The Modi government is not new to facing protests. It went into the lockdown with the CAA protests still going strong and is now facing the farmers’ ire over its agriculture reform bills. The NewsX-The Sunday Guardian debated this issue, beginning with a look at how the Modi government handles protests.
While the CAA protestors were more or less met with a cold shoulder, there has been some outreach for the farmers (after dousing them with water cannons first, one might add). However, while negotiating, the government has also made it clear that it has no intention of rolling back what it clearly sees as a big-ticket reform. In fact, some in the government are even calling it Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 1991 moment. R. Jagannathan, Editorial Director of Swarajya, points, “Whenever a law changes, people living under the previous regime are apprehensive; apprehensions about change are common. The government needs to reassure the people. But there are also people with vested interests who benefited from the previous laws, who will try and destroy the changes. Also, every law has loopholes and these can be corrected. Having said this, there are also some people who think this government is illegitimate and feel that anything that makes this government eat humble pie is good and, so, are accelerating the protest, as it happened with CAA. Yes, there are legitimate issues raised by the farmers, but you can’t say ‘first, repeal the law, and then we will talk’.”
Adds M.K. Venu, Founder Editor, TheWire.in, “The CAA and farmers’ protests are apples and oranges and cannot be compared. The farmers have been talking about the problems in the new bills for a while now so the government can’t claim that they have been misled. Instead, why didn’t the government reach out to them earlier and explain its bills, which is what they are doing now. The way the bills were pushed through in the Parliament could have been avoided.” He goes on to say, “I want to make a larger point: Indian agriculture does need resetting, there should be talks on crop diversification with the assurance of a certain minimum income to farmers. When Modi came to power, he had promised 50 percent returns to farmers over the costs. Only the BJP kept shifting the goalposts in defining these costs. So, the PM needs to rebuild trust with farmers. We definitely need more mandis as the Bihar experiment showed (when mandis were done away with) and the farmers there are getting 40 percent less than the MSP.”
So, is the BJP right in pegging these reforms as PM Modi’s 1991 moment? Venu disagrees. He says, “Describing these farm bills as the ‘1991 moment’ is erroneous. Even globally, farm incomes up to 40 percent are subsidised by the government. Nowhere is agriculture governed by a free market. What the PM needs to do is to sit with farm leaders and lay out a ten-year roadmap. Agriculture is a state subject. Right now, states and farmers are feeling ambushed by the way the bills were brought about.”
Pranjal Sharma, author of India Automated and Kranti Nation, explains: “Agriculture is the country’s largest private sector, perhaps unorganised, but you can’t say that the private sector is not there in agriculture. Any monopoly is a problem, even the monopoly of mandis. Earlier, the law was that you had to sell to a particular mandi at whatever price was set.” As for the demand for MSP, Pranjal adds, “Only 6 percent of farmers get the MSP. And 94 percent don’t get it. So what are we talking about? Farm reforms have been discussed for the last 40 years. There is a video of Kapil Sibal in Parliament arguing for the same reforms. We need to separate the protests from the laws. The protests are not so much about the law as to protect their own interests. In such a situation, it’s easy to create fear and say that ‘you won’t get MSP, your land will be taken away’. If you compare it with Europe, the land holdings are much larger there, so the focus should be on productivity.”
However, if there is a video clip of Kapil Sibal arguing in favour of reforms, there is also a clip of the late Sushma Swaraj pushing for MSP. This, unfortunately, is what politics is all about. Says Aditi Phadnis, political editor, Business Standard, “History teaches us nothing. You had exactly the same painful sequence of events when the government was trying to amend the land acquisition act. You had massive protests, and after one and a half years, the government went back to the original bill. So, it needs to learn how to push through reforms. There is the problem of a lack of communication with this government on a variety of issues and we can’t just blame it on the Opposition for opposition’s sake. We saw something as sensitive as doing away with Article 370 being supported by the Opposition, for instance, so we can’t say that the Opposition will oppose everything this government does.”
This begs the question: Could the government have handled this better? Counters Jaganathan, “In India, if you do something, you are criticised and also, if you don’t. Look at what happened with GST, which had been pending for so long. It got done because some politician was willing to stick out his neck and get it done. I don’t agree with the argument that you first discuss and then make it happen. 1991 was not done through discussion. Even the Congress put farm reforms in its manifesto but is now against it. No law is conceived well in this country from the IPC to MNREGA to Aadhaar. First, pass the law and then, fix it. Get the law passed somehow and then make incremental changes as what is happening now. Any law takes five years to settle. Look at the land bill, the select committee became its graveyard, so a good amount of communication doesn’t get you a good law, it gets you a messy law.”
Good, bad or messy, the farm bills have been passed and the protestors are determined to have their say, belatedly or otherwise. One thing everyone on the panel agreed with is that the agriculture sector needs resetting. The question is now in the delivery.