The Death of an Agitation

JUST ACROSS THE border from Haryana in Khan­auri, Amit Hooda is busy with early-morning travellers at his swanky eating joint. It would seem downmarket to describe it as a dhaba— the place boasts neat rooms where travellers can stay over—even as the fare is wholly Punjabi. “We have just reopened and till two days ago, there was hardly any­one who stopped here,” he says, even as he yells orders at his chef.

Outside, on the road from Sangrur in Punjab that goes all the way to Delhi, a veritable convoy of combine harvesters is speeding away. When hailed and asked where they are going, the driver of one combine tells Open that they are heading to “Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh (MP) or wherever the wheat crop is ready for harvesting.”

“We could not go [to MP and Rajasthan] last year. This road was blocked and the alternative route was longer and our costs became so prohibitive that we had to sit back home. We lost a lot of money.”

Hooda, the dhaba manager, says they opened their joint in Au­gust. “It was at the peak of the agitation. We came with 40 people from Rohtak to start our dhaba. We were forced to pay our staff from personal funds as there was no work. Finally, we had to let everyone go. I have just brought back my chef. Business is picking up even if the pace is slow.”

These are days of green shoots in Punjab, although not necessarily of the plant variety. At Khanauri in Sangrur district—the site of a year-long agitation—farm unions and agitators had pitched camp with their tractors, trolleys and tents. Something similar was done on the other key border with Haryana, at Shambhu in Patiala district. All that remains of those agitations are bamboo poles and discarded cloth used to pitch tents. The concrete roadblocks, erected by Haryana Police just across the border at Shambhu, have been removed. On the border from Khanauri in Haryana, a company of Rapid Action Force (RAF) troopers whiles its time away. Across the border, in Punjab, there is no trace of law enforcers. It is as normal as such places can be.

In the days after the encampments were removed from Khan­auri and Shambhu, the farm union leaders tried to regroup. But this was mostly bravado. On March 19, after their meeting with Union ministers in Chandigarh, many farm leaders were detained as soon as they entered Punjab. Most of them were released nine days later, including the man behind the agita­tion at Shambhu, Sarvan Singh Pandher. Another leader, the 70-year-old Jagjit Singh Dallewal, who was for long on hunger strike and whose health worried the Supreme Court, broke his fast in a hospital bed and sipped water on March 28.

The same day, groups of farmers gathered in front of the of­fices of deputy commissioners across 23 districts in the state. These gatherings were ‘successful’ in the sense of mobilising a number of people and bringing them to a spot. There was more in store. After meeting the press on March 28 in Patiala, Pandher returned to Amritsar, his home district, and organised protests in front of the homes of Punjab ministers on Monday, March 31. If one were to give a charitable spin to these events, farmers indeed are continuing with their ‘movement’.

The reality is grim, at least from the perspective of organisa­tional and collective action. For example, the protests on March 28 did not see participation by the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) (Ekta-Sidhupur), which was a key constituent of protests during the last year. When Pandher was asked this question by reporters in Patiala, he brushed it away by saying, “Unity of various unions is essential. Everyone agrees on that.” He did not answer why ‘unity’ was such a problem. In contrast, BKU (Ekta-Ugrahan), which did not participate in the protests at Shambhu and Khanauri for more than a year, participated in the protests on March 28.

What explains these twists and turns in the farmers’ agitation? Why did the Bhagwant Mann government take action against the farmers now—in March—when he could have acted earlier? From Sangrur, the president of BKU (Ekta-Ugrahan) told Open on March 30, “There were some tactical issues as well. At times it is difficult to talk about these issues openly for fear of harming the farmers’ movement. But we should have considered the situation prop­erly. Did the prolonged agitation alienate common people from us? Perhaps the movement could have been channelled in a different di­rection before returning to action of this kind [roadblocks, etc] after some time.”

Of all the farm unions in Punjab, BKU (Ekta-Ugrahan) is the most clear-sighted on tactical issues. Po­litically, it is also the most leftist of all these formations. Its criticism of Pandher and the Kisan Majdoor Morcha (KMM), even if indirect, points to the danger of more prolonged, more cohesive protests in case this tactical vision is put in place. Last year, during a meeting at Kokri Kalan village in Moga district, the BKU (Ekta-Ugrahan) general secretary, Sukhdev Singh Kokri Kalan, had told Open that Pandher’s agita­tion would go nowhere unless it was given a broad-based direction and involved farmers and their unions across India. On March 30, Ugrahan echoed the same sentiment again.

For the moment, there is pessimism in most unions, except Ugrahan’s. Ramandeep Singh Mann, another leader who has been closely involved in the protests, told Open in Delhi, “This [organis­ing farmers] will take time. We will have to go back to the drawing board to understand the pluses and minuses of our experience.”

What are the takeaways here, after the ‘uprooting’ of farmers from the two spots? On a practical level, the difficulty in collec­tive action involving at least two dozen organisations, each with its own area of influence, sometimes even below the sub-district level, is difficult as Mann admits. But at another, more alarm­ing level, leaders like Ugrahan are ready for the long haul. In his words: “Such turns do come in movements like this. At this moment, the lack of unity is being felt acutely among various farmer organisations. We are talking to our friends in all organ­isations about this. Our struggle will continue.”

