[E-rundbrief] Info 2138 - India’s Farmers Win

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief Info 2138 - P. Sainath, Counter Punch: India’s Farmers Win 
On Many Fronts, Media Fails On All.

Bad Ischl, 1.12.2021

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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India’s Farmers Win On Many Fronts, Media Fails On All

     By P. Sainath, Counter Punch.

     November 30, 2021
     Resist!

https://popularresistance.org/indias-farmers-win-on-many-fronts-media-fails-on-all/

What the media can never openly admit is that the largest peaceful 
democratic protest the world has seen in years – certainly the 
greatest organised at the height of the pandemic – has won a mighty 
victory.

A victory that carries forward a legacy. Farmers of all kinds, men and 
women – including from Adivasi and Dalit communities – played a 
crucial role in this country’s struggle for freedom. And in the 75th 
year of our Independence, the farmers at Delhi’s gates reiterated the 
spirit of that great struggle.

Prime Minister Modi has announced he is backing off and repealing the 
farm laws in the upcoming winter session of Parliament starting on the 
29th of this month. He says he is doing so after failing to persuade 
‘a section of farmers despite best efforts’.  Just a section, mind 
you, that he could not convince to accept that the three discredited 
farm laws were really good for them. Not a word on, or for, the over 
600 farmers who have died in the course of this historic struggle. His 
failure, he makes it clear, is only in his skills of persuasion, in 
not getting that ‘section of farmers’ to see the light. No failure 
attaches to the laws themselves or to how his government rammed them 
through right in the middle of a pandemic.

Well, the Khalistanis, anti-nationals, bogus activists masquerading as 
farmers, have graduated to being ‘a section of farmers’ who declined 
to be persuaded by Mr. Modi’s chilling charms. Refused to be 
persuaded? What was the manner and method of persuasion? By denying 
them entry to the capital city to explain their grievances? By 
blocking them with trenches and barbed wire? By hitting them with 
water cannons? By converting their camps into little gulags? By having 
crony media vilify the farmers every day? By running them over with 
vehicles – allegedly owned by a union minister or his son? That’s this 
government’s idea of persuasion? If those were its ‘best efforts’ we’d 
hate to see its worst ones.

The Prime Minister made at least seven visits overseas this year alone 
(like the latest one for CoP26). But never once found the time to just 
drive down a few kilometres from his residence to visit tens of 
thousands of farmers at Delhi’s gates, whose agony touched so many 
people everywhere in the country. Would that not have been a genuine 
effort at persuasion?

 From the first month of the present protests, I was barraged with 
questions from media and others about how long could they possibly 
hold out ? The farmers have answered that question. But they also know 
that this fantastic victory of theirs is a first step. That the repeal 
means getting the corporate foot off the cultivator’s neck for now – 
but a raft of other problems from MSP and procurement, to much larger 
issues of economic policies, still demand resolution.

The anchors on television tell us – as if it is a stunning revelation 
– that this backing off by the government must have something to do 
with the upcoming Assembly elections in five states next February.

The same media failed to tell you anything about the significance of 
the bypoll results in 29 Assembly and 3 Parliamentary constituencies 
announced on November 3. Read the editorials around that time – see 
what passed for analysis on television. They spoke of ruling parties 
usually winning bypolls, of some anger locally – and not just with the 
BJP and more such blah. Few editorials had a word to say about two 
factors influencing those poll results – the farmers’ protests and 
Covid-19 mismanagement.

Mr. Modi’s announcement today shows that he at least, and at last, has 
wisely understood the importance of both those factors. He knows that 
some huge defeats have taken place in states where the farmers’ 
agitation is intense. States like Rajasthan and Himachal – but which a 
media, parroting to its audiences that it was all Punjab and Haryana, 
could not factor into their analyses.

When last did we see the BJP or any sangh parivar formation come third 
and fourth in two constituencies in Rajasthan? Or take the pasting 
they got in Himachal where they lost all three Assembly and one 
Parliament seat?

In Haryana, as the protestors put it, “the entire government from CM 
to DM” was there campaigning for the BJP; where the Congress foolishly 
put up a candidate against Abhay Chautala, who had resigned on the 
farmers’ issue; where union ministers pitched in with great strength – 
the BJP  still lost. The Congress candidate lost his deposit but 
managed to shave a bit off Chautala’s margin – he still won by over 
6,000 votes.

All three states felt the impact of the farmers’ protests – and unlike 
the corpo-crawlers, the Prime Minister has understood that. With the 
impact of those protests in western Uttar Pradesh, to which was added 
the self-inflicted damage of the appalling murders at Lakhimpur Kheri, 
and with elections to come in that state in perhaps 90 days from now, 
he saw the light.

