How Narendra Modi misread the mood of India s angry farmers bbc.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bbc.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Roy Landersen February 1, 2021
Above, The Indian Express/Abhinav Saha; inset, Militant/Carole LesnickIndian farmers in tractorcade outside New Delhi Jan. 7 protest new laws that would end government-guaranteed price supports. Inset, support action in Yuba City, California, Jan. 16.
Hundreds of thousands of working farmers are maintaining their protests around the Indian capital, New Delhi, determined to roll back laws aimed at crushing their livelihoods. The measures passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government would end state-guaranteed minimum prices for staple crops. They come after farmers’ incomes have declined for years, forcing many into deepening debt.
Up to 300,000 farmers are organized at the protest sites by nearly 400 farm organizations. This is the largest protest against the Indian government in decades and the biggest opposition Modi has faced since coming into office.
BBC News
image captionThe farmers are demanding the repeal of three market-friendly farm laws
After more than 45 days of protests and eight rounds of talks with the government, India s farmers have refused to budge.
Nothing short of a repeal of three market-friendly farm laws - designed to loosen rules around the sale, pricing and storage of farm produce - will make the farmers retreat from protest sites ringing the capital, Delhi. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court, responding to a bunch of petitions, put the laws on hold. The uncertainty lingers.
So why did Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government fail to anticipate the blowback to the laws and misread the public mood in the affected states of Punjab and Haryana? Were they lulled into complacency because a Punjab-based ally initially supported the laws? (The Akali Dal later reversed its stand and quit the government.) Did the government believe that the laws would not lead to any significant erosi
“We have a team of four persons to decide on editorial content. Controversy was due to communication gap. There was nothing wrong with editorial. Some people had objected over Udoke, who had written the editorial. But later we clarified that he was not in our editorial team. He just wrote editorial,” said Ajaypal Natt, another member of ‘Trolley Times’ team and son of a farmer union leader Sukhdarshan Natt.
Sukhpreet Udoke said, “No one could explain to me what was wrong with editorial. My opposition was only due to one reason that I am seen as Sikh writer and activist. Farmer unions are mostly Left and they are not able to tolerate diversity in this agitation. They are in fix as decision making is no more in their hands due to massive size of this agitation and it is the reason that they are searching for scapegoats.”
Vishav Bharti
Chandigarh, December 18
Recently, sitting in a trailer, a group of four youngsters discussed a Facebook post at the Singhu border. An old farmer, sitting next to them, quipped: “Oye mundiyo tusi parhe likhe lagde ho, saanu vi dass do ki ho reha”. Thus the idea of Trolley Times was born. Farmers’ own newspaper.
Reporters were aplenty; an army of amateur photographers was ready with the feed, a trailer became their editing desk, and soon came out the first edition of 2,000 copies of four-page bilingual paper. It was an instant hit on Friday.
“Looking at the response, we are going to print 10,000 copies of the next issue,” says Ajaypal Natt from Mansa, a physiotherapy teacher. He along with Surmeet Mavi, Gurdeep Singh and Narinder Bhinder conceived the idea. The name, Natt says, was floated by one of us just out of fun. “But we instantly picked that,” he says.