Chhavi Bhatia :
Nine months and counting—this is how old the farmers’ protest currently raging on Delhi borders, is in Punjab. Often termed as the cradle of the peasant’s movement, the agrarian state has spearheaded and is continually shaping it into a revolution. What started on the rail tracks of the northern state with only Punjabi farmers revolting against the new farm laws, soon spread to as far as southern states. The scale may be small and the agitation on the outskirts of the national capital where farmers from Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh are camping, grabbing all the limelight, the truth is that farmers are taking the incumbent government head-on. Supporters and naysayers have acknowledged their presence, determination, steel and resolve to continue with their peaceful sit-in in the face of vagaries of weather, brute police force, indifferent political will among other obstacles. They are no longer persona non-grata, buried in the headlines of suicides, droughts and floods. They are, in fact, the scriptwriters of a never-seen-before movement post-Independence, one that they have successfully carried forward with patience and wisdom. An awe-inspiring combination of the old and the young, each generation is learning and unlearning from each other, sifting what is best for the morcha.
For the first three months before the Punjab farmers decided to be heard louder and move to Delhi, thousands of them were living on railway tracks. And then made the roads on Singhu, Tikri, Ghazipur and Shajahanbad border their home. Fellow comrades from Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh showed alacrity in joining them, propelling the hitherto Punjab-centric stir to a pan-India agitation. From sub-zero temperatures in one of the harshest winters in decades to sizzling north Indian summers, they are weathering it all for “haund di ladai”(fight for existence). A most prominent and common sentiment that runs through the protest sites is that the farmers are not going back without getting the laws repealed. “We have not come this far to go back dejected,” they avow. They cannot be deterred, not with orchestrated police confrontations, not with smear campaigns calling them terrorists, not with plummeting or rising mercury, and least of all with intimidation.
Three quarters of a year under it, the farmers’ movement is going on as strong. It has found enormous solidarity beyond the farming community too—salaried class, students, teachers, artists, retired and serving bureaucrats and defence personnel. The humble sentiments of farmers struggling to salvage their land has resonated beyond borders too where NRIs are drumming support for them. To them, the farmer is a hero sitting in 48 degrees Celsius and cooking food using firewood, washing utensils with cold water in zero degrees Celsius. Tell this to the anndata and he would probably be embarrassed because in his simplistic prism of the world, he is a kisan and they don’t give up,
