We live by stories,” American writer and writing coach Tobias Wolff said. “It’s the principle by which we organise our experience and thus derive our sense of who we are. We’re in an unceasing flow of time and events and people, and to make sense of what goes past, we put a beginning and an end to a certain thing, and we leave things out and we heighten other things, and in that way we break the unbroken flow into stories, because that’s the only way we can give it significance.”
I was thinking of this earlier today, when the news broke that Narendra Modi had — in course of a cringeworthy speech — reversed the intransigence of his government and promised to repeal the farm laws that farmers have been agitating against for a fortnight short of two years.
Cringeworthy, because here was a strongman who never accepts, let alone publicly acknowledge, that he has made a mistake now trying to straddle multiple rhetorical stools at the same time. He apologised (not for any mistake, but for his failure to convince the agitating farmers) even as he averred that crores of farmers had welcomed the laws; he promised to withdraw the laws even as he insisted that the laws were in the farmers’ interest…
Bharatiya Kisan Union president Rakesh Tikait provided an immediate indication of how far Modi’s credibility has shrunk when he pointed out that this was merely a promise; the agitation, Tikait said, would continue till the laws were actually repealed in course of the upcoming winter session of Parliament. Put bluntly, Tikait was saying “We don’t trust you”.
Why a climbdown so humiliating that even his the normally reliable media propagandists were left without an out? (Not for want of trying — News18’s Aman Sharma and Amish Devgan among others relied on “government sources” to spin it as Modi taking a decision in the national, and not his personal, interest. What personal interest Modi could have that was at odds with the national interest, the anchors did not explain.
The emerging consensus traces the climbdown to imminent elections to the state assemblies of five states in the first quarter of 2022 — and of these, the crucial ones in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The agitating farmers have already demonstrated, through their on-ground political activism during the West Bengal elections earlier this year, that they are a potent spoiler for the BJP’s prospects.
The BJP usually relies on “divide and rule” and on false-flag operations — but its attempts to divide the farmers, which began as early as a 11 December 2020 outreach by the reincarnated Chanakya, Amit Shah, failed in the face of the farmers’ unprecedented unity. And the use of a Nihang group to carry out a brutal murder which could then be blamed on the protesting farmers came undone when news broke that the leader of the group had met in secret with members of the Union cabinet.
And once the Jats and Muslims opted to forget, however temporarily, the scars of the Muzaffarnagar riots and unite in the face of what they saw as an existential threat to both communities, the politically crucial western Uttar Pradesh was put in play. Combine all of this with the massive rallies by Opposition leaders, as for example the one in Varanasi by Priyanka Gandhi, and the more recent one by Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, and the BJP’s jitters leading to Modi’s climbdown is understandable.
There is a certain naivete in the BJP calculus that a Modi U-turn will reset the political equations. The agitation has extracted an awful cost — estimates range from 600-700 farmers who have died during the 11 and a half months of the stand-off. And then there is the raw, festering wound of Lakhimpur Kheri. To assume that the farmers will forget all of this in the euphoria of the win is to underestimate the scale and intensity of the suffering, and of the collective anger.
And then there is this: the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, having tasted blood, is in the mood to want more. Note:
The SKM, an umbrella organisation of 32 farm bodies spearheading the agitation, added that the agitation of farmers is not just for the repeal of the three black laws, but also for a statutory guarantee of remunerative prices for all agricultural produce and for all farmers. “This important demand of farmers is still pending. So also, is the withdrawal of the electricity amendment Bill. The SKM will take note of all developments, hold its meeting soon and announce further decisions,” the leaders said.
By backing down, Modi has allowed the agitating farmers to take his electoral ambitions hostage — and that will in all probability give rise to further confrontations of the sort Modi was trying to defuse.
If the farmers remain intransigent, the political landscape becomes increasingly fraught. Early days, but word filtering back from the ground is that the BJP will manage to retain UP, by hook and crook. But equally, indications are that the party will not be able to replicate the sweep of 217, which saw it gain a massive 265 seats (with a near-40% vote share) to tally 312 seats in the 403-seat Assembly.
If the party loses ground (and seats), it opens the door for the Opposition it had decimated in the previous election — and this has repercussions for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, where the BJP’s prospects of returning to power depend hugely on sweeping UP and the rest of the heartland. It is already on the back foot in Madhya Pradesh (29 LS seats), where it needed the defection of Jyotiraditya Scindia to make its position secure. It has lost Rajasthan (25 LS seats) and Punjab (13 seats) to the Congress; in Bihar (40 seats), Nitish Kumar remains the most unreliable proposition in contemporary politics.
Against that, it is almost non-existent in West Bengal (42 seats) and Tamil Nadu (39); the Shiv Sena has strengthened its hold on Maharashtra (48 seats). Kerala with its 20 seats is another state where the BJP has slim-to-none hopes of gaining even one seat.
None of this is to suggest that the Opposition is in pole position for 2024 — but it does raise the question, if the BJP cannot sweep the heartland, can it return to power? And if it does come back with a reduced majority, how does a party used to running roughshod over all opposition deal with a situation where it doesn’t have brute-force numbers to work its will?
There is one other aspect to the emerging situation that is worth considering. Back in 2020, I had listed the million mutinies that had broken out in India in the wake of the anti-CAA/NRC protests. Those unrests continue to fester, subcutaneously for now, but chances are that the spectacle of the Strongman bending before people power will give those disenchanted sections of the population fresh hope. The BJP, already fighting raging fires on multiple fronts, is in no position to cope.
Unrest. Violence. And a lot of pain. That is what the immediate future appears to hold.
And in the midst of all of this, the essential tragedy takes a back seat: To wit, agricultural reform is urgently needed. Equitable farm laws need to be framed and debated; consensus needs to be arrived at, and the reframed laws need to be passed and implemented. But a government badly singed by hubris is unlikely to broach the subject in the foreseeable future — and this is going to cost not just the farmers, but the country as a whole.
The need for reform, though, is another blogpost, for another day. For now, as Tobias Wolff suggested, this is an attempt to “put a beginning and an end to a certain thing” in a bid to understand its significance.
PostScript: For far too long, we have come to see our role in a democracy as one of turning up to vote whenever an election is called, at the state or the central level. What the farmers’ agitation, and the anti-CAA/NRC protests before that, should teach us is that democracy is at its best when citizens sign up for it 24/7/365. That our part does not end with electing those who will govern us in our name, but that it also means being willing and able to ensure that those we elect act in our best interests — and when they fail in that basic duty, to protest, to make our collective displeasure known clearly and unequivocally.
“My country, right or wrong,” German revolutionary turned American journalist and Senator Carl Schurz said in 1871, in course of an iconic speech. “When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.”
We really shouldn’t need a Rihanna, a Greta Thunberg, a Meena Harris or a Martina Navratilova to be doing our job for us.
Tailpiece: The BJP will, we are told, organise programs in Delhi to thank Modi for repealing the farm laws. Satirists will soon join the ranks of the unemployed.
{The cover image is courtesy BBC.com)
