Question

write an essay on farmer's movements in contemporary India in hindi

Answer 1

In India, we might say that there are primarily two types of agrarian mobilizations. One is of the poor agricultural labourers and marginal farmers, the other is of the more prosperous and independent owner-cultivators who produce a considerable marketed surplus.1 This apart, there has been several spontaneous micro-mobilisations and individual protests.
Significant historic peasant insurrections against the zamindari, mahalwari, ryotwari and jagirdari systems have been witnessed in the past. The Santhal insurrection, the Mopillah rebellion, Punjab peasant revolt, Kheda peasant struggle, the Nijai Bol movement and the Champaran struggle are few such struggles.
In the post independent India, two ideologies were associated with peasant movements, Viz., i) the Bhoodan and Sarvodaya of Vinoba Bhave and Jai Prakash Narayan and ii) the Communist. However, significant peasant movements such as Tebhaga, Telangana, Naxalbari and land grab movements emerged on the basis of communist ideology. 2 They were significant because they changed certain social structures. While Tebhaga was primarily a tenant revolt, the Telangana, the Naxalbari and the land grab movements were against the monopoly ownership of land by landlords and demanded redistribution of land to the poor and landless. And till date, it is the communists who make the mobilization of poor agricultural labourers and marginal farmers with short term demands on wage hike, assured employment and better working conditions and long term demands for equal distribution of land and other resources.
From late 70s, the other significant movements of the owner-cultivators or farmers have surfaced in few states. Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) of Karnataka, Shetkari Sangathan of Maharashtra and Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) of West UP, Punjab and Haryana have been very vocal and visible in the past two decades. Here, apparently, the agriculturists present themselves as an undifferentiated phalanx as they often did during British India. But one should bear in mind that these farmers’ movements distinguish their interests quite clearly from the interests of the agricultural labourers. 3
Sharad Joshi, the proponent of farmers’ movement in India, now the advisor on agricultural policy for Prime Minister, Vajpayee, made a vociferous espousal about the Bharat vs. India – the rural India vs. urban India dichotomy. The primary contradiction is characterised as that between the rural and the urban. Therefore, the enemy is the government at the centre and at the state. Tikait of BKU has been using the slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan and not Bharat vs India and has been gaining support of middle farmers and even small farmers, even here the general orientation of struggles are against the government policies, the corruption in the administration and many other related issues. Further, despite their call and assertions for broad peasant unity, these movements have been pro-rich in programmes and in practice. Their general demands are; increase in public investment in agriculture, low input cost, higher cost for agricultural produce, remunerative price or minimum support price, easy availability of institutional loans and of late guaranteed procurement of farm produce. All these demands have mainly oriented from the perspective of the market rather than the small and poor farmers.
However, in some studies, the concept of peasant movements has been treated as an expression of the peasant’s search for identity. The dimension of the identity-oriented New Social Movements as seen in the peasant movement of Karnataka refers to collective actions of a group to produce solidarity and identity in the hierarchical structure of the Indian society.4 These were manifested in the ransacking of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Cargill Seeds Corporation, Cremate Monsanto campaign and so on.