RURAL DISTRESS IN MP
regime change if the current government doesn’t accept its demand.
One of its leaders, Kedar Shankar Sirohi, is a social-media savvy activist who has a Bachelor’s degree in agriculture and a Master’s in agricultural economics. Sirohi says he founded his organisation in 2011 to create an independent, apolitical farmers’ union as some of the bigger farmer groups were directly affiliated to either the Congress or the BJP.
“We are non-party but we are not nonpolitical,” Sirohi, a farmer who grows wheat and soyabean, in his Harda farm says. Asked to explain his intriguing comment, Sirohi says farmers’ issues need political solutions. In this new-age farmer mobilisation, social media is a handy tool.
When the Mandsaur agitation happened, Sirohi says, the chief minister (Shivraj Singh Chouhan) pointed to “jeans-clad protesters to say they weren’t real farmers”. “He doesn’t know how young farmers look. Today, farmers have one hand on their steering wheel and the other on the mobile (phone)”.
Catchy sloganeering on Facebook and Whatsapp is drafting support. “Those who live by the sword die by it. This is a government of slogans and social media, and we will discredit it through social media and slogans,” Sirohi says.
The Aam Kisan Union has attacked the Bhavantar price-deficit payment scheme as “byapariyon ka poshan, kisano ka soshan” or “nourishment for traders, exploitation of farmers”. “Our slogan is catchier,” laughs Bhopal-based Irfan Jafri, a farm leader who runs the Kisan Jagriti Sangathan. “We are calling the scheme ‘election ka collection.”
Sirohi says joblessness among educated children of farmers has become a major social anxiety. It’s delaying marriages, he says. “I am a farmer, but our children don’t want to do farming. This election could be worse than Gujarat for the BJP,” says Anand Bajaj, a well-off farmer from Devas.
Sirohi and his colleagues have started an online campaign, asking farmers to stop making loan repayments. They are calling it a “non-cooperation movement”. Every farmer who enrols has to display a slogan on his house walls, pledging his support. Jafri has posted a picture on Whatsapp of 30-year-old Chain Singh Lodhi from Raisen district’s Jamunia village standing next to his house with a pledge written in bold, blue paint that has been widely forwarded.
The farmers seem confident about their political strategy. Sirohi says concentrating on electoral seats where the BJP is entrenched would be a waste of time. “Of the 230 seats, the BJP wins by a small margin is about 60-70 seats. That’s where we will put up our fight.”