Farmer Power: An outdated ideology

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July 24, 2026

The politics behind ‘Farmer Power’

There is an adage in this part of India that there is no medicine for baldness and jealousy. Practitioners of modern medicine claim that a drug has been developed to cure baldness. But the world of medicine is yet to come out with a solution for jealousy. With all respect to women, it has to be stated that jealousy was the prerogative of the ladies. But the last decade has nailed this belief once and for ever, as men have outclassed women in both jealousy and gossiping.

It goes without saying that India has made giant strides in the fields of economic and social development. We are the fifth largest economy in the world and are surging ahead to be one of the top three economies. Nearly 60 percent of the population is engaged in farming, making India a country where agriculture is the main job provider. Farm jobs are seasonal and most of the time farm laborers are out of work. Most of the agricultural workers get employment only during sowing and harvesting.

In the US, 10.4 percent of total employment is in the farm and food sector, according to the Department of Agriculture in that country. But the number of workers employed in the farming sector ismuch lower than that of India. In productivity, countries like China, the US, and Brazil figure in the top league, while India’s is disappointing. Since the liberation of the country from the colonial masters in 1947, nothing has been done to help the farmers who were always at the mercy of the monsoon. If the Monsoon rains fail, there would not be any sowing, as the entire nation was dependent on the vagaries of the monsoon rains.

Almost every year, the country faced drought or flood. India may be the only country that faces a strange paradox of one part facing severe drought while the other part was tormented with devastating floods. This is not a once-in-a-blue-moon phenomenon but an annual recurring event. Nothing has been done to resolve this issue. Yet another issue was the difficulty faced by the farmers in getting loans from nationalized banks or even rural primary cooperative banks. These banks had declared agriculture as the priority lending sector, which meant that farmers get prime preference in getting loans. But that was only for public consumption. Farmers need loans for their agriculture operations like tilling, sowing, irrigation, and to buy fertilizers, and these have to be executed in time. The saying was that agriculture cannot wait. But the babus manning the banks through their systematic approach made farm loans never materialize in time.

The first serious attempt to rejuvenate agriculture and get it the status of other businesses or professions was made during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister. A National Farmers Commission headed by agriculture scientist M S Swaminathan was appointed by the Vajpayee government in 2002. The mandate of the NFC was to recommend solutions to raise the status of farmers and to ensure that they get reasonable returns for their crops. But the Vajpayee government lost the 2004 Lok Sabha election, and the Commission’s report, submitted to the Manmohan Singh government in 2006, ended up in the cupboard of the Prime Minister’s Office and was forgotten. The Swaminathan Commission Report was brought back to life by the Narendra Modi government that came to power after the 2014 general election.

As part of measures suggested by the NFC to elevate the status of agriculture by reforms and modernizing farming operations, the Modi government introduced three bills in Parliament in 2020. Till then, Indian agriculture was shackled by the age-old methods and modernization was alien in the country. Though farmers have been pleading with the Centre as well as state governments to remove the laws that always derailed their hopes and dreams, the pleas went unheeded.

I remember Pejawar Murari, the grand old man of the country’s civil service, trying to indoctrinate the government of the day to initiate measures to revamp Indian agriculture. In meeting after meeting, he pointed out that more than 40 percent of the crop was lost during the post-harvesting operations, mostly on the farms themselves. Murari, who retired as the secretary to the President of India in the early 1990s, had asked for the introduction of reefer vans to transport perishable commodities from farms to markets. But the powers that be chose to ignore suggestions by Murari, who was always in sync with the progress made by other countries in agriculture. It has to be remembered that the Ministry of Food Processing was set up following his recommendation. He had suggested the setting up of a separate ministry for fishing and marine products.

The farm bills introduced in 2020 in parliament (Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce Promotion and Facilitation Bill, Farmers’ Empowerment and Protection Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill) had only one mission: to revolutionize Indian agriculture and attract more and more people to farming. That was the period when traditional farmers were leaving their farms in search of greener pastures and hundreds of farmers were committing suicide across India on account of crop failure and their incapability in paying back loans they availed from usurers.

