India: The farmers’ revolt
The farmers are here for the “long haul,” said Fareeha Iftikhar and Shiv Sunny in the Hindustan Times. In late November, tens of thousands of farmers—most of them Sikhs and most hailing from the northern state of Punjab—set off in trucks and tractors for the outskirts of New Delhi, where they set up roadblocks on the main roads into the city. The farmers have faced police blasting tear gas and water cannons, but they say they won’t leave their makeshift camps until the government repeals agricultural reforms it passed in September. That package of deregulatory policies, the farmers fear, will leave them prey to exploitation by corporations. The farmers outside the capital have brought “food stocks to last for months.” Some trucks have been designated separate cabins for women, others retrofitted as washing areas. Large batteries ensure the farmers can charge their phones and keep in touch with families back home. “The only facility we lack is air-conditioning,” said farmer Navtesh Singh.
The protesters are right to worry about their livelihoods, said Nidhi Suresh in Newslaundry.com. The laws passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government allow farmers to sell their produce not only to the mandis— the government-controlled wholesale markets—at set minimum prices but also to private businesses at market prices. Modi says that will eliminate the middlemen. But mandis are not parasites: They help farmers unload, clean, and store produce, and because of a “relationship built on trust” over many years, they lend farmers money in lean times.
Who will do that once the mandis are gone? Worse, the farmers say, in a few years when the big corporate buyers have put the mandis out of business, they will hold producers at their mercy, paying less than subsistence. Modi must listen to farmers’ “demand for dignity” or risk a massive backlash—agriculture employs more than 200 million Indians, about 44 percent of the workforce.
But these reforms are desperately needed, said Mihir Sharma in Business Standard. Policies designed in the 1950s and ’60s “for an India on the edge of starvation don’t fit the India of today.” Since farmers are guaranteed a set price for wheat and rice, far too many of them grow only that, and the excess harvest rots in warehouses, unable to be exported. Not enough cropland is set aside for vegetables, which a growing India needs. Plus, the market is “geographically biased” toward Punjab, creating a perverse incentive to grow water-intensive rice in a semi-arid region. The system simply must change.
The problem isn’t the reforms, said The Free Press Journal in an editorial, but the government’s lack of communication. By passing the laws hastily, with little parliamentary debate and no consultation with farmers, Modi made it look like he was doing something furtive. At this point, his only option is “a negotiated climbdown.” If the siege of the capital goes on for weeks, more farmers will join, as will truckers and other groups. We are in “danger of the misdirected agitation snowballing into a much bigger conflict.”