Are the contemporary farmers’ movements in India changing their course? Discuss. (2020)
The “course” against which change must be measured was set in the late 1970s by the new farmers’ movements: non-party, regionally organised, anti-state and price-centred. Contemporary mobilisations have visibly altered their scale, alliances and repertoire, but not the class that leads them. The honest answer is therefore a qualified yes — the course has changed in form, not in content.
The course originally set
Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, Mahendra Singh Tikait’s Bharatiya Kisan Union in western Uttar Pradesh, M. D. Nanjundaswamy’s Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and the Tamil Nadu Agriculturalists’ Association shared a single frame — Joshi’s Bharat versus India, an exploited countryside against a subsidised urban order. Their demands were remunerative prices, cheap inputs, power tariffs and loan waivers, never land or wages. Gail Omvedt (Reinventing Revolution, 1993) read them as India’s new social movements; Tom Brass read them as rich-peasant ideology in peasant dress.
Where the course has genuinely changed
- From state to market as antagonist. Before 1991 the state was attacked as a miserly price-setter. After liberalisation and the WTO agreements the enemy became trade opening and corporate contracting — the very ground of the 2020 agitation. Joshi’s own pro-market position became a minority one.
- From regional fronts to national coalitions. The All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee, formed in July 2017 after the police firing at Mandsaur, drew together well over a hundred organisations, and the Samyukta Kisan Morcha repeated the feat in 2020, sustaining a year-long occupation of Delhi’s borders that ended with the repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021 — an outcome no earlier farmers’ agitation achieved.
- From agitation to distress politics. Indebtedness and suicide have entered the charter. The NSS Situation Assessment Survey (77th round, 2019) found 50.2 per cent of agricultural households indebted, with average monthly income of ₹8,337; NCRB counted 10,786 deaths by suicide in the farming sector in 2023.
- New repertoires and alliances. The Kisan Long March from Nashik to Mumbai (March 2018), led by the All India Kisan Sabha and composed largely of Adivasi cultivators demanding titles under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, joined tribal land claims to farmer politics. Border occupations, langar provisioning and social-media framing replaced the older rasta roko, and for the first time farmers’ bodies made common cause with central trade unions in joint strike calls. Charles Tilly’s notion of shifting repertoires of contention captures this precisely.
Where it has not changed
The leading stratum is still the surplus-producing, irrigated owner-cultivator — D. N. Dhanagare’s big and middle farmers. The agricultural labourer’s wage, the tenant’s security and the Dalit’s claim to common land remain outside the agenda, and caste is never named. Rajni Kothari’s “non-party political process” still describes the form; the class content is what has stayed constant.
Conclusion
The contemporary farmers’ movement has changed its opponent, its scale and its methods while keeping its constituency. It is a broader movement of the same class — which is why it can force a policy reversal and still leave the agrarian structure untouched.