be the case, the Central government has been bringing ‘Model Acts’ on agriculture and ‘cajoling’ states to adopt these, knowing well that direct intervention would earn it the unpleasant ire of India’s vast farming population. However, the limited response seems to have worn thin the patience of this government’s masters. With the pandemic, India was locked down. The government sniffed an opportunity and grabbed it with both hands….

Farmers’ Movement in India: A Moment for Collective Introspection

For centuries, agriculture has been a way of life. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Indian agriculture underwent a large-scale fundamental shift. Under British colonial policy, cultivators across the subcontinent were systematically brought into the fold of centralised markets and, with “imperial preference”, they were effectively made to produce a supply of industrial raw materials and commodities for British consumption at the expense of local requirements. The new policies decimated not just the diverse variety of resilient agricultural practices, but also the artisanal manufacturing systems that were symbiotically linked with them. This extraction, facilitated through imperially centralised markets, is among the things that powered the British Industrial Revolution.

https://aryamanjain.home.blog/2021/02/13/the-farmers-movement-in-india/

Gallery: One Year of Kisan Andolan

As we mark one year since agitating farmers announced an indefinite protest across India, protesting the contentious farm laws, our team at the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES) have put together a small gallery, reflecting on the movement; the issues of 'trust' in the farmer-state relationship; role of women & the old in one of the longest civil resistance movements since India's independence, while documenting the voices of those at the protest site. 

Explained: Farm Protests Reflect India's Worst Failing: A Broken Farmer-State Contract

Issues of the 4Ps ('Price, Product, Position, Profitability and Protection')

Photo Essay: 'The Farmers Standing Their Ground During Delhi's Brutish Winter'

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P. Sainath: Farmers win on many fronts, media fails on all / रवि आजाद BKU HARYANA | Kisan Ekta Morcha


Bharat Bhushan - 'Entire political science' lesson: Peoples' power trumps people in power


Farm laws repealed - Huge victory for India's agricultural population after a year-long non-violent struggle, and hundreds of lives lost

 

Surinder S. Jodhka: Changing Modes of Agriculture in Punjab


Jairus Banaji on the Indian corporate strategy of subordinating farm households and family labor


Indian Farmers' Protest - Work in progress videos


Jatinder Kaur Tur & Mandeep Punia: Dalit activist Shiv Kumar's medical report describes illegal detention, torture and PTSD / Chitleen K Sethi: Nodeep Kaur gets bail, medical report shows bruises caused by blunt object


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