The Problem with India’s Farmer Protests

Ishaan Rai (SFS ‘23) is a guest writer for the Caravel's opinion section. The content and opinions of this piece are the writer’s and the writer’s alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.

Protest caravans proceeding towards Delhi, the capital city (Wikimedia Commons).

What was once an obscure, confusing domestic dispute has now gained global recognition. On February 2, a hodgepodge of celebrities, from Rihanna to climate activist Greta Thunberg, tweeted in support of Indian farmers protesting proposed agricultural reforms, and, in doing so, attracted a flurry of attention online. The fervor has even reached the halls of Georgetown: on March 4, the university’s Sikh Students Association hosted an online panel discussing the protests, and more than a dozen school clubs, including this very newspaper, co-sponsored the event and affirmed that they “stand with farmers.”

While it is certainly admirable to shine a spotlight on foreign issues, the coverage of these protests is concerning. More specifically, the nuance surrounding the dispute has been lost as it has traveled overseas—it has been replaced by hyperbole and misleading narratives. I wonder if the tweeting celebrities or the Georgetown clubs who said they stood with farmers understand the details of the proposed reforms or if they understand the full context of the issues that plague India’s agricultural industry.

They may be surprised to learn that the very laws that some farmers are protesting against may be the first step to saving Indian agriculture altogether. 

A Threatened Elite 

First, let’s clarify what a “farmers’ protest” means. The protestors that have gained international recognition are those that have been camping outside Delhi since November 2020. These farmers are almost entirely from two Indian states, Punjab and Haryana, and some hail from western Uttar Pradesh. Considering that a staggering 60 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people are employed in agriculture, this makes the protestors a very small minority. 

You have to ask yourself: can thousands of farmers from three states really claim to represent the will of the hundreds of millions of India’s farmers? Unions have claimed that more than 250 million workers (a number that has not been independently verified) participated in a nationwide strike on November 26 in solidarity with the Delhi protestors. Importantly, however, the vast majority of these strikers were not farmers but workers from various other professions campaigning on tangential grievances such as pension reform. In addition, this strike only occurred on a single day, and there have been no demonstrations of a similar scale since then. The Delhi campers remain the only consistent protestors and, by and large, the only consistent farmer protestors.

Why, then, are these specific farmers outraged? To answer that question, one has to understand the details of the reforms. At their core, the three farm laws passed through India’s Parliament in September seek to deregulate India’s agricultural industry, which the government has tightly controlled for decades. For instance, the laws would provide farmers a framework to engage in contract farming with independent buyers, but most notably, the laws would allow farmers to sell their produce outside of the state-run Agriculture Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs).

For more than fifty years, most of India’s agriculture has been managed by the APMCs and regulated by a minimum support price (MSP), a price floor. These measures were instituted in the 1960s, a time when India suffered chronic food shortages; now, however, the country suffers from the opposite problem: there is too much food. State agencies are overflowing with surplus food, which wastes millions of rupees and has left tons of rotting produce sitting in storage vaults. To make matters worse, it is difficult to export many of these products because the MSP is so much higher than the international market price. All this has led to a highly inefficient agricultural industry, which only contributes to about 18 percent of GDP despite employing 60 percent of Indians; India could be acting as the breadbasket of the world, but instead, much-needed food is caught up in this bureaucratic paralysis. 

The APMC system has also been largely devastating to India’s small-scale farmers. The committees are run by a legion of middlemen, or arhatiyas, who buy produce from farmers and then sell them to buyers in the government or businesses. The problem is, these arhatiyas can charge commissions of up to 10 percent for work that farmers could do themselves, but they are not allowed to by law. The arhatiyas also serve as makeshift moneylenders, offering essential loans to desperate farmers, but they only do so at exorbitant interest rates of up to 18 percent compounded twice a year. This blatant exploitation is devastating to already impoverished farmers, contributing to escalating crises in the countryside: both debt and farmer suicides have been skyrocketing across the country at a frightening pace. It’s no wonder that economists have been urging government reform for decades. 

The farm laws are not perfect, but they are a critical first step to rejuvenating this 50-year-old system and freeing farmers from the wrath of the middlemen. Claims that the laws will put farmers at the mercy of corporations are exaggerations at best, especially since the APMCs will remain as a fallback option. While companies theoretically gain power under the new scheme, so will the farmers, due to their freedom to enter into their own contracts. Economists such as the chief of the International Monetary Fund have also noted that the laws have the potential to raise farmer incomes since they would no longer be forced to pay out money to the arhatiyas. 

