One year after launching a mass protest against the three contentious farm reform laws, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha is taking its fight back to Parliament, with plans to hold daily tractor marches to Sansad Bhavan during the winter session.
In a decision taken at a general body meeting of the SKM on Tuesday, farm unions said they would assert their right to protest within the national capital and send 500 selected volunteers in tractor trollies to Parliament every day from November 29 until the end of the session. They will move “peacefully and with full discipline,” it said.
‘Pro-corporate Central Government’
It said the move is to “increase the pressure manifold on this obstinate, insensitive, anti-people and pro-corporate BJP Central Government to force it to concede the demands for which farmers across the country have launched a historic struggle for one year”.
The SKM’s protest on the outskirts of Delhi began on November 26. After two months camped on the city’s borders, farmers entered the capital with their tractors on Republic Day, with some groups clashing violently with police as they deviated from planned routes and headed towards the Red Fort and central Delhi.
In July, during the monsoon session, the SKM was allowed to re-enter the city in groups of 200 farmers in buses heavily guarded by the police to hold a parallel Kisan Sansad just a kilometre away from the official proceedings.
In the run-up to the first anniversary, several members of the SKM have expressed impatience with the Government’s intransigence, with popular U.P. leader Rakesh Tikait of the Bharatiya Kisan Union giving an ultimatum that the agitation would be intensified if the demands were not met by November 26. Over the weekend, the Haryana unions met and decided to propose that the SKM either march to Parliament or gherao the Prime Minister’s residence to mark the occasion.
Plan for mahapanchayats
Instead, the SKM has decided to mobilise farmers at the Delhi borders and State capitals for mahapanchayats on the day which is also observed as Constitution Day.
The Centre says the three new laws, which have now been suspended from implementation by the Supreme Court, are essential to reform agricultural marketing and provide choices to farmers. Critics claim the laws will dilute the procurement of crops at minimum support prices and benefit large corporates to the detriment of small farmers. Apart from a full repeal of the laws, the SKM is demanding a legal guarantee of MSP for all farm produce.
