Since the end of November, hundreds of thousands of farmers have set up camp on the main access roads to the Indian capital, New Delhi, in protest against the Modi government's agricultural reform. Recently entering a more violent phase, the biggest strike of the 21st century is astonishing both in its scale and in its capacity to federate an opposition to Modi's hitherto untouchable power.
On 17 and 20 September 2020, the Indian parliament voted in favor of the Indian Agriculture Acts of 2020, a package of laws aimed at reforming agriculture nationwide. Led by the Modi government, it accelerates the deregulation of the hitherto heavily state-supported agricultural sector, which had previously guaranteed minimum prices for the sale of goods through mandis (local wholesale markets) or the national food agency.
Three laws to speed up the liberalization of Indian agriculture
The first law on the "promotion and facilitation of trade and exchange of agricultural products" allows farmers to sell outside the mandis. While the law seeks to end the local monopolies that have developed, experience in Bihar state indicates that abolishing them primarily harms farmers' incomes. Subject to this law since 2006, Bihar has mainly experienced a gradual extinction of wholesale markets and of any regulation. Caught between the need to get money quickly and the high cost of storing crops, farmers are often forced to sell quickly, leaving them at the mercy of free traders who are able to set their prices and cause significant volatility. One official report, for example, states that wheat revenues in Bihar differ by 10-15% from the minimum prices ensured by the mandis in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh.
The liberalization of the sector is seen by the government as an opportunity for farmers to choose to whom and where they want to sell. The project's second law thus envisages encouraging "price agreements" between farmers and buyers before the harvest. In addition to warning about the risk of the development of intensive speculative monocultures, the farmers opposed to the reform also point to the inevitable power of the industrial and agribusiness giants, led by the all-powerful Ambani and Adani, the main beneficiaries of these future agreements.
The third measure completes the deregulation of the market under the guise of attracting private investment towards the modernisation and development of storage infrastructures. The "Essential Commodities Amendment" law provides for the removal of oil, potatoes and onions from the list of foodstuffs that have so far been subject to public regulation - thus putting an end to the purchase of foodstuffs by state agencies that are often accused of wasting food due to a lack of infrastructure.
These three texts are backed up by provisions which add to the fear of bankruptcy, scarcity and inflation the fear of a reduction in farmers' rights, particularly in the event of recourse to the administration in the event of a dispute with a private actor. The reform also has its share of overlooked issues, such as the landless agricultural workers who can represent up to ¼ of the rural working population in some states, or the issue of the deterioration of arable land due to the massive use of pesticides which, for example, combines the pollution of 80% of the water tables with the multiplication of cancer cases in the state of Punjab.
The continuity of the green revolution
The reform is a continuation of the agricultural policy carried by the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Initiated by Nehru in response to the famines and shortages that then forced India to import massive quantities of wheat from the United States, this ambitious modernisation programme forced a shift from subsistence to intensive commercial farming. The introduction of new high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice as substitutes for a wide variety of local cereals better adapted to the diversity of arable land, the mechanisation of production and the intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides are all new developments that have enabled India to achieve self-sufficiency just as much as they have enabled large agribusiness groups to form cartels on the market. The wave of liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s has reinforced the big fish of the market by accelerating the capitalization and commodification of a sector that has been progressively forgotten by public policies that prefer the industrialization and urbanization of the country. While the mandis system had until then kept the sector at a small distance from the laws of the market, its abolition is seen as a condemnation for a large majority of the farmers' population, already largely over-indebted and exposed to poverty.
The social movement that has been on the move since November has brought the agrarian question back to the heart of the Indian public debate, generally approached through the prism of the deep crisis that the agricultural world has been going through for thirty years.
"The biggest strike of the 21st century"
Announced in June 2020, the reform did not wait to go before parliament in September to be challenged during the summer. While farmers are gradually coming together under the banner of regional unions, the anniversary of the "Quit India" movement on 9 August marks the beginning of a national alliance of more than five hundred organisations around a "united peasant mobilisation". Then the movement intensified at the beginning of November, first by the blocking of roads in 22 states orchestrated by 200 trade unions or peasant associations, and by an appeal to go to Delhi launched by farmers from Punjab and Haryana. The rallying cry "Delhi Chalo" (let's go to Delhi) was answered by farmers from all over India who joined the camps set up on the highways leading to Delhi by tractor.
