100 days: Back-room troopers keep protest going

NEW DELHI: For 100 days, thousands of farmers have sustained the country’s largest agricultural protest in decades. But camping for months on the outskirts of Delhi, surrounded by barbed wires and police barricades, required a little help from friends.

Activists, groups and people from all walks of life have worked behind the scenes to keep the protest against the three new agriculture laws going. Among them is a lawyer from Mohali, a former sportsperson from Jalandhar, a teacher from Roopnagar and a student-activist and a doctor who left his fellowship in New Jersey to join the farmers’ cause.

Tony Sandhu, a 43-year-old football player from Punjab, was among the first few protesters to reach the Singhu border (Delhiharyana) on November 26, when the cultivators first took their fight to Delhi.

A week into the agitation, Sandhu and other sportspersons set up a camp to organise food and portable toilets, but soon realised a lot more was needed. “Farmers were left with dirty clothes and had little option to clean them,” he says. So they arranged for some washing machines and set up a camp to wash clothes a kilometre away.

Sukhwinder Singh Barwa, 27, from Punjab’s Roopnagar, without planning, launched a school for children from nearby slums.

For 29-year-old student-activist Navkiran Natt, the need to counter misinformation was crucial. She began the four-page bi-weekly Trolley Times for the protest sites.

Simranjeet Kaur Gill, a 34-year-old lawyer, is part of the Lawyers for Kisan group that is helping provide free legal aid to the protesters arrested after January 26 violence.

Swaiman Singh, a cardiologist from New Jersey, US, joined the agitation after leaving his studies midway. “When I saw the plight of our elderly farmers, I couldn’t leave,” says the 34-year-old, adding: “Of course, work and family life have been affected but we are fighting for a greater cause.”→p4