Winning wars: Tractors and tanks share a common history and an indirect link with Sikh-led protests
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Winning wars: Tractors and tanks share a common history and an indirect link with Sikh-led protestsBy
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Synopsis
It is a history that also interlinks with a global history of Sikh lead protests. The point where these histories come together is Stockton, a city in California at the edge of the fertile Central Valley where the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers meet through many waterways to form the California Delta region.
Holt’s company would provide 2100 track mounted tractors to the British army and in 1918 Swinton visited Stockton to express their appreciation.
View: The shared history of tractors, tanks and Sikh-led protests
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Yet tractors and tanks are not as different as those events made them seem. They share a common history which also, strikingly, interlinks indirectly with a history of Sikh lead protests.
‘Tractors Versus Tanks!’ newspaper headlines proclaimed after this year’s Republic Day. Thankfully, the two didn’t come into direct conflict, but the juxtaposition was striking, with the Indian Army’s tanks rolling in the official parade, and the tractors of the farmers protesting the new farm laws rumbling and battering their way through Delhi, sometimes just a short distance away.