In three months’ time, the BJP government will have to answer the 
question – if the opposition has the sense to raise it – of whatever 
happened to the doubling of farmers’ incomes by 2022? The 77th round 
of the NSS (National Sample Survey, 2018-19) shows a fall in the share 
of income from crop cultivation for farmers – forget a doubling of 
farmer incomes overall. It also shows an absolute decline in real 
income from crop cultivation.

The farmers have actually done much more than achieve that resolute 
demand for the repeal of the laws. Their struggle has profoundly 
impacted the politics of this country. As did their distress in the 
2004 general elections.

This is not at all the end of the agrarian crisis. It is the beginning 
of a new phase of the battle on the larger issues of that crisis. 
Farmer protests have been on for a long time now. And particularly 
strongly since 2018, when the Adivasi farmers of Maharashtra 
electrified the nation with their astonishing 182-km march on foot 
from Nashik to Mumbai. Then too, it began with their being dismissed 
as ‘urban naxals’, as not real farmers, and the rest of the blah. 
Their march routed their vilifiers.

There are many victories here today. Not the least of which is the one 
the farmers have scored over corporate media. On the farm issue (as on 
so many others), that media functioned as extra power AAA batteries 
(Amplifying Ambani Adani +).

Between December and next April, we will mark 200 years of the launch 
of two great journals (both by Raja Rammohan Roy) that could be said 
to have been the beginning of a truly Indian (owned and felt) press. 
One of which – Mirat-ul-Akhbar – brilliantly exposed the angrezi 
administration over the killing of Pratap Narayan Das from a whipping 
ordered by a judge in Comilla (now in Chittagong, Bangladesh). Roy’s 
powerful editorial resulted in the judge being hauled up and tried by 
the highest court of the time.

The Governor General reacted to this by terrorising the press. 
Promulgating a draconian new Press Ordinance, he sought to bring them 
to heel. Refusing to submit to this, Roy announced he was shutting 
down Mirat-ul-Akhbar rather than submit to what he called degrading 
and humiliating laws and circumstances. (And went on to take his 
battle to and through other journals!)

That was journalism of courage. Not the journalism of crony courage 
and capitulation we’ve seen on the farm issue. Pursued with a veneer 
of ‘concern’ for the farmers in unsigned editorials while slamming 
them on the op-ed pages as wealthy farmers ‘seeking socialism for the 
rich.’

The Indian Express , the Times of India , almost the whole spectrum of 
newspapers – would say, essentially, that these were rural yokels who 
only needed to be spoken to sweetly. The edits invariably ended on the 
appeal: but do not withdraw these laws, they’re really good. Ditto for 
much of the rest of the media.

Did any of these publications once tell their readers – on the 
standoff between farmers and corporates – that Mukesh Ambani’s 
personal wealth of 84.5 billion dollars ( Forbes2021) was closing in 
very fast on the GSDP of the state of Punjab (about 85.5 billion)? Did 
they once tell you that the wealth of Ambani and Adani (who clocked 
$50.5 billion) together was greater than the GSDP of either Punjab or 
Haryana?

Well, there are extenuating circumstances. Ambani is the biggest owner 
of media in India. And in those media that he does not own, probably 
the greatest advertiser. The wealth of these two corporate barons can 
be and is often written about – generally in a celebratory tone. This 
is the journalism of corpo-crawl.

Already there is bleating about how this cunning strategy – the 
backing off – will have significant impact in the Punjab Assembly 
polls. That Amarinder Singh has projected this as a victory he 
engineered by resigning from the Congress and negotiating with Modi. 
That this will alter the poll picture there.

But the hundreds of thousands of people in that state who have 
participated in that struggle know whose victory it is. The hearts of 
the people of Punjab are with those in the protest camps who have 
endured one of Delhi’s worst winters in decades, a scorching summer, 
rains thereafter, and miserable treatment from Mr. Modi and his 
captive media.

And perhaps the most important thing the protestors have achieved is 
this: to inspire resistance in other spheres as well, to a government 
that simply throws its detractors into prison or otherwise hounds and 
harasses them. That freely arrests citizens, including journalists, 
under the UAPA, and cracks down on independent media for ‘economic 
offences’. This day isn’t just a win for the farmers. It’s a win for 
the battle for civil liberties and human rights. A win for Indian 
democracy.

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-- 

     Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
     Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
     Center for Encounter and active Non-Violence
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