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Afterthought - A day at Tikri Border


 Year, 2020 is about to end and there is newness in the air, except to those farmers who have to spend their night Delhi’s cold weather. There are many who have multiple doubts and paradox about the argi – farm laws passed by the Indian Parliament in the September House in 2020. But question raise on the manner in which those laws were passed in the Upper House. These bills qualify in merit or not is a whole question in itself. There are few points in each bill which have implicit meaning and these doubts create doubt in the minds of farmers, which compelled them to protest. Now, lets see the whole Farmer’s Question in detail.

On 5th June 2020, Union Cabinet promulgated 3 ordinances

1.     Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance, 2020

2.     Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020

3.     Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Service Ordinance, 2020

Later in the September House, all these Ordinance were passed in a manner which overtly show that those bills were not passed in a very democratic manner. This was and still is not a point of protest. Protest of the farmers as evident from the conversation that I had at Tikri Border, are based on 3 pillars – Opposition to Farm Bills; Attitude of Union Government; Media Management.

Opposition to Farm Bills

Farmers started their protest in Punjab some 3 months ago demanding amendment to the bills which the union government denied in a very implicit manner.


Point ‘number 6’ according to farmers is a plan of Union Government to weaken the present APMC and promote private trader to do trade with the farmer. Another issue with the bill is the issue of ‘Dispute Resolution’, given in ‘Miscellaneous’ Chapter of the ‘The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020’, given below. The reason stated by the government of providing no civil court right owes to the fact that, Indian Judicial System is already overburden and will not provide fast resolution to the cases. Secondly, government states that legal fee is very high and is beyond the reach of the farmers.



But, these two reasons do not qualify the merit as ‘Judicial Remedy’ is the part of basic structure of constitution which was ruled by the Supreme Court of India in very famous case popularly known as Keshavananda Bharati Case. As far as high legal fee is concerned this too is a mistake of the government as high legal fee is one of the major concerns, and is the reason that Lok Adalat was forwarded by the Judiciary itself. Coming to the 3rd Act which is ‘Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Service Act, 2020’. This also have the same problem as that of the above Act.




Thus, there issues with the bill are responsible for the protest of the bills on pan – India level. The question that why only Punjab Farmers are present at the protest site and not of other states is answered in subsequent section of this very article.

Attitude of Union Government

Union government is having superseding power w.r.t state government and this power is given by the polity that was formulated when India got independence. Many governments in past have use this power to impose its policies forcefully. Same tactic was applied by the present NDA led government to enact the laws stated above. To do this lot of political calculation was done to pass the bill in the Upper House, as in the Lower House NDA led BJP have clear majority. The way bill was passed in the Upper House shows that the whole House was manipulated and I must say that Opposition was equally responsible for the passage of bill as instead of showing a decent opposition they resorted to creating chaos in the House, and in that chao bill was passed by voice vote even though the demand was of individual voting. Secondly, when farmers were protesting in their state and demanding for the amendment in the bills that time government pay no significant attention to the protesting farmers and thus, it created a burning anger which was looking for a vent to come out. It was the same attitude that government showed to all the previous protest – JNU protest and Shaheen Bagh – also one must not forget the role of media which is used by the current political party in a way which delegitimise the protest by projecting them as Anti – national and Jihadist. Same tactic was applied here too by calling the protester as Khalistani. Later when this tactic do not work they started calling them ‘Aarteya Protest’ rather than farmers protest. This is the time to understand the relationship between the ‘Aarteya and Farmer’.

            Aarteya & Farmers Relationship

After the implementation of the Mandi system way back in 1966. People who were resident of the village became people who provide services like – unloading; uploading; sorting; weighing; arranging labour; etc – these people charge some percentage to provide these services and thus, the word ‘Middleman’ used by government is totally misplaced. As, in economic terms ‘middleman’ means a person who buys a commodity in bulk and then trade it further. This result in the increase in the price. But Aarteya are not middleman as they do not buy in bulk and restrict themselves to providing service as mentioned above. Thus, farmer and Aarteya have a relation of what farmer calls ‘nau-mas’ (blood vessel and muscle). Aarteya give credit to the farmer at any stoke of hour and since, that person is a resident of same village.

Thus, there is a fear that these bills will cease this relationship, and farmers will be forsaken and will have to depend totally on the mercy of bankers.

Media Management

Every government in the history of humankind had and will in future manipulate media to project its own ideology and motive. This trend gets bigger after the discovery of the long-distance communication and is presently humongous due to social media. NDA led by BJP have used media to not only project good image of government but had in past and also during this protest use media to delegitimise the protest. As mentioned above projecting protest as Anti-National and Jihadist is done by the media industry who support government all the time in an implicit manner and sometime shows their support in open. All this is done on the logic that we all should support government to make governance effective.

            Second reason of this trend of media management is that all big corporate owns big stake in media house. This makes these channel susceptible to run the agenda according to the wish of those big corporate. Thus, this raise the question on the very economic model on which media industry is based upon.

            Farmer are really angry on this attitude of media of showing only those things which are beneficial to the government, such as: -

1.     Media showing that the protest is not widespread and is concentrated to just Punjab and Haryana.

2.     Not showing the flaws of the bills thus, a discussion has vent as one section is saying bills are 100% correct and other section is saying that bills are 100% wrong.

3.     Not reporting instances of other farmers coming from Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra.

4.     Biggest wrong that these farmers are actually Khalistani.

. To conclude this, it can be said that government miscalculated the bills in all respect be it political, social or economical. That is the reason that there are huge scope of amendment in the bills.


Reference 

1. http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2020/222038.pdf

2. http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2020/222040.pdf

3. http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2020/222039.pdf

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