Farmers need support, not sympathy: Pilot
Congress leader Sachin Pilot on Friday said in Jaipur’s Chaksu municipality that the farmers protesting against three contentious laws that aim to liberalise the agrarian economy do not need sympathy, but support. He added that the entire nation was standing against the legislation.
Pilot, who was addressing a kisan mahapanchayat in Kotkhawada, hailed the farmers who have been camped at several entry points to the national capital for nearly three months seeking a repeal of the laws.
“A big crisis has come. Farmers, and all, have to understand that the three farm laws by the government of India are not just anti-farmer but ar also against the middle-class, youth, and all true patriots,” Pilot said.
Pilot said that in a democracy, the public is the biggest power, and this mahapanchayat was a warning to the Centre that the youth and farmers were standing united.
Themahapanchayat, or a traditional gathering of several villages, was attended by nearly ten thousand, and over a dozen state legislators. A resolution was passed that the Centre must repeal the laws, create a new law for purchases on minimum support prices, and reduce the prices of petrol, diesel, and gas.
The price of petrol on Wednesday hit a record ₹100 for a litre in Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar. “Farmers don’t need sympathy, they need support. They aren’t begging but asking for their rights. The government of India assured of doubling income -- but has it happened? Such laws have been made that our children will run from post to pillar. They are misleading but the claim of doing things in the interest of the farmer – there is no one to listen to farmers in central government,” Pilot said.
BJP’s Rajasthan unit spokesperson Mukesh Pareek suggested that Pilot and other leaders were misleading the public.
He said that the farm laws were in the interest of the farmers, and that apart from those in two states (a majority of the protesters come from Punjab and Haryana), most farmers were in favour of the laws. “The Congress leaders should stop misguiding the farmers,” he said.
Maharastra, India’s richest state by GDP, has its eyes set on becoming the country’s first trillion dollar economy by 2025. At the same time, Marathwada – a historically backward part of the state, adjoining the distressed Vidarbha region and home to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of the Ajanta and Ellora caves – has seen a surge in farmer suicides.
At the heart of the crisis is a cyclical drought that has persisted for almost a decade. Relief packages and loan waivers have not reversed the trend. The story of dystopia grows more tragic every year as thousands of farmer families flee to the cities, while those who stay back are plagued by bad credit and crop loss.
Landscapes of Loss tells the story of Marathwada through the accounts of its people: marginal farmers, dalits, landless labourers, farm widows and children. It lays bare the complex factors that have brought the region to this pass – a story representative, in many ways, of the agrarian unrest in large parts of rural India. Landscapes of Loss
Kavitha Iyer
230pp, ~599 HarperCollins