IT IS NOT hard to imagine what Tungwali must have looked like three or four decades ago. Located barely 15km from Bathinda, the village still retains some tibbas or sand dunes. It is another matter that one does not see the sand until one gets to the top of a dune in Tungwali. Unlike the Thar Desert, farmers have worked hard to cultivate crops in this sandy environment. In one such elevated patch at the far edge of the village—now covered with an orchard and a cluster of houses—Gurcharan Singh Mann goes about his daily chores, as he has since 1990. “When I came here in 1990 there was nothing but sand dunes. When the wind blew, sand flowed everywhere,” he says. Now, 35 years later, Mann’s patch of land, roughly one acre on the top of a dune, has various fruit trees on it, including an apple tree. Apple trees in Bathinda defy one’s imagination. But then, Mann is no ordinary farmer.

“When I passed out of college here in Bathinda, I realised that working in a regular job would not take me far,” he tells Open at his home in Tungwali. “That year, I enrolled in the Young Farmer’s Course at Punjab Agri­cultural University. They taught me about bee-keeping, dairy­ing, fruit growing, pisciculture, and more.” After years of hits and misses, Mann finally found his calling.

Today, if there is one name famous in the region for apicul­ture, it is Mann. “I started with 10 boxes with 10 frames each for housing bees. Now I keep around 2,000 boxes,” he says. Each box costs around `4,000 and the cost can be recovered in one year. He says that if one is careful, a single box can fetch a profit of anywhere between `2,500 and `5,000. The variation arises from the number of boxes one plants (the more the number, the lower the overall cost of operations), the timing, and the location where one raises the bees.

Mann’s year begins sometime in November. He takes his boxes to locations as far away as Kota (780km away) and Alwar (416km away) in Rajasthan. At one time, he would even venture to Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh. “Shivpuri is wooded and has an abundance of flora that bees like,” he says. Closer home, he also rears bees in Lohgarh, just across the border in Haryana (around 65km away).

Mann is now a celebrated farmer. The dozens of pictures on the wall of his home with the president of India, chief ministers, scientists, and other celebrities attest to his achievements. And these were not mere photo-ops. He now has a makeshift manu­facturing unit in his home where he makes boxes with frames to rear bees. The government has outsourced part of this work to him and the boxes he makes are given to aspiring bee-keepers at a subsidised price. He trains young farmers and freshly minted civil servants to land at his farm to learn and train.

“I learned the hard way. The one lesson I never forget is that nothing comes easy. One has to work hard and what finally determines the difference between success and failure is atten­tion to detail and specialisation. I have grown apple trees and chikoo (Soapapple, Manilkara zapota) in sand. You can see for yourself,” he says. Mann’s honey is not just delicious and flavour­ful but he also has a unique honey variety: one that is almost solid.

Here then is a successful farmer—in every sense of the word, in­cluding financial achievement—who has never agitated in his life; nor has he sought the government’s favour. He presents a complete contrast to farmers in the region. Bathinda, Mansa and Sangrur districts are hotbeds of farm union agitations. At one time, in the 1970s, the region was under the spell of Naxalism as well even if the ideology did not take root and was wiped out by police action.

ONE CAN ALWAYS say that Mann’s experience is unique and not all farmers get the same opportuni­ties. He is, after all, an educated person who thought through his situation and carved out a path for himself. Not everyone can do that.

That is one way of looking at the contemporary agrarian ferment in Punjab. But the reality is that there is a growing band of such progressive farmers across the state. Their number is certainly smaller than the legions of agitators who throng to Khanauri, Shambhu, Singhu, and all other protest hotspots. At one time, some 60 years ago, the entire state was populated by such enterprising farmers who chose to experiment with new, and until then, untried varieties of wheat and rice. At that time, the government helped them with a package of inputs and marketing support. India needed foodgrains and the Pun­jab farmer stepped in.

But over time politically fixed prices of wheat and rice proved fatal to that enterprising spirit. The end goal of that process was the ‘siege of Delhi’ for over a year that finally cul­minated in the withdrawal of three farm reform laws passed by Parliament. One does not have to indulge in teleological reasoning and say that subsidies first wrecked these farmers and then emboldened them to engage in fruitless agitation. But somewhere this mollycoddling created perverse political and economic incentives. Today, instead of thinking out of the box, these farmers launch agitations at the drop of a hat. The year-long blockade of borders at Shambhu and Khanauri is as much a testament to this wrong-headed thinking and misery inflicted on ordinary people as it is to sticking with outdated agricultural and economic policies.

There is hope, however, in farmers like Mann and so many others who are experimenting with new forms of agriculture, those not only sustainable but also remunerative without government support. Looking at Mann and his sand dune, it is inspiring to see that something creative can be done in ag­riculture, a domain that is considered a dead-end activity in economic terms. It is in his example and those of farmers like him that Punjab’s hope lies.

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