 "Centre committed to purchase all farm produce at MSP: Shivraj Singh Chouhan")
(This report has been updated)
A large group of farmers, with a host of demands including legal guarantee for minimum support price (MSP), debt waiver and pension, temporarily halted their Delhi march from Shambhu border on Friday after some of them were allegedly hurt in police action.
They will resume their protest and march to Delhi on December 7, Saturday.
Meanwhile, Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan reasserted the government’s stand in Parliament, saying the Centre was committed to purchasing all farm produce at MSP.
There were signs of thaw too.
Some farmer leaders said that they were willing to sit for talks with the government and the administration. And that the officials have asked them for their charter of demands which will be sent after consultation with all leaders.
Latching on to the protests, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a post on social networking site X condemned the Haryana Police action, saying that the government should listen to the demands and find solutions sympathetically.
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Sarwan Singh Pandher, a farmer leader, claimed that five to six protesting farmers were injured due to the teargas shelling by Haryana security personnel.
The farmers, gathered under the banner of Samyukta Kisan Morcha (non-political) and Kisan Mazdoor Morcha, have been camping at Shambhu and Khanauri border points between Punjab and Haryana since February 13 this year, after their march to Delhi was stopped by security forces.
Besides MSP, the farmers are also demanding farm debt waiver, pension for farmers and farm labourers, no hike in electricity tariff, withdrawal of police cases (against farmers), and “justice for the victims of the 2021 Lakhimpur Kheri violence.
Reinstatement of the Land Acquisition Act, 2013, and compensation to the families of farmers who died during the previous agitation in 2020-21 are also part of their demands.
On Friday morning, a ‘jatha’ of 101 farmers began its foot march to Delhi from their protest site at the Shambhu border but was stopped a few metres away by multi-layered barricading set up by Haryana security personnel.
The security personnel lobbed multiple rounds of teargas shells in order to disperse the protesting farmers and force them to go back to their protest site. Farmer leaders claimed that some farmers were injured and were taken to a hospital.
The Haryana Police has asked the protesting farmers not to proceed further and cited prohibitory order clamped under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), under which any assembly of five or more persons in the district is banned.
Meanwhile, Chouhan said in Rajya Sabha that when Congress was in power, they had stated on record that they cannot accept the MS Swaminathan Commission recommendations, especially on giving 50 per cent more than the cost of produce.
He also claimed the Modi government was already giving remunerative prices to farmers, saying that paddy wheat, jowar, soyabean were being purchased at 50 per cent above the cost of production from three years ago.
He also cited intervention in changing export duties and prices whenever rates of commodities fall.
RSS-backed body passes resolution
RSS-affiliated Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS) in its two-day All India Congress held in Guwahati in Assam passed a resolution saying that the country’s development won’t be possible without the uplift of farmers. The BKS also called for a clear-cut policy on genetically modified crops from the government.