Saturday 9 June 2018

Farmer Agitations - Sunny Narang

In India, out of 121 million agricultural holdings, 99 million are with small and marginal farmers, with a land share of just 44 per cent and a farmer population share of 87 per cent.
With multiple cropping prevalent, such farmers account for 70 per cent of all vegetables and 52 per cent of cereal output.
According to National Sample Survey Office data, 33 per cent of all farm households have less than 0.4 hectares of land. About 50 per cent of agricultural households are indebted.
Rural Economy is the economy which still supports more than 70% of Indian population , based on the farmers : More than 850 million , it is Rural India which is the largest Rural Population on the Planet of any country .
In China , now the Urban Population exceeds the Rural Population , Just over 680 million now live in cities – 51.27 per cent of China's entire population of nearly 1.35 billion.
Any Indian Political Elites that forget this Ultimate Reality , are in for Big Trouble .
And no one knows this better than RSS .
And the lead on the farmers issues have been taken by many ex RSS activists , who have now been sidelined by the Globalised Mindset of the Present BJP Dispensation .
Govindacharya is the Deepest Chanakya of Indian Politics.
He built the social-engineering platform , on which the OBC leadership like PM Modi took power .
He is the brain behind the Ram Mandir Rath Yatra .
He also is part of the team that built India Against Corruption.
And he is always with the Farmers .
Never for a moment should any Urban or Global Policy-Thinker should Forget , that India Still Lives In The Villages.
The Largest Country on the Planet with a Rural Population .
Gandhi wrote about Gram Swaraj , don't push the Farmers so much that they ask for Gram Samrajya , the Rule of the Village .
From August , 2008 - 9 years before the present violent farmers protest in Mandsaur , Madhya Pradesh :
Farmers will have to find their own ways to solve their problems, because no good can be expected from the government,? said noted thinker Shri K. N. Govindacharya.
He was addressing a mammoth rally of farmers at Balbaade, Goida in Jharkhand.
More than 10,000 farmers participated in the rally.
Shri Govindacharya further said that the political leaders are busy in protecting their governments and have very little time for solving the problems faced by the farmers. He was of the opinion that over-interference of the government in every field was the major reason for all ills.
He said that the people who have not seen villages and are unaware of rural realities are making policies in air-conditioned cabins of Delhi deciding the fate of farmers.
He said that a system based on jal, jangal, zameen, janwar and jan (water, forest, land, livestock and people) is in existence in India. For the farmers benefit, this system has to be protected at all costs.
From April , 2013 - 4 years before the present violent farmers protest in Mandsaur , Madhya Pradesh :
K N Govindacharya has alleged that the present BJP government in Madhya Pradesh is more corrupt than the previous Congress government led by Digvijay Singh.
During the BJP government,industrialists and bureaucrats were happy while the farmers suffered,he alleged.
From May 2015 - 2 years before the present violent farmers protest in Mandsaur , Madhya Pradesh :
"The BJP government in Madhya Pradesh is drawing flak for celebrating 'Krishi Mahotsav' -- a farm fair during which Rs.50 lakh would be spent just on 'Krishi gaan' (song) - while farmers in state are in deep distress due to crop failure.
Shankar Mahdevan has been reportedly paid Rs.50 lakh for the song, composed by Mahesh Shrivastava.
Amidst the celebrations of 'Krishi Mahotsava', state farmers leader Shiv Kumar Sharma seems unhappy.
"Through this festival, the government is actually celebrating the death of around 72 farmers. The money used on this festival has come from the taxes given by farmers," Shiv Kumar told IANS."
Govindacharya, who has served as the General Secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party, told the newspaper that his group Rashtriya Swabhiman Andolan had postponed their agitation against cow slaughter .
“Cow protection is not a religious issue, and unfortunately it is being made one. Gai buchadkhaane tabhi pahunchti hai jab kisan usey bechta hai (cows end up at a slaughterhouse only when the farmer lets go of it),” the RSS ideologue said.
“For 80 per cent of this process, why are we blaming the Muslims who are at the end of a long line of people trading cows?," he said.
I was at the historic Bharatiya Kisan Union Gherao of the Meerut Collectorate in 1988, when I was in Hindu College , Delhi University .
With a friend I took a UP Roadways bus and on the way we saw thousands of tractors taking people , food to the gherao Ground Zero.
I have never experienced anything close to this , after that .
Tens of thousands of farmers , their families sitting around the Meerut Collectorate , managing everything perfectly.
Chuna lines were made for various pathways , food areas were earmarked .
The Farmers were giving speeches and they said that all the electricity lines and water canals go from our farms to these big cities .
We can bring down these cities in a day .
It is our sons which make the country's armies .
This was when Mahendra Singh Tikait , a Jat leader from Western UP became a national hero of Indian farmers .
