The farmers agitation in Mandsaur, leading to police firing that left six dead and over 7,000 of cases still filed against the protesters, has cast its long shadow on the ongoing Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh.
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The man behind that agitation, chief of the Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sanghathan, Shiv Kumar Sharma alias Kakkaji, is however, not in a mood to allow that shadow to fade even if the Congress has not successfully cornered the government politically on the issue.
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi expected to hit the campaign trail in the State over the weekend, Mr. Sharma has decided to raise questions over the “29 policies that the current government has announced for farmers.”
“The current government has announced policies like fasal bima yojana (crop insurance scheme) and the Bhaavaantar Bhugtan Yojana or the price deficit finance scheme, and a new Minimum Support Price (MSP), in all 29 schemes that do not fundamentally address the fact that input costs of farmers have gone up without requisite compensation. I shall be raising this issue again and again through the polls, especially since Prime Minister Modi is to address campaign rallies here,” he told
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Referring to the agitation last year, Mr. Kumar, who was also once the much influential chief of the RSS affiliate Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, said that while the cameras may have gone away farmers have continued to protest against non-remunerative prices and policies that do not address the real issues faced by them.
Yatra with message
“This August 15th we started a Yatra across 300 out of a total of 320 blocks in the State. It culminated in Bhopal on October 28th, with a very powerful political message in its wake.
“I basically quoted former President S. Radhakrishan who said that while cooking rotis it is important to flip it over every once in a while or it burns out. In the same way, a government should be changed every five years or it gets complacent,” he said.