Discuss the main features of farmers’ movements in independent India. (2015)
Confined to the years after 1947, agrarian mobilisation in India divides at two watersheds — Naxalbari (1967) and the Green Revolution. Zamindari abolition removed the colonial antagonist; the Green Revolution then created a new one, the state as price-setter. The features below follow from that sequence.
Feature 1: the land question survives 1947, then fades
The first two decades continued the colonial agenda. The Telangana struggle was called off in 1951; land-grab agitations pressed unimplemented ceiling laws; Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan and Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sarvodaya sought voluntary transfer and largely failed. Naxalbari (1967), where adhiars seized jotedars’ land under Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, was the last great land-centred insurrection; A. R. Desai (Agrarian Struggles in India After Independence, 1986) treated it as the boundary of an era.
Feature 2: the leading class changes
Desai divided post-independence struggles into those launched by the newly propertied rich farmers and those by the rural poor. The second stream shrank; the first grew. The new farmers’ movements of the late 1970s were led by irrigated, surplus-producing owner-cultivators — D. N. Dhanagare’s big and middle farmers — not by tenants or labourers.
Feature 3: the demand shifts from land to price
Remunerative prices, cheap power and water, fertiliser subsidy and loan waivers replaced rent reduction and land redistribution. Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana, Mahendra Singh Tikait’s Bharatiya Kisan Union and M. D. Nanjundaswamy’s Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha shared the Bharat versus India frame: a sectoral grievance against the urban order, not a class grievance against a landlord.
Feature 4: non-party form, regional base, new repertoires
These movements were deliberately non-party and charismatically led — Rajni Kothari’s “non-party political process” — regionally concentrated in the Green Revolution belts, and resting on dominant-caste village networks. Their methods were blockades, denial of village entry to officials and mass dharnas, later long marches and border occupations.
Feature 5: after 1991, distress and coalition
Liberalisation split the movement — Joshi welcomed market access, most opposed WTO commitments. Distress reframed everything: the NSS Situation Assessment Survey (77th round, 2019) found 50.2 per cent of agricultural households indebted with average monthly income of ₹8,337, and NCRB recorded 10,786 suicides in the farming sector in 2023. Fragmented unions began federating — the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (2017) after the Mandsaur firing, the Kisan Long March from Nashik to Mumbai (2018) which brought Adivasi forest-rights claimants into farmer politics, and the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, whose year-long occupation of Delhi’s borders forced repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021.
Feature 6: a persistent silence
Across all phases the agricultural labourer’s wage, the concealed tenant and caste go unaddressed. Gail Omvedt read these movements as genuine new social movements; Tom Brass read them as proprietors’ politics in populist dress. The silence is evidence for Brass.
Conclusion
Independent India’s farmers’ movements moved from insurgency over land to bargaining over price, and from the poorest to the propertied. They have become more effective and less transformative at the same time — able to reverse a law, unable to change an agrarian structure.