Andolanjivi Tikait brothers bay for hostile neighbour

In 1965 India faced a situation that is not very different from what it confronts today. Pakistan calculated that it could wrest Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) from India. At that moment of peril, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri delivered a heartfelt speech in which he coined the slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan. Needless to say, both Kisans and Jawans stood like a rock behind India.

The similarity, at least in part, ends there.

On Monday, Rakesh Tikait and his brother Naresh Tikait, both professional agitators-cum-farm leaders, issued controversial statements. Rakesh Tikait, who was closely involved in the agitation between 2020 and 2021, said that he was in Ladakh some days ago when the Pahalgam terrorist attack took place. “I spoke with people in Kashmir…they have been ruined. But one must ask the question: who gains from such an attack? The one who gains is not sitting in Pakistan but is here right in our midst,” he insinuated.

“If I take a name, you will say that I am naming someone…the one who is gaining by doing ‘Hindu-Muslim’ he knows the entire sequence of events,” he added.

Not to be left behind in this competitive sport of questioning the country, his brother Naresh Tikait opposed India holding the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in abeyance.

“A treaty has been agreed upon…it should remain in force. We are not in favour of (holding it in abeyance). We are farmers…farmers may be anywhere…water should continue to flow,” he said.

But within an hour of the contentious statement emerging, Naresh Tikait realised the damage that had been done by his utterance. He then tried to limit it by issuing another statement on X: “We are completely against terrorism. The whole country is expecting concrete action against it. We do not want to spoil our history. We are already against terrorism and will remain so in future too. The government has all the resources. It should take action against terrorists that every citizen of the country feels proud of.”

In the normal course one could excuse farmers for not understanding questions of defence and national security and, in general, of how and why governments make the policies they do. But these “farmers” are hardly that. In the two years when farmers’ had blockaded Delhi, these two “farmers,” among others, were fairly articulate in making demands on a law for Minimum Support Prices (MSP) for various crops; they also knew the details of The Electricity Act, 2003 and the amendments that were being debated to that law. To say that they don’t know the risk and extreme dangers posed by Pakistan and its sponsorship of terrorism in India would be to give the duo an excuse.

The real problem is the political licentiousness that has existed in India for a long time, one that masquerades as “democracy.” Under the aegis of that shield, one can say anything one wants and get away with it. The more outrageous the statement, the more acceptable it is. Rakesh Tikait’s statement that “everyone knows who gains from terrorism,” falls in this category.

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