The Indian Farmers' Movement 2020–21: Part I: Reclaiming Postcolonial Nationalism from the State

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On November 26, 2020, when international borders were still partially closed due to the global coronavirus pandemic, a new democratic and peaceful movement was taking shape in India, led by farmers. They wanted to register their protest against three contentious agricultural reform laws covering “Produce Trade and Commerce,” “Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services,” and an amendment in the definition of “Essential Commodities.” Thousands of men, women, and children from the farming communities of the northern states of Punjab and Haryana left their homes and fields and drove on tractors and pick-up trucks hitched with “trolleys” (trailers) to New Delhi.

At the borders of the national capital of the world’s largest democratic nation, the farmers witnessed the full display of the power of their own elected federal government. Their attempts to enter the city were blocked by the deployment of a heavy police force, and the capital was closed off at several points; excavators were sent to dig up trenches, elaborate multilayered barricading was erected with massive concrete boulders generally used to prevent the impact of bombings, iron grills normally used in India to control traffic and set up temporary checkpoints were placed, covered with barbwire to assure extra security, and if all of this was not enough, water tankers were brought in to spray cold water on the farmers, who were also beaten up with lathis (batons).

The public who tilled the lands of the world’s largest democracy were denied entrance to the capital of their own republic. The farmers decided to camp out at the borders of New Delhi, occupying parts of the highway, sleeping on the streets or their trailers brought from home, setting up tent cities, whose inhabitants grew by hundreds of thousands. After ten rounds of failed talks with government representatives, the farmers continued their protest movement through January. A staggering 248 farmers have died since the beginning of the protest, either due to hypothermia, heart attacks, or by committing suicide as a means to register protest.

A turning point in the movement came on January 26, 2021, India’s Republic Day, when the government of India stages its own parade, which showcases military strength and national cultural heritage with tableaus representing all Indian states against the backdrop of colonial-era administrative buildings. The farmers had wanted to carry out their own tractor parade on the freeway circumscribing Delhi, the route agreed upon a day before the planned event. Hundreds of thousands more farmers joined them, and the tractor parade started peacefully. But a faction of the demonstrators separated themselves and drove in huge numbers to the Red Fort, built in the sixteenth century, from whose ramparts every Indian prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru has hoisted the national flag and addressed the nation on August 15, Indian Independence Day.

The movement’s leaders called off the rally and dissociated themselves from the rowdy group. With widespread condemnation of violence, the movement was under the threat of being extinguished, when the farmer leader Rakesh Tikait wept on camera decrying the violence and pledged to bring the movement to its desired goal: a total repeal of the laws. Following this, a ten-tier barricading on the borders of Delhi went up with more trenches, iron spikes, cement blocks, iron grills, and concertina wire, and internet service has been intermittently shut down.

The farmers continued their condemnation of violence on the Red Fort by staging a daylong fast on January 30, the 73rd anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu right-wing fanatic Nathuram Godse in 1948. The movement continues to grow today through mass gatherings on New Delhi’s borders, but also in villages and small towns for farmers who cannot make it to the capital. The farmers’ leaders have given the government the ultimatum of October 2, 2021—Gandhi’s 152nd birth anniversary—to repeal the laws.

Admittedly, this is an unduly telegraphic history of a powerful movement, in which the terms of discussions and debates have changed at a rapid speed and continue to do so. In this short essay, however, I want to highlight three points. First, that the current Indian farmers’ movement, instead of being critical of the Indian nation or nationhood, is effectively deploying patriotism to critique the Indian state and its majoritarian politics. The movement harnesses the energy of the anti-colonial struggle to redefine and reclaim postcolonial nationalism from the state. Second, through its constant reminder of the significance of agriculture in a modern postcolonial nation-state—studied in detail by Akhil Gupta in his pathbreaking book Postcolonial Developments (1998)—and through an invocation of citizens’ rights, the constitution, and the judiciary, the farmers stake their claim in the history and the future of postcolonial nation-building. And third, and most importantly, by drawing strength from the Sikh religious faith while being inclusive of all religions, the movement and its supporters have created a new text of religious tolerance and empathy, a secularism that actually acknowledges and practices the strength of multireligious India rather than negating it.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to state that the growth of muscular nationalism that has defined India in the last eight years can be seen bulging on two biceps of the government: one depicting the Hindutva ideology of majoritarian religious supremacy, and the other an image of a shiny “New India.” Promoted by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Prime Minister Modi, this brand of populist, exclusionary ethnonationalism has thrived on declaring Muslims and Christians outsiders to the nation, and even weaponized citizenship through a controversial law introduced in 2019, against which there was a massive protest led by Muslim grandmothers, which ended abruptly at the beginning of the pandemic. And yet, it succeeds and appeals to the public with its promise of “Sabka saath, Sabka Vikas,” a message of inclusion and economic development and upliftment of all.

Internally, the rhetoric of border security and protection of “Mother India” from enemies such as Pakistan and China or terrorists and separatists is amplified to protect this new India. Externally, the new India involves free-market economy, access to consumer goods from all over the world, elevating living standards, increased purchase parity, and the rise of India as a global power on the world stage. While the harbinger of liberalization of Indian economy was Dr. Manmohan Singh, leading economist, in 1991 India’s finance minister in the Congress-led government, and from 2004 to 2014 India’s first Sikh prime minister, the BJP has built its image as a party that leaves behind the socialist “License Raj” in which state-run corporations ruled the nation. It’s an entirely different matter if India today ranks 164 among 193 growing nations of the world.

