Thousands attend Kariri mahapanchayat to support Rakesh Tikait, farm protests

In the latest in a series of mahapanchayats against the farm laws organised by the Samyukt Kisan Morcha in Rajasthan this week, several thousands gathered today in Kariri, a Meena stronghold, in the state’s Karauli district. The massive gathering sat directly under the sun for the whole day, to listen to the farm leader Rakesh Tikait. “The fight about the MSP, it is about farmers,” he told the crowd, which had taken over the slopes of a hill edging the venue. “It has nothing to do with your caste.” The Meena community is notified as a Scheduled Tribe in the state, and the gathering indicated that the opposition to the farm laws is consistent across the caste spectrum in the agrarian region of the state.

However, there was no love felt in the crowd for leaders other than Tikait. The activist and politician Yogendra Yadav had to be introduced as the “greatest think tank on farm laws,” but still received a lukewarm response from the audience, who seemed only mildly interested. The farmer leader Amra Ram, who was the star of the show at a mahapanchayat held two days earlier in Sikar, was booed off stage before the moderator came to his rescue. He spoke, but even his cry for slogans was met with a terse silence. Ram and Rajaram Meel, both Jat leaders, spoke for less than a minute combined.

The mahapanchayats in the districts touching Punjab and Haryana, as well as in the Jat strongholds of the state, indicating the support of Rajasthan’s Jat community for the protests. Meanwhile, a huge rally by the Congress leader Sachin Pilot in the eastern Rajasthan town of Dausa showed the support for the movement among the Gurjars. In today’s rally at Kariri, a village with a population of just 2,288 according to the 2011 Census of India, over 72 percent of whom are from Scheduled Tribes, the massive attendance appeared to outnumber the total residents.

Tikait, Yadav and another farm leader Yudhveer Singh asked the audience to be ready to join them at the farmers’ protest at Shahjahapur, on the Rajasthan-Haryana border. Throughout the afternoon, the moderator at the mahapanchayat announced the contributions they received—at least a dozen, ranging from Rs 1,100 to Rs 1,51,000—for the aid of those sitting on the border. “We will welcome you there and take care of you, but one person from each family has to come when we call you,” Tikait said.

“You can write that we are all here completely, absolutely with Rakesh Tikait,” Ramlal Meena, a Kariri resident who attended the mahapanchayat, told me at the end of the day. “And you can write that we can’t stand Modi’s face. We won’t allow his MLAs to enter the village come the next election.”