Explain the dynamics of neo-farmers’ movement in contemporary India. (2018)
The neo- or new farmers’ movements, beginning in the late 1970s in Punjab, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, differ structurally from older peasant struggles: where the peasant fought a landlord for land, the farmer bargains with the state over price. Their dynamics follow from that shift — from a class in production to a class in the market.
The structural motor: the Green Revolution
The new technology of the 1960s created a stratum of irrigated, input-purchasing, surplus-selling owner-cultivators — D. N. Dhanagare’s big and middle farmers. Such a cultivator buys fertiliser, power and credit at administered rates and sells at an administered price, so every term of his income is set by the state — which makes the state, not the landlord, the antagonist.
The ideological dynamic: Bharat versus India
Sharad Joshi of the Shetkari Sanghatana framed the conflict as an exploited agrarian Bharat drained by a subsidised urban India — a sectoral, not class, antagonism. This lets a movement led by employers of labour speak for “the farmer” as a whole, and silences the wage question. Mahendra Singh Tikait’s Bharatiya Kisan Union and M. D. Nanjundaswamy’s Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha worked the same frame regionally.
The organisational dynamic
- Non-party and charismatic: unions outside party structures, held by a leader rather than a cadre — Rajni Kothari’s non-party political process.
- Community infrastructure: caste and kin networks — khap assemblies in the Jat belt, dominant-caste bodies in the south — supply mobilisation at near-zero cost, as resource mobilisation theory predicts.
- Novel repertoire: road and rail blockades, denial of village entry to officials, later long marches and border occupations.
The contemporary dynamic: from subsidy to survival
After 1991 the movement split over liberalisation — Joshi welcomed market access, most others opposed WTO commitments — and distress then reframed the agenda. 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 recorded 10,786 suicides in the farming sector in 2023. Hence the coalitional phase: the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (2017) and the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, whose agitation forced repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021.
The unresolved argument
Gail Omvedt treats these as new social movements — non-party, multi-caste, converging with ecological politics. Tom Brass and Dhanagare reply that a movement which never raises the agricultural wage is a class movement of proprietors, its populist vocabulary a device of hegemony.
Conclusion
The neo-farmers’ movement is the political expression of commercialised agriculture in a state-administered market. Its power is the leverage of the surplus producer; its limit is that the landless labourer, who now outnumbers the cultivator in suicide statistics, has no place in it.