Roughly a year after the Delhi was rocked by violence, Delhi is rocked by violence. Again ? No, a year ago there were riots. This time, there are clashes between the protesters and the police. Clashes between two communities, and clashes by a determined lot to fight against the government and its police apparatus, are not the same. More importantly, dozens died a year ago. This time, there has been only one casualty. Hopefully, there will be no more. But is there nothing common ? Violence, some will say, is common. And violence is, by itself, something that should be condemned. Violence delegitimizes legitimate causes, damages public property and gets people killed. If democracy works, none of this should be required. If it doesn’t work, we must resist the temptation to quick fix it with fire.
But beyond the similarity and the superficial differences lies something fundamentally different. You would argue that it is the issue at stake. A year ago, Shaheen Baug was the symbol of protest against the possible delegitimization and stigmatization of the Muslim community by a government perceived as anti-minority. The protesters knew that they were heavily outnumbered, outmanoeuvred and hiding behind the fleshy shields of old women. It was a desperate stance, and for all its success and failure, the desperation was evident from day one to the day the Covid-emptied stage was unceremoniously pulled down. Repression was postponed by the possible moral cost of attacking old unarmed women, and engagement was out of question.
What followed the Delhi elections, was however, equally desperate. Angry at being challenged by old women of the minority community, politicians with vested interests (communal polarization to prevent a recurrence of Shaheen Baug, obviously) sent goons into Delhi to wreak havoc. For four odd days (or was it five?) the streets of a section of Delhi were given over to wanton carnage and destruction. There was nothing spontaneous about this – it was pre-planned, as evidenced by the overwhelming presence of armed young men and their desire to attack without provocation. Counter-attacks led to pitched battles that took dozens of lives before the police brought the situation under control.
History will judge the effect of this contrived violence on the prospects of the BJP and the AAP, or for that matter, on the social fabric of Delhi. It will, presumably, also judge whether the protests were successful in ensuring that the NRC/CAA business was put off indefinitely or not. But the numbers involved – protesters, rioters and other “interested parties” – were all in the hundreds, or low thousands. This contained the fallout – good, bad and ugly – and ensured that the results, at least in the short term, would also be superficial and meagre.
As the cliché goes, not this time. Since the December passage of three controversial agriculture laws, a protest has been continuing in and near Delhi. The protesters are farmers, primarily from the adjacent states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. They are convinced that the laws will open them up to the corporate hawks, who will eventually exploit them by dictating prices and farming conditions a la indigo planters of yore. The MSP or Minimum Support Price guaranteed by the government, which ensures that the farmers get adequate remuneration for their investment and effort come harvest time, will become a dead letter.
Opinions on the desirability of the farm laws is divided, with some claiming that it will emancipate the farmers to do business with whomever he likes. Others claim it will create oligopolies led by corporates in the farm sector and further depress farm incomes and standard of living in the countryside. Either may be true, or even both. What matters here is not the complex economics of the laws and their possibilities, because, as a section of the media never tires of pointing out, the farmers are simple folk who do not understand the nitty gritty of the laws. But they understand their farms, and for better or worse, are convinced that the government is out to gut the MSP system to favour its corporate backers. It may be that Punjab and Haryana are among the few states where the MSP system actually yields any results, and hence the earlier system was not completely broken. The farmers see these legislations as attempts to finish off what good remains in the system, and they won’t allow it.
The result was a widespread mobilization of support by the kisan (farmer) unions across all districts of Punjab and Haryana. Such mobilization soon occurred in UP, Rajasthan and even other, geographically distant states like Maharashtra and Karnataka. The decision was made to march to Delhi and demand of the rulers that they scrap these laws. So began the fateful chain of events that have led – neither inevitably nor predictably – to this moment.
First, the farmers’ movement was sought to be stopped, or atleast contained, to areas within the BJP ruled state of Haryana. The police massively underestimated the number of farmers and the HP of their tractors. Amid scenes of tractors breaking through barricades and tear gas and water cannons proving ineffectual (consider that these are the coldest months in North India), the obstruction effort failed miserably. By early December, the farmers were pouring across the barricades, closing in on Delhi. The Haryana police gave up the attempt altogether.
The farmers reached Delhi en masse and promptly refused to be corralled into stadia and thus marginalized from public view. Staying in public view was important because, as they knew very well, the farmer is a politically important symbol regardless of the colour of your political flag. Unlike the Muslim protest (as it was made out to be in early 2020), the farmers could not be easily “coloured”. Even the attempt to paint it as a Sikh protest did not achieve the desired effect because the patriotism of the Sikhs is much harder to question, Khalistan bogeys be damned.
The farmers had also come much better prepared, turning their trailers and tractors into makeshift homes. Since they were farmers, they had also provisioned well for the coming long vigil. Media and social media warriors were surprised – some rather unpleasantly – by the appearance of community kitchens or langars and the variety of food being available there. That this food could not be painted in beefy colours (pun intended) made it that much more visible and difficult to discard on the communal pile. Since the countryside supports people from the countryside, neither were fresh provisions difficult to obtain, and the mini-villages that cropped up soon proved remarkably resilient.
Another vital difference was that the protesters’ numbers soon dwarfed that of any other major protest in recent times. That these protesters were drawing on deep wellsprings of support was evident in farmers joining them from different districts of practically all the adjoining states as the protests went on. The numbers were soon in their thousands. Such huge crowds, if they chose to “press” their case, would become unmanageable.
It was numbers more than anything else that forced the government to the negotiating table. Narendra Singh Tomar, the ill-fated agriculture minister tasked with leading the negotiations, soon found that postponement and procrastination were anathema for those sitting in the biting cold hundreds of miles away from their homes. They demanded nothing short of repeal. The government of the day is not used to backing down, especially when it comes to “big ticket” reforms such as demonetization, NRC/CAA, GST, tax changes, import duty hikes, and now this. Amendments appeared palatable, but the protesters refused to accept this. Negotiations dragged on. The wise men in ivory towers – the politicians and their experts – were being made to look like insensitive fools.
