On 10 October 2015, the fourth day of the rail roko—stop the trains—at Pathrala village, near Dabwali Mandi, in Punjab, the organisers of the joint farmer-labour protest mistook me for a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Agent. Given the extreme vigil with which the organisers have guarded the agitation, not allowing it to be appropriated by any political party, even rejecting regular party leaders from taking the stage, such suspicion towards me was completely in keeping with the aim and method of the agitation which hopes to benefit more than 2 lakh families in the state. The protest, which has farmers squatting on railway tracks to prevent trains from plying began on the afternoon of 7 October. Their demand is for just compensation for the failed cotton crops, remunerative rates for basmati crops, the payments of sugarcane dues owed by private mills, and debt relief. To this end, the protestors had urged for a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, tentatively scheduled for yesterday at 5 pm. However, the talks that were held ended in a stalemate with neither side budging.
Dressed in a shirt and cargo pants, notebook in hand, I looked very urban to the thousands of rural men, women, elderly and children who were lying on rail tracks under white tents amidst the joint flag of eight Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) factions and seven different Mazdoor organisations. The small and medium land owners among the Jats, the Dalits and other lower castes are fighting this battle together, Lachhman Sewewala, the state secretary for the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union told me: “It is wrong to consider farming as only a Jat occupation. A farmer is not a caste. To me, a farmer is one who derives their living from farming, with land or without land.” he said. He went on to point out that small farmers and landless labourers deal with much the same issues as any other farmers, that include employment, price rise, sustainable agriculture, loans and recovery and suicides. “The expenses on agriculture have increased, the profits have decreased. The labour’s sustenance from land and their relationship with it has reduced. We no longer get fodder for cattle, straws for cooking fires, even vegetables and so on.” He went on to state that the farmer and the labour suffered under these obstacles, and that is why they had all come together. People have come from all across the state irrespective of the political party in power in their area: Shergad and Rampura in Bathinda district are represented in the parliament by Union minister for Food Processing, Harsimrat Kaur Badal from the Shiromani Akali Dal; the Sangrur district is represented by Bhagwant Mann from the Aam Aadmi Party. Amritsar is represented by Amarinder Singh of the Congress.
The loudspeakers in the vicinity were alternating between anti-government slogans and revolutionary songs. These songs described the pain of the loss of the cotton crop or white gold, the manner in which loans were recovered, the 97 farmer suicides that have taken place in Punjab between May and August this year and the proliferation of drug use in the region. Speaker after speaker took the stage, exhorting the protesters to remember the stories of Bhagat Singh, Kartar Singh Sarabha and Udham Singh from the freedom movement, as they drew parallels between their struggle against British imperialism and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s failed Land Bill. Amidst the warnings against corporate imperialism, they also relayed instances of Sikh saints and warriors such as Guru Gobind Singh and Banda Bahadur, who fought against injustice. They asked the protestors to fight through non-violence this time, strive for peaceful agitation, and to not do anything that would give the government and police a chance to clamp down upon the agitation.
It was only as I arrived that I realised that by taking the bus to the venue I had avoided the police barriers that had been erected to prevent people from reaching the site. I had called one of the organisers ten minutes prior to reaching and had been asked to alight near a statue, at an old and now unused bus stop. As I stepped down from the bus, I saw 22-year-old Gurpreet Singh, who had been sent to fetch me on his motorbike. As we made our way to the location, I noticed the police standing a distance away. Once I reached, I realised that several protestors had come to the venue by navigating through paths in the field and other roundabout routes. A day before this demonstration, the police had arrested protestors who were coming from the nearby villages of Khudian and Faridkot Kotli to Pathrala. These protestors were released after a few hours, a technique that is being used across all other seven sites of the protest.
The loss from the stoppage of over 850 trains, their subsequent cancellation and diversion to other routes has cost the railways upwards of Rs 100 crore until now, and is also affecting the sale of hosiery and iron good among others as their stocks are piling up. The last sustained rail roko in Punjab was in 2000 and had lasted 72 hours. This one that is underway right now has long since crossed that, having already exceeded seven days. “Will the Railways impose the loss on the Punjab government?” Gurpeet asked me as we drove, “They will pay everybody else, but not us.”
As we began discussing the protest, I asked him about how long it had been since he had last slept. “Been a while. I have been with the movement ever since it began a month back,” he answered. Gurpreet went on to explain the problems that had been plaguing the protestors, “The administration plays cheap games: you must have heard, how in Bathinda the police allowed a bull to enter the venue and break the protest meeting. When we went to protest at the deputy commissioner’s offices across the state, they used women constables to stop us.” He summed up his frustration at the manner in which these events were unfolding: “Who likes to sleep on railway tracks? But they have pushed us. Why can’t they talk to us? They say Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal can notice even an ant walking in Punjab; can’t he see us?”
For every day of the protest, protestors have allowed the Cancer Express train—a train that routinely carries cancer patients making the overnight journey to the town of Bikaner for treatment at the government's regional cancer centre—to pass through in spite of the rail roko. Protestors and organisers were distributing leaflets that alleged that the government had stopped the trains in an attempt to discredit the demonstrations and paint them as inhuman.
