India farmers set protest and global solidarity actions Jan. 26
https://themilitant.com/2021/01/23/india-farmers-set-protest-and-global-solidarity-actions-jan-26/
BY ROY LANDERSEN
Vol. 85/No. 4
February 1, 2021
Indian farmers in tractorcade outside New Delhi Jan. 7 protest new laws
that would end government-guaranteed price supports. Inset, support
action in Yuba City, California, Jan. 16.
ABOVE, THE INDIAN EXPRESS/ABHINAV SAHA; INSET, MILITANT/CAROLE LESNICK
Indian farmers in tractorcade outside New Delhi Jan. 7 protest new laws
that would end government-guaranteed price supports. Inset, support
action in Yuba City, California, Jan. 16.
Hundreds of thousands of working farmers are maintaining their protests
around the Indian capital, New Delhi, determined to roll back laws aimed
at crushing their livelihoods. The measures passed by Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s government would end state-guaranteed minimum prices for
staple crops. They come after farmers’ incomes have declined for years,
forcing many into deepening debt.
Up to 300,000 farmers are organized at the protest sites by nearly 400
farm organizations. This is the largest protest against the Indian
government in decades and the biggest opposition Modi has faced since
coming into office.
The protests started from the northern states of Punjab, where many are
Sikhs, and neighboring Haryana, before spreading elsewhere.
Farmers’ unions are planning a massive tractor protest in the capital on
India’s Republic Day Jan. 26 and are carrying out a recruitment drive in
villages across Punjab signing up thousands.
The Modi government complains that farmers’ plans will spoil the
traditional celebrations the government organizes on that day. It claims
the farmers are “maligning the nation globally.”
Actions in solidarity with the farmers’ struggle continue to grow around
the world. Over 500 rallied at the Sikh temple in Yuba City, California,
Jan. 16.
A Global Day of Action in solidarity with the Indian farmers will take
place Jan. 26, coinciding with the New Delhi tractorcade. In New York, a
march will leave Times Square at 10 a.m. for the United Nations building.
“I urge workers and farmers in the U.S. to join these support actions,”
Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New Jersey
governor, told the Militant. “Working people all over the world have
common interests.”
Camps sustained by growing support
A group of 25 men led by Faaroqi Mubeen from the Muslim Federation of
Punjab volunteered for days to serve in the community kitchen at one of
the New Delhi camps. “It is our responsibility to take care of the
farmers,” he said. It is “the farmers who feed everyone.”
Irfan Jafri, a wheat, rice and soybean farmer who heads a local
agricultural organization in Madhya Pradesh, brought 200 farmers from
his village, spending two weeks in a camp. “During that time locals
opened up their homes to us, Sikh groups gave us food, and we had a
chance to meet farmers from all over India,” he told the press.
“The central government is wondering who is funding the protests,”
70-year-old Sadhu Ram from a village near Kaithal, Haryana, told the
Times of India. “If they want to know, our help is coming from the
ordinary villagers, who are contributing wheat, rice and sugar because
they know the farm laws will affect livelihoods.”
Trailers of food and firewood keep arriving from collection drives held
in nearby states. The camps provide kitchens, accommodation, and medical
and laundry facilities.
Villagers are excited to take turns at the camp sit-ins. But “people
need to be rotated to enable work like crop watering and cattle care to
continue back home,” Pawan Maan told the same paper. “The villages will
keep sending more people and the government will be forced to listen to us.”
Farmers are “fearlessly taking on the powerful government,” Surmeet
Mavi, an editor of the Trolley Times, a daily newsletter published from
the protest site, told the BBC.
Protests against the new laws by farmers from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya
Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Uttarakhand to Tamil Nadu in the south
have intensified in recent weeks. A thousand farmers made the three-day
road trip north to Delhi from Kerala.
Talks between farmers and the government remain deadlocked despite the
Supreme Court suspending Modi’s laws and offering to “mediate.”
Many family farmers in India faced increasing debts, even before the new
laws take effect. In Punjab, the press reports three to four farmer
suicides every day. Thousands of widows and other family members
carrying portraits of farmers who took their own lives have joined the
demonstrations.
As land is passed down from generation to generation, farms have become
more subdivided. In the past 50 years the number of farms in India has
doubled to about 146 million and the average size has halved to about 2½
acres.
In the eastern state of Bihar, minimum price supports were removed 15
years ago. Last year, while Punjabi farmers sold their rice at the
state-mandated price of $25 per 100 kilograms (220 pounds), farmers in
Bihar were forced to sell that for $16 on the open market.
The Indian rulers have their eyes on extending market prices across the
country and reaping superprofits as state-backed price supports are
removed. Small farmers can then be pushed out by larger scale capitalist
production.
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George H. Smith “It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain,
emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how
comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on
the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands,
on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his
reason, is contradicting himself. There can be no knowledge of what is
good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there
is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through
reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is
destructive to human life.” ― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