Mahendra Singh Tikait (6 October 1935 – 15 May 2011) was a leader of Jat farmers in the western area of Uttar Pradesh state, India.
He was born in 1935 at village Sisauli in Muzaffarnagar District of Uttar Pradesh. He was President of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, a farmers' movement, and was revered as the farmers’ "second messiah" after the Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh.
The hereditary title of Tikait was apparently conferred on his family by the seventh-century emperor Harshavardhan. Since then the title has been transferred to the eldest son of the family.
Tikait first became a significant figure in 1987 when he organised a campaign in Muzaffarnagar demanding the waiving of electricity bills for farmers.
Pankaj Pachauri , then a journalist with India Today reported :
When the year-old Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) decided to lay siege to Meerut Divisional Commissioner V.K. Dewan's office on January 27, the Bir Bahadur Singh Government employed its tried strategy: tire the strikers.
But Singh clearly failed to gauge the clout and charisma of BKU leader Mahendra Singh Tikait, and the agitation gained momentum. Barring the leftists, all major national opposition parties, farmers' organisations from other states and Meerut's citizenry extended support to Tikait.
A nobody till last year, the farmer leader, clad in his dusty kurta-pyjama did not leave the stage and attracted both village and city folk like a magnet. "This is a drama of the madmen, only those should come who will fight to the finish," he declared in the beginning.
And people came. On tractor-trollies, truck-tops, bullock-carts, motorcycles, cars and on foot. Meerut city (pop: approximately 6 lakh) had never seen such a congregation of humanity. The administration was in a quandary. Work was paralysed in the commissioner's office, schools and colleges were closed and even the judicial system came to a halt when the lawyers went on strike in support.
Tikait's most spectacular show was at Delhi's Boat Club lawns in 1988 when nearly five lakh farmers from western Uttar Pradesh occupied the entire stretch from Vijay Chowk to India Gate.
Delhi's power elite held out until the stench became too much to bear and after a week, the Rajiv Gandhi government bowed to his 35-point charter of demands that included higher prices for sugarcane and the waiving of electricity and water charges for farmers
The Present farmers agitation in Madhya Pradesh :
Since June 6, when Madhya Pradesh burst out on national television screens and newspaper front-pages, one kept hearing a name — Kakkaji. All queries made about the ongoing violent farmer protests kept leading to him.
Shiv Kumar Sharma, nicknamed Kakkaji, is the angry farmer leader who has been railing against the government for last several years and, as many believe, is the person behind the ongoing violent farmer stir.
The 65 years old farmer-activist has been associated with an RSS backed farmer outfit, sacked after his repeated attacks on the BJP-led government in the state, and, by his own admission, jailed 44 times.
He started out as a student activist back in 1971. It was in Jabalpur University where he studied from 1971 to 1977 as a law student, doing MA LLB where he first dabbled in activism, first by holding protests for farmers' rights and later providing them legal assistance pro bono.
He then started a farmers' magazine called 'Kisan Ganga' with his own money. But the magazine didn't take off and he lost the 2 acres of land he had mortgaged to fund the magazine.
This is the time, in 1998, when he joined RSS backed farmers' outfit — Bharatiya Kisan Sangh.
He claims to have worked in Sangh affiliate for two years without realising that it was run by RSS. "I didn’t know. Nowhere in their documents did they say that BKS was run by RSS. After two years, I got to know," Sharma says.
But that didn't stop him from working for the Sangh affiliate for the nine more years.
Another farmer activist Suresh Gurjar, a national executive committee member of BKS, remembers his association with Sharma.
"He was active from his student days and during his time strengthened and built from scratch our outfit in over 50 districts in Madhya Pradesh, which is why the organisation made him its state president.
There is no doubt about his integrity and honesty.
Only I feel that he is hogging all the limelight. Others like me have also worked for farmers. But we aren't talked about as much."
With BJP being in power in Madhya Pradesh for the last 15 years, the period in which over 18000 farmers committed suicide in the state, there may not have been much scope for the RSS-led farmer outfits to protest against status-quo.
That's when Shiv Kumar Sharma made his mark.
He led two huge movements against the state government in 2010 and 2012.
The 2012 agitation in Bareilly was more violent. The violence was solely provoked by police, he claims, where one farmer lost his life and several rounds were fired.
After his second protest, Sharma was sacked from BKS. He went on to found his own farmer rights body — Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangh.
This is the body behind most of the protests in Madhya Pradesh today.
A person close to Sharma claims that the firebrand farmer activist has always felt a threat to his life since.
"Even today he feels that the state is out to kill him. Although Kakkaji doesn't fear death but the threat is real to him."

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