So now that I am done with my travel, and am almost fully settled into my new home, here’s the first in what will be a regular feature: thematic reading lists on issues of importance. Here, a selection of good reads on Modi’s promised repeal of the farm laws (As I come across more in the coming days, I’ll keep adding them to this post. Oh and if you read something worth sharing, do post links in comments and I’ll pull them into the main post):
The seeds of a bleak future, by Devangshu Datta for Business Standard: This piece by “DD”, as he is known to friends, makes the point I had touched on almost as an afterthought in my post yesterday: That (a) agricultural reforms are absolutely essential and (b) that this misadventure by the Modi government has set back the reform process by at least a decade, maybe more. As he puts it in his lead grafs:
Agriculture is inefficient and needs reform. The laws, which are now to be repealed, were regressive. But this government, and the next, and the one after that, will hesitate to even mouth “agriculture reform”.
That is the essential tragedy that underpins Modi’s unthinking use of a brute majority to push through half-baked reforms without any discussion, without the consensus-building that is so essential to lasting reform. It is also the point that has been largely missed in the schadenfreude that has enveloped the left-liberal section of our polity in the wake of Modi’s abject climbdown.
In passing, it needs mentioning that Modi has said that once the laws are officially repealed in course of the winter session of Parliament, the government will constitute a committee to promote “zero budget agriculture”, in consultation with representatives of the Central and state governments, farmers, scientists and economists. If this happens, it could well lead to meaningful reform sooner than later — but the proof of the pudding…
Perils of Hubris, by Ramchandra Guha for The Telegraph: Guha’s piece is a primer on the fatal flaw in the farm laws — to wit, the hubris that impelled Modi to rely on his brute majority push the laws through with no attempt to discuss, debate, and seek consensus. If there is one bit I’d push back on, it is this:
Nonetheless, that he reversed the decision is significant, for this may be the first occasion on which Narendra Modi has expressed contrition for making other people suffer through his actions…
So for Modi to say, “Main kshama chahta hoon (‘I seek your forgiveness’),” as he did on Friday, was a radical departure from past practice.
To that, I’d add “I wish”. Because at no point did Modi express contrition for making people suffer. What he actually said was, I apologise for not being able to convince the farmers that the laws were good for them. Big difference — he has been, and still remains, unconcerned about the suffering, the deaths; his concern is to get the record to show that the fault lies not in the laws themselves, but in his inability to persuade the farmers of their efficacy. (In passing, the Hartosh Singh Bal piece Guha refers to is linked here.)
A tale of two rollbacks, by Anil Sasi and P Vaidyanathan Iyer for Indian Express: This is the third successive piece that could have used “hubris” in the headline. And the central point is right there in the opening graf:
The Narendra Modi government was spot on in identifying two big areas, land and farm, for reforms early on in its first and second terms respectively. But in a remarkable parallel, in both cases, it relied too much on its numerical strength and refused to do the heavy lifting of politics. In both cases, it trashed opposing voices and attributed to it motives that effectively derailed the discourse.
Like Guha, the authors of this piece set out at length how the laws were pushed through with scant regard for the democratic process. And this, like Guha’s piece, is worth reading for us to understand how we got here and, more importantly, how that process has effectively derailed any hope of meaningful reform in the near- to mid- future.
What the withdrawal of the farm laws means, by Pratap Bhanu Mehta for Indian Express:
Much of this piece parallels the thinking in the earlier pieces, but there is one particular passage I disagree with:
But one of the interesting things about this moment is that the concession has come at a time when the movement itself was dissipating. The farmers’ movement did not have overwhelming resonance outside Punjab and Western UP. The visible modalities of protest had, through various means, been cleared out, even though BJP politicians at the local level were facing resistance. In short, the government had the staying power to stare down and repress the protest. To a great extent it did, and could have continued to do so. The timing of the announcement is not driven by the momentum or power of the movement, which is why it is a bit of a surprise.
Where to begin? While it is true that the protests, with Singur as focal point, have been fronted by farmers from the Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh, it is not entirely true that farmers elsewhere are unaffected, or disconnected. Remember the events of 14 March 2017 and the days immediately following, when 72-year-old farmer P Ayyakannu led protesting farmers from Tamil Nadu to the Jantar Mantar for a months-long protest? Within months of that date, and while the TN farmers were still occupying their protest site, other protests broke out in Madhya Pradesh (culminating in violence in Mandsaur) and immediately after, in interior Maharashtra. In fact, just before Republic Day, some 15,000 farmers from across Maharashtra had gathered at Azad Maidan in solidarity with the protests led by the Punjab/UP farmers.
Second, the movement was not dissipating, as Mehta suggests — rather, the farmers were increasingly taking the political route to drive their point home. They fanned out in West Bengal during the assembly elections earlier this year, and post-poll analysis indicates that their activism was a significant factor in the BJP’s crushing loss in the state. More recently, the farmers announced that they will be taking out tractor rallies to Parliament on every single day of the upcoming monsoon session — rallies that, if they had pulled them off, would dent Modi’s image big time both at home and abroad. And, third, with the crucial UP elections on the horizon, the farmers had demonstrated their will by refusing to allow BJP leaders to set foot in villages in their own constituencies; on November 5 protesting farmers took former Haryana minister Manish Grover and other BJP leaders hostage and held them for hours until Grover apologised.