However, three particular areas have benefitted the most from this stagnant APMC system: Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh. It’s from these regions where more than half of the rice and wheat bought by government agencies originates, and in fact, many of those protesting are APMC middlemen themselves, holding dual jobs of both landowner and agent in an absurd cabal of corruption. These farmers feel that the reforms will lead to the dismantling of the APMCs and MSP, even though the laws don’t actually affect either and only give farmers more options in their selling. In fact, the government has repeatedly affirmed that both elements will be retained. Despite portrayals of the government as callous and intransigent, it has been negotiating with the farmer unions for weeks; lawmakers even agreed to push back the implementation of the farm laws by 18 months. But the protestors want nothing less than a complete repeal, based largely on a misunderstanding about what the reforms actually accomplish.

Is the current system really defensible? In Punjab, for example, most Punjabi farmers don’t even benefit from it. In terms of land distribution, Punjab is one of the country’s most unequal states, with a genuinely staggering level of consolidation: while large holdings, or holdings over three hectares, take up 14 percent of all of India’s land, they cover 66 percent of Punjab’s land. Untouchables, members of India’s lowest castes (caste being a form of inherited class that has been present in India for millennia), make up almost 32 percent of Punjab’s population, but they own just 6 percent of private land, half the national average. It’s the large landowners, who come from high castes like the Jats, that get rich off of the APMCs while their workers get peanuts. By and large, the people camping outside Delhi are not salt of the earth peasants you might be imagining, but the wealthy Jat elite fearing profit cuts. 

Storming the Ramparts 

Activists have also accused the Narendra Modi government of carrying out a crackdown against the protestors, pointing to newly installed barbed-wire fencing and the use of temporary internet shutdowns at their campsites. Certainly, internet restriction is something worth objecting to, but in this instance, the criticism ignores the context surrounding the shutdowns, which is that the government only took such drastic action after the violent events of January 26. 

On that day, India’s Republic Day holiday, protesting farmers veered away from their pre-planned routes and began violently clashing with officers; hundreds of policemen were injured, and one farmer even died when his tractor fell on top of him. Some even stormed Delhi’s famous Red Fort, with rioters planting a Sikh religious flag on a building long considered an important national symbol. Even though this violence is barely mentioned in reports on the farmer protests, there is no doubt that the use of violence has severely damaged the farmers’ credibility in the eyes of many Indians. 

While the Delhi Police’s internet shutdown was an excessive step, one cannot fault them for stepping up general security with measures like fencing. Even though only a small section of the protestors participated in the rioting, supporters who want an honest debate about the farm laws cannot ignore their actions just because the cause seems just. But, instead of rectifying the domestic discussion through measures such as publicly purging violent elements from the movement, pro-farmer activists have internationalized the issue. It’s no coincidence that the celebrity tweetstorm occurred just a few days after the January 26 violence. Yet choosing this approach will only further de-legitimize the protests for Indians, who would be rightly confused to see foreign celebrities they may have never heard of commenting on domestic issues they clearly do not understand.

In fact, if the goal of the pro-farmer activists was to pressure foreign governments into supporting the farmers’ demands, their efforts may not bear fruit—although a U.S. State Department spokesman did push back against the use of internet shutdowns, even he gave tacit support to the government’s farm bills, saying, “In general, the US welcomes steps that would improve the efficiency of India’s markets and attract greater private sector investment.” So much for solidarity. 

Conclusion

All this is not to say that I feel no sympathy for the protestors, who have legitimate fears that their way of life might be forever damaged. But the simple truth remains that they are benefitting from a flawed system, one that has brought prosperity to themselves but no such wealth to the rest of India’s farmers, or even to the impoverished small-scale farmers within their own states. And such grave concerns seem hysterical now that the government has repeatedly affirmed that systems like the APMCs and MSP will continue.

Ultimately, these farm reforms are long overdue, and it would be a shame if the Modi government had to abandon them due to special interest groups who are functionally holding the capital city hostage. If you strip away the narratives and study the facts, it becomes obvious that the reforms will help far more farmers than hurt. 

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