Faced with the increasing number of arrivals at the camps, the government began negotiations in early December which, according to the unions, did not lead to anything satisfactory. While an appeal to the Supreme Court was lodged, the talks intensified, still in a dialogue of the deaf, during January. After two months of mobilization, billionaire Ambani takes a stand by saying that his Relience company, which has a lot to gain in the reform and which operates, among other things, in the wholesale supply of food, will not cut prices. Apart from this reasonably questionable statement, the only concession offered by the government is to delay the implementation of the laws for a year and a half, a proposal rejected by the unions.
Expanded collective action
At the same time, the Indian population is gradually discovering, especially through social networks, the pacifism and patience of the many demonstrators ready to stay "for as long as it takes the government to reverse the reform" on the edges of the motorways in the cold Delhi winter. Initiated by the Sikh community of Punjab, this mode of protest is animated by a pacifist ideal based on the trans-caste and trans-class figure of the farmer who feeds the nation, the annadata. The resilience of the three main settlements around Delhi over the past three months is largely due to the reproduction of Sikh socio-religious practices. For example, food is provided by langars, community canteens attached to Sikh places of worship, which enable all the farmers present to be fed thanks to the food brought by each one, as well as seva, a form of voluntary service in the preparation, cleaning or serving of meals.
This form of protest has the support of a large part of the population, charmed by videos on social media showing farmers serving meals to the police present at the camps. The repertory of collective action has gradually spread beyond the organisation of the camps to cover the whole of India, especially after the first call for a national strike was made on 8 December, which was followed by the constant arrival of new farmers on the roads leading to Delhi. The unity of trade unions from all over India, representing small landowners as well as day laborers, Sikhs as well as Muslims and Hindus, brings to the people an idealized vision of a plural India.
As Sumantra Bose, Professor of International Politics at the London School of Economics, reminds us, the agricultural sector is politically unifying since almost half of the population is economically linked to it, and therefore feels concerned by the issues that affect it. The success of the platforms set up by farmers to broadcast their actions to the general public bears witness to this collective enthusiasm: the dedicated youtube channel, Kisan Ekta Morcha, for example, has exceeded one million subscribers in one month.
The sacred union that the government had so far failed to break, despite numerous disinformation campaigns, has recently crumbled under the first riots with the police. On 26 January, when the Delhi police authorized the peasants to march in tractors through a defined area of the city, some of the demonstrators deviated from the signposted road to reach the Red Fort, the historic symbol of independence. Two days of clashes with the security forces followed, resulting in the death of one man and many injured.
If the godis medias (the "media sitting on the knees of power") quickly jumped on the occasion to discredit the movement alongside Modi, it
nevertheless seem that the resilience of the movement can largely overcome this violent turn of events. The unions thus decided to ease the tension by cancelling another march planned for 3 February and almost unanimously disassociated themselves from the violence.
The first fractures of the Modi
While the absence of serious opposition at the national level is an inherent factor in Modi's hegemony since 2014, the grouping of farmers behind one and the same demand constitutes for observers the first notable fracture of Modi's power. The power struggle to establish a coherent discourse in the face of the first days of protest revealed organizational flaws not only within the BJP but also more broadly in the Sangh Parivar (a grouping of associations working for Hindu nationalism). The sticking point lies in the delicate nature of the agricultural sector, which the government cannot afford to denigrate as a whole among the middle class that represents its main electorate. While Modi has always enjoyed the support of his electoral base in the implementation of other major reforms of his governance ( demonetization, repeal of article 370), it seems that here the conception of the state proposed by the agricultural reforms contradicts the attachment of his middle class to state intervention without being able to relate to the Hindu nationalism commonly put forward by Modi. As E. Sridharan shows, around 60% of this population is directly dependent on state aid, either as civil servants or as rich landowners. While it is difficult for the moment to assess the impact of the movement on Modi's power, it seems that the more repressive turn of the last few weeks, which has led to the cutting off of the internet in Delhi and numerous threats to independent media, is sounding the alarm of a power that wants to harden itself for fear of falling. After refusing to backtrack, the government is now facing demonstrators who do not seem to be retreating in the face of the violence. At the gates of Delhi, trenches are dug and concrete barricades topped with barbed wire are erected. On the Ghazipur camp, the trade unionist leader Rakesh Tikait promises that he will fight to the death to prevent the eviction of the farmers - behind him the demonstrators support him: they will remain there at least until 2 October, the day of Mahatma Gandhi's birth. In the meantime, they are planting flowers on the police's nailed boards.