Dear farmers, watch the backdoor

If only for a day, there was a moment when it felt like the streets and Parliament were in unison on the farmers’ issues. While farmers on the ground are demanding a legal guarantee for MSP (Minimum Support Price), the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture, for the first time, has recommended legalising MSP.

Yet, despite this apparent harmony, the government remains apathetic: a new policy document is replaying the same rhetoric it had to abandon while repealing the three farm laws. It’s as if government policy were a dog’s tail—forever crooked. Meanwhile, the protesting farmer on the street is looking askance at the government and in forlorn hope at Parliament. The farmers’ agitation is gaining momentum again. At the Khanauri border between Punjab and Haryana, farmers under the banner of the apolitical Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) are staging another sit-in protest.

Their demands are the same, unresolved even after the Delhi protests— legal MSP guarantees, debt relief for farmers, and the fulfilment of promises made at the time by the central government. But the government will not let the farmers march to Delhi. At the time of writing, farmer leader Sardar Jagjit Singh Dallewal was on the 23rd day of a hunger strike, yet no representative from the central government had approached him for talks.

Although most offshoots of the original SKM are not part of the Khanauri sit-in, they expressed solidarity by organising tractor marches nationwide on 16 December. The SKM had issued a three month ultimatum in November, warning the government of another largescale movement. If these parallel protests converge, the farmers’ agitation could surpass the previous one in both scale and impact.

The agitating farmers received unexpected support during the current parliamentary session when, on 17 December, the standing committee on agriculture, animal husbandry and food processing included several farmer demands in its first report. The committee, chaired by Congress MP and former Punjab chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi, includes members from all parties, including a majority from the ruling party.

The committee has unanimously recommended legalising MSP and has instructed the ministry to draft a roadmap for its implementation. It has also proposed a debtrelief scheme for farmers and doubling the PM-Kisan fund from Rs 6,000 to Rs 12,000 annually. For the first time, the demand to involve farmers in formulating international trade policies for agricultural commodities was also placed on the parliamentary agenda. While the committee’s recommendations are not binding, they bring hope that the farmers’ voices are now resonating beyond the streets and have reached the portals of Parliament.

Meanwhile, the government’s stance remains unchanged. On 25 November, the ministry of agriculture released a draft—curiously issued only in English—for a 10-year policy titled the ‘National Policy Framework for Agricultural Marketing’, seeking feedback from farmers within 15 days. This document reflects the same mindset that gave rise to the three anti-farmer laws. Even though agriculture markets are under state jurisdiction, the central government drafted this policy without consulting the states. Not just that, the draft mandates that state policies on agricultural marketing must in future align with this national framework.

When farmers take their produce to market, their primary grievance is the lack of fair prices. This led to the formulation of an MSP policy, which the farmers have been demanding must be granted protection in law. However, the draft policy makes no mention of MSP. Instead, it proposes a crop price insurance scheme akin to crop insurance.

This document makes it abundantly clear that the government wants to leave farmers at the mercy of market forces, continuing its agenda to privatise the agricultural sector. Despite being forced to repeal the law promoting private mandis as alternatives to the current APMCs (Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees), the government is attempting a backdoor reintroduction of the same dispensation through this draft policy.

Provisions like allowing private markets, enabling exporters and wholesalers to buy directly from farms, and recognising warehouses as market yards are thinly veiled attempts to dismantle the APMC system.

The draft also seeks to revive contract farming, as envisaged in one of the three laws it had to repeal under pressure from farmers. As of now, most farmer organisations seem unaware of this new policy. However, activists like Kavitha Kuruganti and Rajendra Chaudhary of the ASHA-Kisan Swaraj network have submitted written objections demanding its withdrawal. The SKM has called for copies of the draft to be burned in protest.

The farmers know this government is hard of hearing—time they got together and returned to the streets to reiterate their demands.