Stop treating farmers as enemies of the state

The second farmers’ movement, demanding legislation guaranteeing a higher minimum support price (MSP) for a wider range of agricultural produce, started on February 13, to be met once again with a brutal response from three Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led governments — at the Centre, in Haryana, and in Uttar Pradesh.

This treatment of the largest single section of the people — over 45 per cent subsist on farming — raises big questions yet again about the legitimacy of a regime that’s been snowballing in the direction of a police state.

The movement, to recap, was mainly against the implementation of three ‘farm laws’, which would have given corporations control over markets and made agricultural producers, and consumers, fatally dependent on them. The agitators had some additional demands —  the main one being a law guaranteeing MSP.

After responding to the agitation with ferocious force and allegations painting the farmers anti-nationals, Khalistanis, etc., the regime repealed the laws in November 2021, bowing to electoral compulsion — elections were approaching in Uttar Pradesh. It had promised at the time to form a committee to go into the issue, but nothing has transpired in over two years.

Recognising, perhaps, that the only way to get this regime to respond to legitimate demands is to hit it where it hurts, two farm bodies relaunched the movement, with general elections impending, only to be met by the same brutal response. A 21-year-old farmer has now died in police action at the Punjab-Haryana border, even as representatives of the regime led by Union agriculture minister Arjun Munda hold talks with the farmers.

The talks are not likely to result in a conclusion favourable to the farmers as long as the regime sticks to its position that expanding the ambit of MSP and increasing the floor price by applying the Swaminathan formula is not economically feasible. Let’s note that on winning power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to raise farmers’ remunerations in terms that practically endorsed the Swaminathan formula. A decade on, it’s tear gas shelling and war-scale barricades.

Let’s unpack the category ‘farmer’. There are many kinds of ‘farmers’ or peasants as they are referred to in the academic literature. The farm laws and MSP affect most the category of ‘rich peasants’, who have the most substantial marketable surpluses — and they are concentrated mostly in the ‘Green Revolution areas’ of Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh. That is why the movements have originated in this region.

But middle peasants and small peasants also must sell some of their produce, and big peasants are also scattered in pockets in southern, western, and eastern India. This is why the movement resonated across India over two years ago, and is doing so again.

It is well known that agriculture has become steadily unremunerative for various categories of farmers with varying sizes of marketable surpluses due to many reasons: the rise in input costs and the vagaries of the market — or prices — being most important. The government claims it cannot roll out an expanded MSP scheme. 

A Credit Rating Information Services of India Limited (CRISIL) report points out that the government would require around Rs 6 lakh-crore in the current (rabi) marketing season if it procured only crops trading in mandis below the MSP, but the real cost to the exchequer, which is the difference between the mandi price and the MSP, would be Rs 21,000 crore for FY2023-2024. It would help crop diversification as well.

As Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has pointed out, this is just 0.4 per cent of the Budget and pales beside the Rs 14 lakh-crore of bank loans written off and Rs 1.8 lakh-crore in tax reliefs given to corporations.

Whether or not the government can afford to pay a higher MSP, it is insupportable to treat farmers who provide the country its food security as if they were an enemy fighting a war. This regime works only in the rarefied air of symbolism.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’)

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