A short drive later, we reached a makeshift structure around 200 meters near the rail tracks where I was offered a choice of water, tea, lassi or milk. Lunch was scheduled for later. The stream of donation, I observed, had mostly been in small cash and in kind—milk, flour, tea and water among other things.
While the farmer and mazdoor unions in Amritsar and Moga are agitating over just compensation for failed Basmati rice crops, the export version of which is now trading below half of last year’s price; the protest in Nawanshahr is about money owed to sugarcane growers; and that in the south Punjab Malwa belt is over the massive failure in 9,500,000 acres of cotton crops coupled with news of corruption and the inefficiency of the state machinery. The cotton seeds approved by the government to the farmers in this region proved to be bad and non-resilient to Whitefly (tiny insects that feed on plants).
In April this year, before the cotton sowing season, in a typical anti-drugs barricade near a village called Bhai ke Wala, on Baga Purana Road, the deputy superintendent of police, Gurjit Singh, stopped a jeep and found it carrying Rs 65 lakhs in bribes to a senior Akali leader as “goonda tax”—a fee extracted in return for protection. The Union leaders allege that the leader in question was the state agricultural minister, Tota Singh. The matter was widely reported in the media but the government did not take any action on the matter.
The whitefly is not a pest that is new to the agricultural landscape of Punjab. However, earlier, it was successfully contained through pesticides. This season the director of the agriculture department, Mangal Sandhu, acquired pesticide without due tenders and supplied it to the farmers. He is now in jail, remanded in judicial custody and not allowed to speak to the media. The common pesticides used by the farmers have all failed; some have been proven to be extremely diluted, while others were found to be fake. Reports on the tests of these samples at the Central Fertilizer Quality Control and Training Institute, Faridabad, vary greatly in their effectiveness. The scientists at Punjab Agriculture University suggested a second spray of certain pesticides, but that was not effective either. It is revealing that the university’s own cotton crop failed this season, devastated by Whitefly.
In a season, a farmer averages an expense of Rs 21,000 not including the cost of land leased from a landlord or incidental expenses. Punjab experiences two distinct growing seasons: November to April and May to September. Add to this, the average rent at Rs 18,000. Even if the crop fails, the famer owes the rent to the landlord. In such a scenario, what does the government owe its farmers? The protesters are demanding a compensation of Rs 4300 crore at the rate of Rs 40,000 per acre for farmers and Rs 20,000 per acre for the cotton-picking labourers. However, the government is offering the farmers Rs 600 crore, a figure that has been reached after increasing the initial compensation of Rs 10 crore.
The protestors have discredited the three major political parties in the state and have chosen to not ally themselves with any. I ask Sewewala if this was the first time that the traditionally Akali Dal voting farmers, those of them who typically vote Congress, and the labour are fighting together on this scale. “On this scale, yes. We have collaborated earlier over compensation for farmer suicides, over reduction of electricity bills, but not in this large manner,” he answered. He mentioned the obstacles to a united front: “Until now, the political parties have managed to drive a rift among us. They tried even this time. Badal asked us to drop the labour part of compensation. Our coming together has had them worried. How come these poor, backward people are united? What does this tell them about the coming elections in 2017?”
Joginder Ugraha, president of BKU, was tired by the time I approached him. He was lying on a railway track and had announced that the strike, which was to be carried out for an indeterminate length of time, would cease at 5 pm yesterday, the hour appointed for the meeting with the chief minister. Since the meeting did not result in a resolution, the strike will continue while the union leaders meet at Kisan Bhawan in Chandigarh.
I asked Ugraha if he thought that the protest was inching closer to achieving its goal. “The protest will take us to the negotiating table and the government will still try to fox us. Yet, the real purpose is different and has been achieved. The purpose is to tell those who take us for granted, the politicians, that we are not theirs. It is a fight for self-confidence, for respect, for us to be to look into the eyes of these leaders,” he said, before adding, “We have stormed the citadels of Badal. Our people come from various political affiliations. We don’t interfere with that. All we say is vote for who you may but for class and inter-class unity.”
I asked him if he remembered the Akali protests in the 1970s and 1980s and wondered aloud whether this was any different from those. Ugraha sat up animated, “The Akalis protested by cutting trees and throwing them on roads and tracks. We are doing none of that. It is just our bodies. No harm to public property. In the last 38 years of my activist life, I have never seen so much youth coming together. It is a new phenomenon. It is also difficult to tame." He concluded, “The youth is restive. This opens up new challenges for us. The youth comes because it is now aware, it is becoming critical. The challenge is to keep it focused on change, on compelling the systems through mass pressure to work and fight for pro-people changes.”
As people gathered for the night vigil, I noticed that the number of protestors had grown substantially as compared to those present during the sunny day. As Gurpreet dropped me back to where I was staying for the night, I asked him what he thought might break the movement.
“Me,” he said, “If I sell out. The government has tried many tricks: bribes, threats.”
I want to believe he won’t.