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Over the last two months, huge protests have dominated Indian politics. Thousands of farmers have created self-sustaining camps around New Delhi, and the uprising has now spread across the whole of the country. Last week, police and farmers clashed at a demonstration and one farmer died.
India’s farmers are demanding that the government drop agricultural reforms proposed by right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party. Those reforms would change long-standing price supports for crops – a way of preventing prices from falling below a certain threshold – which, according to many farmers, throws them on the mercy of megacorporations and the market. A large number of Indian farmers are severely in debt, and many have died by suicide in recent years. Suicide rates climbed further during the pandemic.
Elected in 2014, Modi has come under plenty of criticism; he leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party which has blended neoliberal reforms with anti-Muslim terror. But there has been little effective opposition to him until now.
To explore this moment of crisis and possibility, I called up Vijay Prashad, an Indian historian and journalist and the director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He’s been in New Delhi during the protests. Here’s what he had to say (responses have been edited for length and clarity).
In November, Indian workers staged a huge general strike
Prime Minister Modi promised so-called labor market reform, and he delivered by basically suspending the eight-hour day during the pandemic, which is why there was a general strike on Nov. 26. [An estimated] 250 million workers went on strike in India. It’s the largest general strike in world history.
He also promised to commercialize agriculture and handed it over to his corporate cronies – Gautam Adani and so on. They rammed through three bills in Parliament, which basically suspend price supports for agriculture. The context here is that the IMF and others have been calling for years for India to stop subsidizing agriculture. Meanwhile, as you well know in the United States, in the last 20 years, almost $2 trillion has been spent in support of agriculture, often of big capitalist agriculture. What's okay for the goose of the West is not okay for the gander of the East.
The government’s pro-business moves brought powerful opposition to its doorstep
With these reforms, Modi brought together agricultural workers, small farmers, medium farmers, and even in some cases, big farmers, but not the corporate farmers. Agriculture has struggled and without price support, there's no way people can make a living. So this became an existential attack on the majority of people in rural India.
During that general strike in November, the farmers started the revolt and gathered at various important checkpoints to enter Delhi. They were stopped there by the police.
The government has tried to break this rebellion by dividing the farmers on class lines, on regional lines and religious lines and calling them terrorists. It’s not working.
In fact, in Western Uttar Pradesh, which is a major state the BJP party rules, the farmers had not been involved in this agitation. But because of the clash, because of the terrible things that the Modi government was saying about the farmers, large numbers of farmers from Western India joined the protest.
Meanwhile, over this two-month period, over 140 of these protesters have died. Not from police violence, but [from] ... exposure because they're sitting outside in the Delhi winter. But still, they're not moving anywhere.
“It’s a different grammar of resistance”
In the U.S. and Europe a lot of activism is commodified [through NGOs and salaried organizing]. People come out for a demonstration, then go home. What I saw, at least, at Occupy camps in the U.S. was you had people relying on others, bringing donuts and this and that. The urban space doesn't allow [cooking] anymore. You'll get arrested. You don't have a permit.
There have been many attempts to commodify struggle in India, but they can't quite succeed because there's an enormous rural population.
And so in the case of these farmers, they've set up a whole village there, and the police can't come in because the whole area is defended. They battle the police at the periphery and they've taken charge of that land. It's a different grammar of resistance. It's a resistance rooted in community solidarity.
The protests are bigger than the farmers
Something like this cannot survive unless the community is behind it. This is a community rebellion. So what we see is yes, there are trade unions there and the farmers union. They are all there. They are providing structural support and so on. Then there are farmer groups. Sports teams have come. There are religious organizations.
Because so many of the farmers who came from Punjab are Sikh, the gurdwaras have come and there is a tradition called langar, which is you just feed anybody who wants to eat. So they've made langars at these camps.
And so there is a kind of atmosphere of community spirit there. A real uprising cannot last without this.
“The violence enters your nervous system”
Frantz Fanon made a really good point: The capitalist system has imposed violence on people's lives. It's a violence of poverty. It's a violence of denigration by hierarchical violence caused by stress, or it's a violence of patriarchy. You know, everyday violence. It may not come with somebody hitting you, but it’s neurological, you know, it enters your nervous system. And you flinch from reality because it constantly assaults you.
The police impose violence. I mean, the farmers came to march peacefully into the city. They encountered a barricade. Now, what are you supposed to do when you encounter a barricade? Just turn around and go home? No, you will break the barricade. You see, the police will place the barricade and then take one step back. And if the farmers pushed the barricade, then they say the farmers started the violence. You've structured the world violently.
If you put a roadblock in front of my peaceful march, you have started the violence, not me.
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