Chaduni, Tikait: Two firebrands of the stir
NEW DELHI: The protests that led Prime Minister Narendra Modi to announce his government will scrap three farm laws would not have been possible without the groundswell of support whipped up by two of the agitation’s unlikely leaders, Gurnam Singh Chaduni and Rakesh Tikait. Chaduni took the agitation outside the confines of Punjab to his home state Haryana, which paved the way for farmers to reach Delhi’s borders. Tikait planted the movement firmly in the political bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh.
A firebrand, Chaduni organised one of the first meetings on September 10, 2020, in Haryana’s Pipli village to protest the three laws. The next milestone came when the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), a coalition of over 200 farmer unions, called for a march toward Delhi on November 26-27.
The laws aimed to ease restrictions on trade in farm produce by setting up free markets, allowed food traders to stockpile large stocks of food for future sales and laid down a national framework for contract farming based on written agreement. Farmers maintained these changes will leave them at the mercy of big corporations, who would be in a position to dictate low prices.
In Punjab, the movement was led by leaders such as BS Rajewal and Satvir Singh, but it was Chaduni who built a movement in Haryana, said Kakkaji, a farm leader. convenor of the AIKSCC, 78-yearold Balbir Singh Rajewal, a veteran farmer leader from Punjab, and Chaduni, who was the face of the farmers’ agitation in Haryana.
“It was Chaduni who went from village to village, day and night, and explained the need to make the agitation bigger and bigger. This was after it was clear that thousands of farmers would move to Delhi,” said Sandeep Topra, an aide to Chaduni.
Chaduni contested the 2019 Assembly election from Ladwa constituency in Haryana’s Kurukshetra region, campaigning on a mix of farmers’ issues and matters of local development, but lost. His wife, Balwinder Kaur, also fought and lost the 2014 Lok Sabha polls as an Aam Aadmi Party candidate.
Chaduni’s native village, Charuni Jattan, lies in the Shahbad area of Kurukshetra district. He derives his surname from his native village, a customary practice. Chaduni is an iconoclast. In the middle of the march to Delhi on November 25, 2020, farm unions decided unanimously to sit peacefully on the Punjab-Haryana border due to resistance from the government and a crackdown by Haryana police. Chaduni gave a war cry, defied the sit-in plan, and instead pulled apart barricades in Ambala to reach Delhi with thousands of followers.
“These laws will break the backbone of farmers. They will lead to distress sale of farm produce and make us bow to big corporations,” Chaduni told HT at the time.
After thousands of farmers reached the borders of Delhi on November 27 last year, the Centre asked the protestors to move to Burari, a designated site on Delhi’s outskirts before talks on the demands could begin.
Chaduni opposed it, likening Burari to an open jail. “It is a victory of all farmers and it took the ultimate sacrifices of more than 600 farmers who lost their lives in this agitation,” Chaduni said.
Rakesh Tikait
When, after months of peaceful protests, hundreds of farmers marched to the Red Fort and clashed with police in the Capital on January 26 in a tractor rally that went completely out of hand, farm unions feared the violent episode could spell the end of their movement. Instead, Tikait, a leader of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, an influential farmers’ organisation, entrenched the protests firmly in his home turf, the politically crucial sugarcane belt of western Uttar Pradesh. Tikait began holding a series of “kisan mahapanchayats” or rural conclaves, which are respected village institutions of the landed Jat community where social decisions taken by elders are binding.
Over 100,000 farmers have camped in five makeshift camps at key border points of Delhi. A turning point came on the night of January 28, when news began to spread that authorities in Uttar Pradesh would descend on Ghazipur, a protest camp on Delhi’s border, to vacate it. The site was under the supervision of Tikait, an influential Jat farm leader from western UP. Tikait cried before TV cameras, saying he would rather die than give in, which steeled the resolve of the Jats, a community that had benefited from the Green Revolution of the 1970s.
The Tikaits belong to the Baliyan khap, a dominant clan among the Jats, most of whom are sugarcane growers. They voted overwhelmingly for the ruling BJP in past elections. This sugarcane belt was the ground zero of the deadly Hindu Jat-Muslim clashes in 2013, which helped the BJP politically. That religious divide is now seen to be cementing. A mahapanchayat in Bhainswal in February saw heavy participation of Muslims.