It is the nature of a democratic system that where the executive fails to resolve a crisis, the judiciary steps in. The judiciary – the Supreme Court in this case – was already receiving PILs demanding a range of things, from dispersion of the protesters on Covid prevention grounds to investigation for Khalistani infiltration (by which was meant receiving Canadian and other foreign funds). Eventually, the Court focused on the right cases, pulled up the hapless minister and his bureaucracy for their lackluster progress, and suggested the setting up of a panel to suggest the way forward.
Farmers – no strangers to litigation given the complex land laws of this realm – did not want any truck with another panel. They had not made any such demand, theirs having been repeal pure and simple from day one. More importantly, however, the Court ordered that the laws be kept in abeyance for a year and a half so the panel could do its job. The farmer unions were invited to appear before it and present their case.
Whether they eventually do so remains to be seen. The protesters, however, were neither satisfied by the composition of the panel itself, nor the modus operandi of the government in going about the still-ongoing negotiations. So they stayed put in numbers that continued to raise the hackles of the Delhi police. In fact, they planned a grand tractor rally to press their case into the heart of Delhi on Republic Day 2021.
Such numbers are difficult to control, and violence was always feared. In reality, the farmers started out with remarkable restraint but at the wrong time and through the wrong places. The result was that barricades meant to keep them within the set bounds of time and space – if the most benign police claims are to be believed – were breached. Once more, the clash was in terms of numbers. Hundreds of police versus thousands of farmers and their sturdy tractors. If the police had been apprehensive about stopping such an influx (or onslaught, as some in the media would have you believe), they were proved right. By mid-day, the farmers had reached the symbolic Red Fort and hoisted, among many flags, those of their unions and the Sikh religion.
The path that history takes along the already tortuous course is unpredictable. That the farmers could have stayed non-violent goes without saying. That they could have turned violent given the vitriol being poured at them by sections of the media and the harsh conditions they have had to live under (about a hundred of them have lost their lives, some through suicide), was always a given. That the violence helps the administration paint the protesters as violent intruders bent on subverting peace and order also goes without saying.
But again, hark the numbers. If the administration chooses to clamp down, nothing short of the army would be needed to clear them out. The political costs for the BJP in Punjab and Haryana would be palpable. Already, the BJP leaders are facing significant blowback in both states, and the BJP-JJP government in the latter appears less than rock solid. On the other hand, the taste of violence and the impact it generated in the space of one day would continue to boil the blood of the “youngsters” who were blamed for breaching the barricades and turning up at places they weren’t supposed to go to.
With the benefit of hindsight and limited foresight, it becomes clear that the numbers were at play in places where it was not readily evident. For instance, considering that the Supreme Court gets petition for everything and the kitchen sink, it is remarkable that they took up the matter and pronounced judgment as quickly as they did. In case of other, limited and distant movements, it takes months before the cases come up through the legal pipeline. In this case, however, the court not just took up the matter but exercised its original jurisdiction to set up a panel that would report to it rather than to the government. This step, whose utility will be tested in the coming months, nonetheless was more progress than anything Tomar achieved with his lengthy meetings.
Numbers also ensured that the protests could not easily be maligned. It is easy to call a group of a few hundred as representing a clique. One or two thousand can be called followers of a political party. But many thousands are difficult to characterize, stigmatize and victimize. The social media lackeys of the administration tried their level best, throwing canards and calumny by the dozen and making dark references to Operation Blue Star and the riots in Delhi aimed at the Sikh Community. But numbers proved to be a barrier such slander could not surmount, since they kept on growing even as the protesters grew embittered at being called anti-nationals, agents of foreign interests, Khalistanis, et cetera cetera.
Numbers too, ensured that all all-out attack was not possible through “non-official” means. Sikhs carry weapons and farmers have basic martial training, especially in the Sikh tradition. This aspect of their self-defense was clear through interviews that some of the farmers gave in the early stages of the protests. Any attempt to violently disrupt the protesters would be met with righteous force, law and order be damned. And so non-violence was respected by all because reservoirs of arms guarded ahimsa. By way of comparison, where Shaheen Baug used the frail bodies of aged women, the farmers used the very real and rippling musculature of Nihangs and even ordinary farmers as insurance against physical assault.
But what does the future hold ? Attempts at sowing division have so far failed. The farmers have made it amply clear who they are and aren’t. Attempts by groups associated with Shaheen Baug – such as the students of Jamia Millia Islamia who generally express solidarity with anyone fighting against the government, have been summarily spurned. So have media groups seen as being pets of the government. The farmers make it clear to anyone willing to listen that they are farmers first and last, and their goal is repeal of the farm laws. It is this simplicity that holds them together and ensures that their opponents – the government as well as the political groups aligned with it, have their “divide and conquer” task cut out.
But will this unity hold ? History tells us that violence tends to reduce support, as major political parties like the AAP and AITC are distancing themselves from the violence. Given that these opposition parties have acted as megaphones for the protesters, this support is crucial for garnering sympathy in the face of the continued tirade against them in the government-aligned media. Further, there are arguments gaining ground that the suspension of the laws should be seen as a major victory and with the Rabi crop coming up for harvest in a couple of months’ time, the farmers should return to their fields, undefeated and victorious.
At the same time, the farmer unions appear to be in no mood to back down. They are wary of cooperating with the SC-appointed panel and have promised a foot march to Parliament on Budget Day (February 1, 2021). What matters now, as may be obvious, is whether they can keep their flock with them.
Because if the past few months, years and decades have taught us – numbers count in a democracy.