What happened was not that the momentum of protest had ebbed, but that the protests had morphed from a television-friendly spectacle to a prolonged, determined siege that no longer commanded sustained media attention. Unlike Mehta, Modi read the signs right, realised that it would be near-impossible for him to pull off political rallies in UP in the face of determined farmers, and backed down.
The first sign of fear, by Sankarshan Thakur for The Telegraph: A beautifully weighted piece that calls out Modi’s hypocritical spin that the rollback was a magnanimous act, taken in order to end the suffering of the farmers. No such thing, says ST.
Friday’s summary backtrack on the farm laws is a desperate grab in the garb of a gift, make no mistake; a cold, calculating heart masquerading as having finally melted under the Gurupurab moon out of concern for the farmer.
A few other pieces that are worth your while:
Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta on how the farmers forced Modi to climb down
P Sainath on how the farmers won, and the media failed, on all counts
Soutik Biswas for the BBC on why Modi was forced to roll back the farm laws
Harikishan Sharma and Avishek Dastidar on how the propaganda spin that the BJP, and Modi, have always honoured the farmers and never abused them is a flat-out lie, as they demonstrate via a meticulous chronicling of the abuses heaped on the farmers. While on that, it is worth mentioning that after a failed meeting between the farmers and Cabinet ministers Piyush Goyal and Narendra Singh Tomar on December 11 a miffed Goyal, unaccustomed to being baulked, said the agitation had been infiltrated by Leftists and Maoists, and of “certain elements” who were “not working for the good of India.” Just a reminder that the name-calling started early in the agitation — and that it was the government, through its ministers, who gave the cue to the media.
Also read this Twitter thread by US-based professor Gaurav Sabnis
Oh, and the perfect note to sign off with:
Update, November 21:
Listen to this Ravish Kumar monologue where he takes down Modi’s hypocrisy
Now watch this video, where an agitating farmer speaks with the command of facts, an earthy pragmatism, and a sense of nuance that MSM seems incapable of.
A P Sainath Twitter thread on Modi’s speech and the farmer protests
Harshitha Mishra in Quint on the plight of the media in the wake of the Modi U-turn. While on which, the IT Cell and other propaganda outlets spent a large part of yesterday attempting to trend #StandWithModi. Yes, but stand where? Where Modi stood last week, or where Modi stands now, or where Modi will likely stand next week?
The Samyukt Kisan Morcha is in no mood to relent. The march to Parliament will go ahead and if the government tries to stop them, it does so at its peril, says Rakesh Tikait. But what is more significant is the call for MSP guarantees — a tricky issue the BJP had tried to skirt by holding out the carrot of repeal of farm laws, but it does not seem to be working. The key bit:
“Meanwhile, sources in the BKU said they were surprised that the Prime Miniter chose to repeal the laws instead of promising a law on the MSP.
In western U.P., the demand for the elusive statutory MSP guarantee has found much more political resonance than the three farm laws, which were in suspended animation. In fact, BJP leaders who had to do the explaining in villages would crib that promulgation of farm laws has given life to an old demand that no government would like to fulfil.”
(The cover image, of farmers attending a Maha Panchayat at Bhainswal in the Shamli district of Uttar Pradesh on 5 February 2021 was shot for Reuters by Danish Siddiqui, who was sadly killed in Afghanistan a few months later).
2 comments
Reading your summary, it seems like one of the main reasons farm laws failed was the lack of consultation and taking different stakeholders into the mix. I have one genuine question for them, it is easy to say that the bill was steamrolled in parliament etc. but do you really think modi and Shah wrote all the bill by themselves? Won’t that be giving them too much credit? They would have asked someone in some ministrynto craft it, right? and those people might have consulted somebody else etc. etc. So unless you know the exact list of people who were consulted, how can you conclude that not enough people were consulted.
I fully agree that the fault of the bill being cancelled lies solely with the government, but these articles popping up after the bill got cancelled smells fishy. Lot of smart people including like likes of Nitin Pai, Amit Varma, Shruti Rajagopalan seemed to be supportive of the general idea of farm reforms and never provided any counter suggestions.
The reasons the farm laws failed should be obvious by now: Lack of consultation, sure, but more than that, the fact that the government was putting its finger on the scales in favour of private players. Right from day one, the farmers have been asking for just this: a guaranteed MSP (which, as I recall, was a BJP poll promise anyway).
No one is suggesting that Shah and Modi wrote the bill themselves. The problem with this government is that it has systematically gotten rid of anyone with any pretension to expertise, anyone who might tell them they are wrong. So those people in the ministry? Basically, we have ended up with a gaggle of yes-men (and women) who do what the two top leaders want, irrespective.
Again, there is no denying that agriculture needs reform. Think for instance of the fact that we are producing too much of some (water intensive) crops and not enough of others. Think also of the number of small holdings that have become unsustainable. These — and many other — issues need to be resolved. But the only way you can resolve it is by listening to the stakeholders, broad-basing consultations, building consensus. (I don’t know about the experts you cited; I certainly don’t intend to tell you what good agriculture reform looks like because I am no expert).
The very fact that the bills were rushed through shows you that the GoI itself knew there were problems with it, no?
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