The composition of the current movement and the farmers’ tactics and strategies of protests have made it very difficult to critique them on either of these parameters. A very large number of employees of the Indian Armed Forces come from farming communities. The tent cities on the borders of New Delhi have prominently evoked Sikh freedom fighters such as the leftist anti-colonial revolutionary Sardar Bhagat Singh, celebrated as a martyr across all communities. The farmers reference historical movements against their oppression of the British Raj, such as the Pagadi Sambhal Jatta (Safeguard Your Turban, implying Dignity) movement from 1907, led by Sardar Ajit Singh, Bhagat Singh’s uncle. They use the word “Satyagrah” (insistence on truth), which was given traction by Mahatma Gandhi while leading a nonviolent farmers’ movement in 1917; and continuously raise the slogan of “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” (Hail the Farmer, Hail the Soldier), first raised by postcolonial India’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Sacrifices of farmers on the battlefield and their hard work on the agricultural field, indeed their key role in the Green Revolution that led to building a postcolonial India self-sufficient in food cannot be given a different spin. So while the subservient Indian mainstream media and supporters of the state have accused the farmers of being separatists, terrorists, or anti-national—a term used freely for anyone who questions or critiques the government or its policies—the farmers, in calling themselves “sons and daughters” of Mother India fighting for their rights under the national flag are chipping away at the state’s hegemonic brand of nationalism.

Second, the Indian government’s narrative of the value of the newly introduced farm laws hinges on two words: “development” and “deregulation,” underlining that the laws would guarantee a thousandfold increase in farmers’ wealth, open up the market for competition, and rid Indian farmers of their dependence on the state. Here as well, the image of the educated and aware farmers—protesting in traditional Indian and Western outfits, many of whom speak English, and driven by women participating in large numbers—has made their subsumption into this narrative rather difficult. The farmers who are protesting with families, some more affluent than others, are indeed beneficiaries of farming subsidies as are given by major capitalist governments such as the United States, Canada, and Germany. However, what they contended in the Supreme Court of India is that the laws were created and implemented hastily without the central government having performed the groundwork necessary to assure buy-in from the most important stakeholders: the local, statewide, or national farmers’ associations. In addition, they argue that farm laws in the constitution of India are a prerogative of respective state governments, so a one-size-fits-all law for a nation with multiple climate zones, soil types, and farming practices was hardly a gesture toward reform. Finally, the rhetoric of the laws heavily favored large corporate organizations poised to enter food retail in India through bulk-buying and large supermarkets. By limiting farmers’ rights to legal recourse to lower bastions of the state bureaucracy, which was created by the British and thrived in socialist India, the laws themselves haven’t completely been able to shun the burden of the “license raj.” The farmers, including those with small-to-medium holdings, want to protect their ownership rights, get fair prices for their crops, and do not want to be reduced to contract farmers for the corporate sector on their own ancestral lands, as also argued by the leading economist Kaushik Basu.

My last point about how the movement is puncturing the dominant narrative of religious nationalism vs. secular dissent can be best illustrated by a meme that a friend from India forwarded one day, which can be roughly translated as “the syllabus only contained Hindu-Muslim topics, but the exam had a question on the Sikhs.” Religious fault lines that have been created and deepened in India in the last decade are failing to prove effectively divisive when it comes to the farmers’ movement. Sikhism, a monotheistic faith and philosophy started by Guru Nanak (1469–1539), offers a way of thinking and living that dismantles hierarchies of caste and gender and forwards a spiritual path of equity through an inclusion of diversity. Shri Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy text, includes among others verses from Hindu and Muslim Sufi saints. The message of Sikhism can therefore neither be easily pitted against Hindus nor Muslims. While the majority of protestors are Hindus and Sikhs, Muslims regularly contribute service and food to the movement. The daily recitation of the Sikh scripture and hymns starting with early morning prayers is attended by people of all faiths. And given the long history of Sikh struggle for minority rights against Mughal rulers, and the sacrifices of the Sikh Regiment in many wars fought by postcolonial India against China and Pakistan, the patriotism of the Indian Sikh community can hardly be twisted or turned for political purposes.

The ongoing farmers’ movement in India has come to represent much more than the struggle of farmers for their rights to be consulted before laws are made on their behest to profit global corporations. It’s a uniquely Indian movement that thrives on its participants’ self-reliance and community-based sovereignty. Through their collective dissent against three controversial agricultural reform laws, these feeders of the nation register their opposition to the laws by staging protests against the policies introduced by big government. It’s a fight for land ownership, autonomy, and preserving a way of life and cultural identity, not merely a fight against deregulation or crony capitalism.

While no one knows whether and to what extent the movement will be successful, it has presented new challenges, and therefore many opportunities, to rethink postcolonial nationalism in the public sphere, and about the place of farming in an idea- and service-based global economy. Such rethinking will happen only if there is a restructuring of older polarizations of conservative and liberal nationalisms. As the farmers have shown, there is a need for a new vocabulary for national belonging and nationhood, in which the citizens are not recipients of but participants in national polity beyond the day of voting. Led by farmers, a community that is considered worldwide to be the spine of a nation, regardless of whether a nation’s economy is primarily agriculture or technology-based, this movement with growing global support—to be covered in the second part of this essay—has today become a symbol of the public asking for accountability from the republic.

B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and World Literature and former Director of the Title VI National Resource Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is the first essay in a three-part series.