The Reality of Farmers' Protest Around India's Capital

In the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the US had alienated most of its Western European allies on trade issues and on contribution to NATO. Joe Biden’s presidency will repeat that in alienating India, one of the US’s three most important strategic partners in the Indo-Pacific region, if he listens to ultra-liberals and Khalistani hotheads like Simran Jeet Singh. In his 12^th February 2021 Time.com article ‘The Farmers’ Protests Are a Turning Point for India’s Democracy – and the World Can No Longer Ignore That’, Jeet Singh has tried to paint India – its prime minister, government, and society – in the blackest of black, but in his extreme hatred and antipathy for India, this “scholar and historian of South Asia” forgot to rely on facts. He, instead, built his case entirely on blatant lies and some half-truths. Let us see below what the facts are and how he has distorted them to mislead his readers.

The farmers blocking highways near India’s capital New Delhi for the past more than two months are only from Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh and can claim to represent not even two percent of India’s 145 million farm households. They are protesting against the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government majorly deregulating the farm sector through three new farm laws. Because they see in them an end to the long prevailing system under which they could choose the food grains (only wheat and paddy) to produce and sell them in ever-increasing quantities to their chosen buyer (government of India) at ever-rising prices (called MSPs – Minimum Support Prices). This system has resulted into the government presently stocking wheat and rice over two and a half times the national food security requirements. They cannot be exported because they are not the types in demand abroad and even if somehow exported they would fetch prices far below the government’s costs. On the other hand, India is forced to import edible oil and pulses (lentils) for over $10 billion every year. But these farmers would not even consider diversifying.

There is tremendous environmental cost of growing water-guzzling paddy in semi-arid Punjab and Haryana. Assured free or highly subsidized electricity, the farmers there use powerful submersible pumps to flood the paddy fields depleting the aquifers more and more. Every year the water table goes down by almost a meter. And once paddy is harvested, in order to quickly prepare the field for sowing wheat, the farmers burn about 100 million tons of paddy stubbles, locally called parali. That causes a month of air pollution of monumental proportions which attacks the lungs of 50 million people in and around the national capital. Obviously, the world’s environmentalist-in-chief Greta Thunberg was not briefed about these two great environmental disasters before she waded into the problem in support of agitating farmers. Of course, one should not even expect any due diligence from the likes of Rihanna and Mia Khalifa, who somehow had to support a protest halfway across the world and establish their liberal credentials. Uber millions for oneself and sympathy for the underdog do make a heady combination.

And when the internet was being increasingly used to further incite the farmers and to spread venom against a properly elected government, its  temporary lockdown for a day or two and that in limited areas around the farmers’ protest sites was perfectly in order. As for violence, it was the farmers who turned violent on the most sacred day of Indian democracy – Republic Day on the 26^th January – when they stormed into the national capital New Delhi in their thousands, on foot and riding hundreds of tractors. Many of them armed with swords and spears clashed with police armed only with wooden batons, they also launched murderous assaults on police personnel trying to crush them under the wheels of their tractors. And all this was streamed live on scores of TV news channels in India and abroad. 394 police personnel, including women constables, suffered injuries, of them scores were treated in trauma centres and two in hospitals’ intensive care units. Nowhere else in the world, the police could have behaved with such control and restraint as the Delhi police on that day. Not even one farmer got injured at the hands of the police, but one died when his tractor turned upside down in his attempt to break through a road barrier. His unfortunate death was maliciously reported by some TV newspersons as having been shot by the police. They were not even arrested, only FIRs (First information Reports) for full investigation were filed against them. But Jeet Singh (sworn to tell only lies as he seems to be) claims “they jailed nine journalists” and he did not even tangentially mention that they had falsely reported that the farmer had died shot by police officers. 

Anyone having even a superficial knowledge about Islamic countries Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan would know that religious minorities there are persecuted for their faiths. India’s Citizenship Amendment Act was brought by Modi’s government to give accelerated citizenship to members of such minorities, by their very nature non-Muslims, who had come to India till 31 December 2014 and been living in India since. Calling this act anti-Muslim is parading one’s ignorance, to put it mildly.

Kashmir, of course, is a very convenient stick to beat India with but will anyone ever think for a moment why India government blacked out internet there (internet fully restored on the 5^th February 2021), why it has deployed there so many security personnel? India does not enjoy doing that but it is a desperate necessity to counter Pakistan-sponsored (manpowered, armed and funded) Islamic terrorism continuing in Kashmir since the 1980s. Another point ignored by votaries of human rights is ethnic cleansing of about half a million Kashmiri Hindus from Kashmir in January 1990, and this was well before the infamous ethnic cleansing of 70000 Muslims from Sebrenica. The Hindus chose to flee Kashmir because the alternatives to it as given by the much more numerous Kashmiri Muslims were “convert to Islam or get killed”.      

