Are farmers fighting the polls with their backs to the wall?

With other states producing wheat and paddy, farmers in Haryana and Punjab are losing their bargaining power, which is also affecting their political clout.

As one drives through Haryana and Punjab, what stands out is the landscape. Acres and acres of land scorched black, the burnt residue of last year’s paddy crop, stretch out.

But the land unites the people in more ways than one. It is the tiller of this land that moulds the politics of these two states, but their clout (electoral and economic) is waning. If farmers are blocking the highways trying to make themselves heard, they know they must do it together. The battle of India’s annadata is shaping the electoral outcome of the ongoing Lok Sabha elections in Punjab and Haryana, and echoing in neighbouring Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh.

In Punjab, it’s a four-cornered contest where polling is on June 1 for 13 Lok Sabha seats. The state is bucking the national trend of forming alliances. Instead, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) took the moral high ground while breaking its 20-year-plus alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demanding a legal guarantee on minimum support price (MSP) for the farmers. The SAD hopes its pro-farmer stance will help it gain credibility in the long run, and while it is likely to lose these polls, it hopes to do so with its dignity intact.

The Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) (Which runs the government in Punjab) face each other in the state. The Congress refused to share AAP’s anti-incumbency and realised an alliance here would be to the advantage of the BJP and the SAD. In Delhi, the AAP-Congress alliance is facing the BJP.

AAP, which swept the Punjab polls just two years ago, is already looking at disappointed faces. Freebies work their magic, but in Punjab where the voters are used to the pampering, they have limited returns. Already the fiscal burden is getting heavier in a state with a 46.8 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio. “Punjab produces Rs 33,000 crore of electricity of which Rs 22,000 is given away for free. Each government gives the afeem [opium] of freebies and the voter just keeps asking for more. Everyone is asking for MSP, no one is agitating for jobs,” a former chief principal secretary told this author.

The BJP hoped to draw a wedge between the Hindus and the Sikhs like it did in neighbouring Haryana, but it hasn’t so far worked in Punjab. In Punjab, the Jat Sikh is about 25 per cent of the population, and in Haryana the Jats account for 27 per cent of the population with farming as their major occupation. In Haryana, the Congress’ ‘Chattis Biradari’ politics of taking various segments of the population together changed with Bhupinder Singh Hooda flexing the Jat muscle in 2005 — a move that gradually isolated the non-Jats.

The BJP gleaned its chance in 2014, and a non-Jat helmed the state in Manohar Lal Khattar. The BJP’s message was clear. It could form a government with the support of the Hindus. If there was anti-incumbency against Khattar, a non-Jat could be replaced with another non-Jat chief minister, Nayab Singh Saini. The buzz for a long time in the BJP was that a Jat versus non-Jat division is the best thing that could have happened to the BJP in Haryana. Now the party isn’t so sure.

So far the experiment has worked, but indications on the ground are the Jats are consolidating options like never before. The Jats have had their chief minister from 1996 to 2014. Now they want their ‘choudharat’ and their clout back. The 2020 farmers’ protest and the agitation at the Shambhu border is a culmination not just of grievance against crop guarantee being taken away.

But the Jat Sikhs clout is diminishing politically, as well as economically, says Pramod Kumar of the Institute of Development and Communication, Chandigarh. “If in 1997 they were 42 per cent of the Punjab Cabinet, they were 18 per cent in 2022.”

With states such as Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh showing the way for paddy and wheat respectively, Punjab and Haryana can’t claim to be India’s sole grain bowl. The farmer there is slowly watching a seller’s market moving to a buyers’ market. So, if the government is digging its heels over the MSP issue, it is not without reason. In the face of an agitation, the government doesn’t need to blink first.

(Meetu Jain is a senior journalist. X: @meetujain.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.