The sad thing is that there are many restrictions and regulations in the country which prevent the farmers from selling their crops at the market of their choice. The Bill introduced in Parliament in 2020 proposed barrier-free trade of farm produce and also legalized contract farming to facilitate hassle-free transportation and trade of farm produce. Farmers were offered facilities to sell their produce outside Mandis, the traditional markets. Imagine the scenario of buyers coming to the villages and purchasing all farm products at pre-determined prices and transporting the same in reefer vans to supermarkets all within a matter of hours. I remember Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman assuring the farmers that once the bills are passed, the choice of farmers will go up by leaps and bounds. “They will get remunerative prices, and the infrastructure facilities too will undergo major changes,” said Sitharaman. But our economists and self-styled economists (some of them turned to economics after their successive failures as lawyers in the Supreme Court) could not digest the fact that the income of farmers will increase manifold, thereby becoming self-sufficient in their needs. (If you have any doubts, please ask the farmers of Karaikudy in Tamil Nadu).

These “intellectual classes turned fear mongers and spread the news that the farm bills were detrimental to the interests of the farming community. The word corporatization was a term that was anathema to this intellectual class, though they themselves represent corporate houses in the Supreme Court.

While leaders of farmers’ organizations like R V Giri of Tamil Nadu (he was the president of the Confederation of Indian Farmers’ Association) and P Changa Reddy ( former chief of CIFA) had welcomed the farm bills, the world saw a group of persons from Tamil Nadu staging demonstrations in New Delhi to highlight the plight of farmers. Their “agitation” was unique as the demonstrators who claimed they were farmers ate soil and rats to convince the onlookers about their helplessness and the Centre’s indifference to the farmers. P Ayyakkannu, a lawyer who drives around in swanky cars, and his colleagues staged the demonstration with bones and skulls of farmers who had committed suicide following crop failure and debt traps. Their agitation hogged global headlines when they marched to the Prime Minister’s residence wearing just loincloths. “Kissan Mar Raha Hein… Kissan Bhookha Mar Raha Hein” were their slogans. The anti-India media was waiting for such an event, and they had a month-long celebration as Ayyakkannu and his troop had their fun. Ayyakkannu’s organization is named National South Indian River Interlinking Agriculturalists Organization, a letterhead outfit. The team had collected skulls and bones which they claimed were of farmers who committed suicide because of farm distress. The national and international media had a field day thanks to the comic show enacted by Ayyakkannu and his colleagues who travel only in swanky limousines.

Ayyakkanu and friends stage demonstration at New Delhi to highlight farmers' woes — Ayyakkanu and friends stage demonstration at New Delhi to highlight farmers’ woes

The debate planned in both Houses of Parliament remained a non-starter as the Opposition parties staged a protest parade and tore and threw the copies of the Bill at the Speaker as well as the Chairman in the Upper House. Instead of debating the Bill, the Opposition leaders were seen disrupting and derailing the proceedings of the Houses. The Speaker as well as the Chairman, whose pleadings to the opposition party members to return to their seats and continue with the proceedings were heckled and jeered, and this prompted the House to suspend the rogue members for the entire session. The suspended members staged a fast-unto-death demanding the quashing of their suspension. This too was granted by the House, but the members continued with the agitation.

R V S Mani, a former under-secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs who is also a living martyr of the evil machinations of P Chidambaram, has written in his book “When Mani Writes” that there is an ecosystem in India to keep the farmers poor. “The so-called farmers’ protests by vested interests allegedly had little participation from tillers of soil; among them were more of middlemen. The demonstrators were acting as non-state actors to push the ISI agenda of disrupting the development bandwagon of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” writes Mani.

This brief note is an introduction to “FARMER POWER-The 2020-21 movement, The State and Agricultural Reforms in India” authored by Sudhir Kumar Suthar, a teacher and researcher at JNU. No need to elaborate the fact that he is a strong critic of farm reforms because the leftists always want the Kissan to stay in perpetual poverty. The book features the farmers’ carnival staged by middlemen who corner all profits made by the tillers of the soil. Imagine the scenario of corporate groups like Ambani, Tata, Birla, etc., getting farm crops directly from the farmers through contract farming, which is a win-win situation for the producers as well as end users. But our left radicals would not allow that to become a reality. Would you like to know the kind of farm leaders who always succeed in taking the farmers for a ride? We have a farmer leader who is ignorant of the kind of “tree” on which the paddy grows!!

If you do not read “FARMER POWER,” you are not losing anything. But if you read the same, you are wasting your valuable time.

FARMER POWER (Penguin)
Rs 499/-

Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.

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