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Farmers protest: In mobilisation, farmer allies turned on govts -Partha Sarahti Biswas, Kavitha Iyer & Zeeshan Shaikh
-The Indian Express

As the farm protests in Maharashtra spilled over to MP, with five people killed in police firing in Mandsaur last week, The Sunday Express looks at the economics and politics of the unrest

ONE gloomy afternoon this March, a disillusioned Dhanu Dhorde Patil, 43, sat watching his television in Dongaon village, about 2 km from Puntamba in Ahmednagar district, the heart of the recent farmers’ agitation in Maharashtra. On screen were reports of doctors striking work across the state in protest against the growing violence against them. Patil, upset by the dip in onion prices, threw an idea at his friends that evening, one that would take Maharashtra by storm. “Why can’t we strike work like the doctors have?” By then, Dr Sanjay Dhanvate, managing director of Puntamba’s Asha Kiran Paraplegic Center, was already thinking along the same lines. The state’s farmers had tried everything from fasts to railway blockades — with little success. “A strike would be the ultimate weapon — farmers would not grow or trade in agri commodities,” he says.

On April 3, the Puntamba Gram Sabha unanimously passed an eight-point charter of demands threatening a strike from June 1 if they were not met. “A single village on strike would hardly be news, so over the next few days we asked almost 200 villages to pass similar resolutions,” says Dhorde Patil, who was once associated with Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption movement. With Nashik and Ahmednagar villages leading the way, over 2,000 gram panchayats passed resolutions of a Shetkari Sampa or farmers’ strike on May 1, Maharashtra Day. Incidentally, it was local BJP leader Dhananjay Jadhav who took the lead in Puntamba. “A meeting was held in Pune on May 11 to form a core committee to spearhead the movement. Some villagers had reservations about the speed at which things were moving, but we followed Jadhav’s lead anyway,” says Suhas Wadane, a villager.

At the Pune meeting, additional power centres emerged. There was the Karad-based event manager Sandeep Gidde, Kamal Sawant of the Bhumata Sanghatana and Shantaram Kunjir of the Maratha Seva Sangh. “This core committee then began to travel across the state to spread the word of the plans for June 1,” Dhanvate says. Simultaneously, Raju Shetti of the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana party, an ally of the ruling BJP, had begun to openly express his unhappiness with the Maharashtra government’s intransigence on a farm loan waiver. By mid-May, even as Dhanvate and 20 villagers prepared to meet Fadnavis, Shetti was planning a padyatra from Pune to Mumbai. At their meeting with the CM, Dhanvate and team were willing to reverse the strike call. “But new leaders had emerged and several organisations decided to continue,” admits Dhanvate.

Days later, Shetti’s padyatra began, more or less independent of the other organisations. But the thousands of farmers who attended Shetti’s rallies along his route didn’t really see the two struggles as separate. The demands were the same. Shetti’s yatra, which he labelled as his ‘Atmaklesh Yatra’ — a self-professed repentance for supporting the BJP — should have set off alarm bells, but senior government sources say the administration failed to recognise its seriousness as for one, Shetti’s own party colleague, Maharashtra minister of state for agriculture Sadashiv Khot, had conspicuously stayed away.

Once the strike kicked in and the urban centres began to feel the pinch, with supplies squeezed, the core committee was called for a marathon discussion with Fadnavis in Mumbai on June 2. The committee and the CM announced the withdrawal of the strike before dawn on June 3, with the government agreeing to the Rs 30,000 crore loan waiver. But by then the movement had acquired a life of its own. Those in Nashik and elsewhere too refused to call off the strike — the assurances were not in line with their demands.

The core committee became the target of farmers’ ire. Gidde’s proximity to Khot, and the fact that top negotiator Jayajirao Suryavanshi had stayed back at Khot’s bungalow, incensed farmers who saw it as a betrayal. In Puntamba, where it all began, Jadhav’s ties with the BJP led villagers to declare that the government was trying to sabotage the movement. While Suryavanshi eventually had to apologise, Jadhav is still to return to Puntamba even though the strike was called off on June 8.

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