Tears, water, and a protest rekindled
chaos.
This time, apart from old-timers who had been here before, farmers who initially sat out of the protest landed up as well. Instead of winding up, by Friday morning the protest spot had crowds much larger than at any time over the past two months. Farmers there said the crowd would swell even more by Saturday morning.
As they streamed in, most of the farmers did not head to tents or langars (community kitchens) ; instead, they went straight to the stage to hear their leader speak. And Tikait -- son of the legendary late farmer leader Mahendra Singh Tikait who headed the Bharatiya Kisan Union -- addressed them again and again, until his voice cracked and broke.
Each time he could speak no more, the crowd called out to him. “Tikait tum aage badho, hum tumhaare saath hain (Tikait, you move ahead. We are right behind you).”
Farmers flocked to click pictures with him, journalists queued up to interview him, and protesters all around discussed his video message from the previous evening.
For the first time since the protests began in November, attention , restricted largely to the two larger protests sites, Singhu and Tikri, inhabited largely by farmers from Punjab and Haryana, moved to Ghazipur.
From the stage, Tikait hit out at the local administration for cutting the water and power supply to the protest site.
“If the government (local administration) doesn’t send water tankers within two hours, we’ll dig our own bore wells here and draw water. The ground and its water belongs to everyone,” he told a gathering that was growing through the day.
But neither Tikait, nor the other farmers here, were short of water on Friday.
While some locals arranged for water tankers, as did the Delhi government -- it was visuals of people bringing drinking water directly from their villages to Tikait that stood out.
A man from Meerut brought an old plastic bottle, only half filled with water; a young boy from Muzaffarnagar, sitting on his father’s shoulders, carried a large tumbler in his hands; someone from Amroha brought water straight from the Ganga; and lots of the returnees carried water to the stage in large plastic jugs. Tikait’s associates would pour some of the water in a small steel container as a symbol of respect.
A woman who sang on the main stage offered to sell a recently constructed house if the movement needed funding; some residents of Noida and leaders from the Ghazipur Mandi said from the stage that, despite the inconvenience, they did not mind farmers occupying the road.
Support also arrived in the form of political leaders. Delhi’s deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia extended unconditional support, and said that he was sent by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to ensure that all arrangements were in place.
“Kejriwal ji sent me to ensure you don’t face any problems,” Sisodia told the gathering.
“It is in such tough times that one aandolankari (protester) come to help other aandolankari (protester),” Tikait responded.
Other politicians to visit were Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Jayant Chaudhary, UP Congress Committee chief Ajay Kumar Lallu, Haryana Congress leader Deepender Singh Hooda, Swaraj India founder Yogendra Yadav, and Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad.
As more people poured in -some tractors made multiple rounds to nearby villages to ferry people; others took public buses -- the Ghazipur site was clearly not prepared for the surge. Tents brought down by the departing farmers on Thursday afternoon were hurriedly re-erected; new ones came up as well. At the langars, the lunch was mostly limited to rice and dal, and the snacks to tea and rusk.
“Now we won’t make the mistake of leaving in large numbers until our demands are met. Tikait’s cries made us realise that taking one step back would mean government taking many steps forward to remove us,” said Harminder Singh, a farmer who returned from Bareilly.
Tikait assured the farmers that there was no going back a second time.
On Thursday, he offered to surrender to the police before saying he would not leave -- for the sake of the agitation to repeal three contentious farm laws, and for the sake of his “Sikh brothers”, who, he said, were being branded as traitors over the Republic Day violence, which he said was part of the “conspiracy” to malign the movement.
“The government conspired to insult us. But now I’ll ensure the farm laws are repealed and you return homes safely and with pride,” he told the gathering.
By repeatedly waving a large national flag from the stage, he did his bit to undo the damage caused to the movement by the violence and vandalism on Republic Day.
The UP Police were on the sidelines throughout Friday.
A Delhi Police officer, who did not want to be named, said the barricades were made more secure to negate any chance of people from either side mingling with each other. “But we did not stop any media persons. They were allowed to pass, upon producing identity cards,” said the officer.
Delhi Police personnel stayed beyond the barricades, several hundred metres from the stage, where the gathered crowd raised their hands each time Tikait sought their assurance for a peaceful protest.