The Farmers' Protests

The laws

Three farm acts were passed by the Indian Parliament in September 2020, deregulating agricultural marketing. The government’s case was that they would free farmers to sell outside state-regulated markets. The farmers’ case was that removing those markets removed the assured minimum price that Punjab’s agriculture had been built around since the Green Revolution, and left small producers facing large buyers with nothing in between.^1,3

A year on the road

Protest began in Punjab and moved on Delhi in November 2020, where farmers were stopped at the state borders and simply stayed — at Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur — through a Delhi winter, a Delhi summer, and the second wave of the pandemic.

They built what amounted to towns: tents and then insulated shelters, libraries, medical posts, laundries, schools, newspapers. Estimates of numbers at the sites ran into the tens of thousands at their peak.

The unions’ own count, collected by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, recorded 248 deaths at the sites by the hundredth day in March 2021 — mostly cold, illness and heart attacks among older farmers.² The final figure over the full year was several times that.

Langar

The sites ran on langar: the free communal kitchen that every gurdwara maintains, and that Sikh institutions mobilised at the protest at very large scale, feeding anyone who came — protesters, police, journalists, passers-by, without distinction.

The practice goes back to Guru Nanak’s community at Kartarpur and to Guru Amar Das’s rule that anyone seeking an audience eat in the common kitchen first. It is not a charitable add-on to Sikh belief; it is a five-century-old institution stating that people of any rank or religion sit in one row and eat the same food.

What was novel in 2020 was the scale and the setting — the institution operating as the logistical backbone of a mass political movement, in view of the whole country.

The repeal

On 19 November 2021 — the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak — the Prime Minister announced the laws would be repealed. Parliament repealed them at the end of that month, and the protest sites were wound up in December 2021.²

What is contested

Almost everything about the politics of this remains argued over: whether the laws were good policy, whether the repeal was principled or electoral with Punjab’s election months away, and what was actually conceded on the minimum support price, which was the protesters’ central demand and was not legislated.

One thing is worth recording plainly, because it bears on this site’s subject. During the protest, participants were repeatedly described by figures aligned with the governing party as Khalistanis — separatists — a characterisation the protesting unions rejected and which the movement’s composition does not support.

The reason that accusation carries the weight it does, and the reason it was reached for, is 1984 and the decade after it. This is the most recent entry in this chronicle, and it is not legible without the ones before it.