What is your assessment about the recent farmers’ movement in India? Elaborate. (2024)
The mobilisation against the three farm laws of 2020 and its sequel of 2024–25 is the most consequential agrarian agitation of independent India. Sociologically it is best read not as a new departure but as the new farmers’ movement — market-oriented, anti-state, led by surplus-producing owner-cultivators — operating at its highest organisational pitch.
What the movement was
- The three laws were enacted in September 2020. Farmers’ unions formed the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, occupied Delhi’s borders from 26 November 2020, and held them for over a year; the repeal was announced on 19 November 2021 and the Farm Laws Repeal Act passed that month.
- The unfinished demand — a legal guarantee of Minimum Support Price at the C2 plus 50 per cent formula of the National Commission on Farmers chaired by M. S. Swaminathan (2004–06) — produced only a Committee on MSP in July 2022, which has yet to report publicly.
- The 2024 “Delhi Chalo” phase, led by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (Non-Political) under Jagjit Singh Dallewal and the Kisan Mazdoor Morcha under Sarwan Singh Pandher, was halted at the Shambhu and Khanauri borders; Dallewal’s fast ran from November 2024 to April 2025.
Assessment: an organisational success
By resource mobilisation theory (John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald), its achievement lay less in grievance than in infrastructure — village union networks, the gurdwara langar system, diaspora remittances and a disciplined digital presence. Charles Tilly’s vocabulary fits: it invented a new repertoire of contention, the semi-permanent border occupation, in place of the older rasta roko. Rajni Kothari’s “non-party political process” describes its form exactly — a mass force outside party structures forcing a legislative reversal, which almost no Indian movement has achieved.
Assessment: its class limits
- Its base remained the big and middle farmers of D. N. Dhanagare’s agrarian classification — irrigated, market-dependent, MSP-reliant growers of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.
- It repeated the old silence. Punjab has India’s largest Scheduled Caste share (31.94 per cent, Census 2011) and the smallest Dalit landholding; agricultural wages and land redistribution were never on the charter. Tom Brass’s charge that these are employers’ movements in populist dress retains force, against Gail Omvedt’s reading of them as genuinely new social movements.
- The distress that dominates the countryside sits beside the movement rather than within it: NCRB recorded 10,786 suicides in the farming sector in 2023, of which 6,096 were agricultural labourers.
Conclusion
The movement proved that organised agrarian India can still veto policy, but it spoke for the producer, not for the cultivating poor. Until price politics is joined to wage and land politics, its victories will remain defensive.