India’s human rights record is something to be proud of. Is there any other nation in the world where besides the majority community, 200 million Muslims, 38 million Christians, 25 million Sikhs, 8 million Buddhists, and 5 million Jains live in peace and harmony? Of course, there are some violations of human rights but we have a very pr0-active National Human Rights Commission and there is a very assertive and fiercely independent  judiciary, the only in the world where judges, themselves, have been selecting and appointing judges for the past 27 years.
 
Chinese imperialism and Islamic terrorism are not two bogeymen, as Jeet Singh says, but the biggest dangers facing the world’s democracies and if the democracies do not unitedly combat and defeat them, they, one by one, will end up before long as a Chinese colony or an Islamic Republic or both.

The ranking by the Press Freedom Index is simply laughable, can anyone in his right mind believe that Haiti, Albania, and the communist China-controlled Hongkong could be sixty places above India? The Human Freedom Index, more or less, also falls in the same category. Just have a look at the nations ranked above India’s lowly number 111, and you will also question this index’s credibility. And as for the “sustained assaults from the Indian government” on Amnesty International, it was found to be in violation of India’s Foreign Currency Regulation Act for accepting a significant amount of foreign money without the government’s approval. It can not be anyone’s case that India’s laws should stop applying at the doors of Amnesty International and some such agencies.

Jeet Singh has recounted the most unfortunate incidents of 1984. But he omits the murders of hundreds of Hindus and moderate Sikhs by Sikh extremists led by a “religious” figure Jarnail Singh Bhinderawale and the turning of the humongous Golden Temple complex in Punjab’s Amritsar into a formidable fortress where hundreds of Sikh militants, armed to the teeth and trained by a retired major general of the Indian army, had seized complete control of the Sikhs’ most sacred shrine and were demanding a separate nation for Sikhs, Khalistan, carved out of India. Compared to this, the situation which the ATF, FBI, and US army jointly faced nine years later in Waco (Texas) was a walk in the park. In Amritsar, the Indian state was forced to employ military to flush out armed militants holed up in the temple complex and that led to the then prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her own Sikh bodyguards and massacre of about 2800 Sikhs in Delhi by mobs led by some important members of the ruling Congress party. It was members of “Hindu nationalist” RSS and Bhartiya Janata Party who saved quite a few Sikhs from being lynched by Congress-led and sponsored mobs.

Calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi the Butcher of Gujarat is the height of maliciousness. As the then chief minister of Gujarat, he had tried his best to control the communal riots in the state following the burning down of a railway coach at Godhra by Muslim extremists, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims were massacred, and within a day he handed the control of the worst affected Ahmedabad to the army which was able to quieten the situation almost immediately. In the entire state of Gujarat, in the 2002 riots, about 750 Muslims and about 250 Hindus lost their lives and a little over 200 were reported missing. What is remarkable is that Hindus were a majority of those shot dead in police firing, that shows that Narendra Modi was as even handed as he could be. It should also be kept in mind that in 2005, when Modi was spitefully denied visa by a couple of countries, it was a Congress government at the Centre and it would not be surprising if it had a role in the denial of visas. 

Accusing the Modi government of having an anti-minorities bias is  travesty of truth. The religious minorities continue to enjoy many important government-granted advantages over the majority Hindu community. One such is they, themselves, control all their religious institutions and places of worship; whereas in case of Hindus, such control vests in the respective state governments. Recently, the Christian chief minister of the Indian state Andhra Pradesh had appointed a Christian relative of his to head the management board of the richest Hindu temple in India, and it was only after sustained but peaceful protest by Hindu devotees that the appointment was cancelled. Andhra Pradesh has also been in the news because of more than 140 Hindu temples desecrated, some even destroyed, in the Christian-run state. So much for persecution of minorities in India! Then there are tens of millions of special scholarships for Dalit students and those belonging to religious minorities. In fact, in many ways, Narendra Modi’s government is minoritarian in its outlook and approach.

All said, Narendra Modi is a sinner because he is the first Indian prime minister who is trying his utmost to increase India’s comprehensive national power. And all those habituated to seeing India punching below its weight and finding the sight highly satisfying do not obviously like the change. But India needs Modi’s vision, his determination and leadership, and his no-nonsense approach to ushering in essential reforms.

Kanan V. Jaswal                                                                                   16 February 2021