UP elections, Punjab protests: The politics in Modi withdrawing farm laws

Decision to drop controversial reform could not have been better timed, strategically and electorally, for the BJP.

It took a politically significant remark from Rahul Gandhi and threat of a street protest by the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), a vocal ) constituent of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for the Narendra Modi government to freeze an amendment to the land acquisition law in 2015. Gandhi critiqued the Modi dispensation as a “suit boot ki sarkar”, signifying that it was loaded, in terms of its politics and policies, in favour of the corporate sector.

It took more than a year for the government to repeal the three farm laws that provoked massive protests, beginning in Punjab on August 9, 2020 and spreading to Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The months were marked by protesters assembling on Delhi borders, violent face-offs with the police, occasionally dissent from within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and periodic protests by the Opposition and farmers’ deaths to prod the government to renege on a significant decision.

The PM’s announcement, in a televised address to the nation, this morning came before he departed on a visit to Uttar Pradesh, that votes in February-March 2022. The stirrings in rural UP, more than Punjab, seem to have dictated the decision. The BJP is ruling a state that has 80 Lok Sabha seats and 403 assembly seats and its fortunes hang on not just retaining it but cutting the anticipated losses in the legislature. In 2017, the BJP won 324 seats, primarily those in the rural areas.

The killing of farmers in Avadh’s Lakhimpur-Kheri and the arrest of the son of a central minister for allegedly mowing down protestors with his SUV amplified the significance of the farm laws as well the protests beyond west UP to which they were confined. Elsewhere, in Avadh and east UP, farmers were not overtly concerned with the laws which they believed largely concerned the “well-off” Jat farmers of the west, who were the principal beneficiaries of the land redistribution measures taken by Chaudhary Charan Singh when he was the CM.

The Lakhimpur-Kheri tragedy took the message across the state and affected small and marginal farmers as well who until then were sanguine in the belief that the state would protest their interests and not leave them susceptible to the vagaries of the market.

West UP has about 70 seats. The BJP has always been strong in this belt on the strength of the Jat votes but lately, the community has vocally expressed its resentment with the party and looked like gravitating towards the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) founded by the late Ajit Singh, the scion of Charan Singh, and inherited by his son, Chaudhary Jayant Singh. While it’s a matter of speculation still if the Jats would shift in bulk towards the RLD given that their allegiance to the BJP is also underpinned by their belief in Hindutva and the desire to become part of the caste Hindu grouping, farmers everywhere in UP, regardless of their caste, began questioning the farm laws.

On the writer’s recent visit to parts of Avadh, even marginal farmers wondered why the Modi government was reluctant to give a statutory guarantee on the MSP instead of allowing open markets to dictate the price line. Their discomfort was accentuated by other problems: the unseasonal rains that adversely affected the quality of the standing paddy crops and made the yield practically unfit for consumption, the rampaging unclaimed cattle let loose by owners who could not hand them over to the abattoirs once they became unproductive and lastly an acute fertiliser shortage. Combined, these factors have made agrarian concerns a matter of worry for the BJP, even as its cocktail of welfarism and Hindutva went down well with several voters.

Still, farmers were confident that PM Modi would redress their grievances before voting. The decision could not have been better times, strategically and electorally.

BJP and RSS workers, deputed by the local MPs and MLAs, fanned out in the villages to interact and get feedback from pradhans on the agrarian issues. Among those flagged were legislative surety for MSP, curtailing the role of open markets and a fertiliser crunch. These demands were raised by farmers of all castes and economic class and not just the big farmers. In fact, the MSP demand acutely bothered the small and marginal farmers who formed the backbone of the BJP.