Suhas Palshikar writes: It needs to transform itself into a movement, aspire to transcend prejudices and bring out the sublime among the followers rather than allow them to remain passive participants unwilling to change themselves.
Written by Suhas Palshikar |
Updated: October 27, 2021 7:54:35 am
The lynching and murder of Lakhbir Singh at the Singhu border is symptomatic of what agitations must try to avoid. Such incidents cannot be avoided only by condemnation or strict vigil over participants. Only when agitations overcome the limitations of the social order in which they obtain can they avoid such condemnable violence. This has something to do with the trajectory of an agitation, from being a protest to a movement.
Agitations can turn into movements due to the intransigence of rulers. That seems to be the fate of the farmers’ agitation. But even as agitations transform into movements, they run many risks. The agitation by the farmers of north-west India is no exception. Going on for a year, it has faced criticism from the ruling party and its sympathisers on many grounds. At the beginning of this year, the unruly behaviour of a section of protesting farmers attracted strong criticism and charges that it is being propped up by Khalistani elements.
The farmers’ agitation is by far the most effective and long-term agitation of the past few decades. Precisely for that reason, the killing of a Dalit protester allegedly by a group of Nihang Sikhs or the Lakhimpur Kheri incident signifies the nature of complex challenges such mass mobilisations need to address. Such incidents not only help the government provoke vigilante action against protesters, they also test the patience of the protestors themselves. Imagine a retaliation by the kin of the person who was killed at Singhu or mass outrage at Lakhimpur Kheri and we have the complete recipe for mayhem. How can long-drawn agitations and movements-in-the-making ensure that they do not fall into this trap of being maligned, waylaid or sabotaged? There are at least three pathways that the farmers’ agitation can adopt. The first two are interrelated.
It appears romantic to have an element of spontaneity and voluntarism but agitations simply cannot afford to be entirely leaderless or so loosely organised that there is no coordination. To be sure, the farmers’ agitation does have a coordination committee but the lure of being “truly” a people’s movement (in the sense of being almost without a leader) is always there. Leaders themselves savour this element because of the sense of democracy that it instills into the agitation. It empowers the ordinary participant, who believes that she or he is the actor and not a passive follower. Yet, there must be leadership and it must steer the agitation by balancing the agency of the participants and the demands of coordination to keep anarchy at bay. While Rakesh Tikait has gradually emerged as the face of the farmers’ agitation, it is not clear if he is acceptable as a leader to all sections and beyond the limited territories of his popularity.
Secondly, leadership is a matter of planning and coordination too. An agitation to grow into a movement requires organisation and planning. When an agitation extends into weeks and months, it also requires the building of a cadre that will be ideologically and organisationally trained to retain a degree of influence over the followers. It is not clear how much of this the farmers’ agitation is doing. During the heydays of the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, Sharad Joshi made sure that a diverse set of intermediate leaders would gain acceptability, that ordinary farmers were educated on many issues and that the agitation touched upon broader issues like women’s empowerment.
The third element needed is a larger vision to relate the agitation to ongoing socio-political processes. Very briefly, the farmers’ agitation did attempt this by encouraging Jat-Muslim unity in parts of UP. But beyond that, it has remained singularly focused on the three farm laws and matters related to MSP. It can be argued that this approach avoids unnecessary division over other social and political matters; but, at the same time, such an approach imposes a limitation.
All agitations, when they extend temporally or in terms of social bases, begin to reflect the larger society. Internal dynamics of participating communities get transposed onto the functioning of the movement. This also means a movement will become home to prejudices and wrongs that inhabit society in general. In other words, the movement and its participants begin to look almost like the larger social system.
The farmers’ agitation need not be held responsible for the killing of Lakhbir Singh but it represents a social ill that the agitation and its participants needed to avoid but could not. This is where the core challenge emerges. An agitation of this magnitude needs to transform itself into a movement, aspire to transcend pre-existing prejudices among its adherents and bring out the sublime among the followers rather than allow them to remain passive participants unwilling to change themselves.
The killing of Lakhbir Singh clearly shows that the farmers’ agitation is yet to move into that direction. For that to happen, it will have to evolve a broader vision and include larger masses beyond territorial and occupational boundaries. In a limited sense, the anti-CAA agitation had come close to that objective. The government used anti-minority sentiment, the pandemic and the judiciary to effectively end that agitation.
In the case of the farmers’ agitation, so far, the judicial route has not helped the government, though recent observations by a bench of the Supreme Court give us a foreboding of what might be. The acceptability of the discourse of farmers’ distress as compared to that of citizenship and minority humiliation has ensured that the farmers’ agitation will survive various governmental efforts to malign it. That is why the farmers’ agitation must overcome not only the momentary challenge caused by the Singhu killing but the larger challenge of becoming a robust movement.
Movements face delicate moments when in a sub-democratic environment, the rulers are obstinate in matters of negotiation and eager to crush movements through public perception. Movements like the farmers’ agitation must strive to be a microcosm of the larger society but also strive not to replicate social prejudices. To mobilise the masses but also to make them overcome the mass mentality is the most delicate task. Only time will tell if the farmers’ agitation is up to it.
This column first appeared in the print edition on October 27, 2021 under the title ‘The farmers’ challenge’. The writer, based at Pune, taught political science and is currently chief editor of Studies in Indian Politics