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By Leonie Williams
WHY ARE INDIA’S FARMERS PROTESTING?
More than half of India’s population work on farms and many are among the country’s poorest. Up until recently their government has protected them from the ravages of open market prices, but this is changing.
On the 5th June 2020, amid growing concern about the collapse of the economy due to lockdowns disrupting business, rising unemployment, and the spread of Covid-19, the Government of India introduced three laws aiming to deregulate India’s enormous agriculture sector. These bills focus on the deregulation of purchase and sale of farm produce and many farmers are concerned that they stand to lose more than they will gain from these bills.
It is believed that these laws will deregulate crop pricing and eventually lead to the scrapping of the Minimum Support Price that secures a guaranteed income for farmers by setting a uniform price for crops. The main beneficiaries of these laws stand to be the large agricultural corporations with gargantuan financial power, and the individual farmer will struggle to compete with industrial-scale farms. Farmers are concerned that they are in no position to take their produce out of their districts to trade as this will add to their expenses, and consequently reduce their income. Along with this, the lack of minimum price protection will cause farmers to have to look further-a-field for more trade if the big corporations and markets begin to out-price them.
Due to these fears the Supreme Court of India has suspended the implementation of the laws and created a committee of agricultural experts to look into the grievances of the farmers. In the meantime, the farmers are participating in the largest protest movement in history.
WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE PROTESTS?
Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers and their supporters have been occupying major roads surrounding the capital, New Delhi, since November 2020 in protest against the agriculture reform laws. These peaceful protests are being greeted with violence and a multitude of human rights violations from the police.
After an eleventh round of talks between the farmers and the government failed, farmers’ unions decided to organise a tractor march into the capital on India’s Republic Day. A group broke off from the peaceful march and overran police barricades at Delhi’s iconic Red Fort. Miscommunication led to violent face-offs with police, who used tear gas and batons to try to beat the protestors back. This use of force resulted in chaos, a farmer being crushed by an overturned tractor, and over 200 protestors were detained on charges of rioting. There have been reports of disappearances, with farmers’ groups claiming that more than 100 people have gone missing since the tractor protest on 26th January, as draconian laws like the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) have been used to clamp down on protesters. While farmers’ unions have put together a large team of lawyers to help secure bail for imprisoned protestors and fight their cases, they are struggling to locate the whereabouts of those who have gone missing without a trace and many fear they will be lost forever.
We have seen huge displays of censorship from the government about these protests as eight journalists who covered the farmers' protests and violence on 26th January have been arrested and are now facing criminal charges simply for doing their jobs. On 1st February, hundreds of Indian Twitter accounts - including those of news outlets, activists and actors - were suspended for more than twelve hours after the government said that these accounts were posting content which was inciting violence, when in fact, it was just any account that was using the hashtag #FarmersProtests. Twitter reversed this suspension, but 3 days later the Indian Government served a notice to Twitter to comply with an order to remove content and accounts related to the hashtag. That same day, many news media organisations reported that journalists were being refused access to protest sites by the police.
Internet services have been repeatedly suspended in Delhi’s main protest sites and many of the adjoining districts in order to prevent communication between protestors and with the wider population. The Indian Government is going to great lengths to censor the protestors, completely violating their right to freedom of expression and association while simultaneously putting them in a vulnerable and dangerous position of being cut-off from those outside of the protest. This is the largest democracy in the world, censoring its people.
To prevent the protestors exercising their right to peaceful protest, the police have been erecting metal and wire barricades along with metal and stone boulders in the protest sites as a deterrent. There have been reports of more than 2,000 iron nails being strewn along the roads leading up to the designated protest sites. The police have allegedly blocked access to portable toilets that were constructed by the famers and are preventing street cleaners from clearing the growing mounds of rubbish, which is leading to the spread of infectious diseases.
On February 5th, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights issued a statement calling for the Indian government and other authorities to exercise “maximum restraint” during these protests, adding that the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression should be protected both offline and online. India is a member of the UN Human Rights Council and a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), meaning that the Indian Government is duty-bound to protect these rights, something it is clearly failing to do.
The Indian authorities are blatantly violating multiple human rights, and there have been many allegations of police violence, the illegal detention of protestors, "misrepresentation, polarization and sensationalisation" by media channels, and the prevention of food, water and sanitation from being delivered to protest sites.
The Supreme Court stated that it is "extremely disappointed at the way government is handling” the situation. The Court also rejected a claim by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta that the "vast majority" of farmers supported the laws, stating that they had not received any submissions from any person claiming that the laws were beneficial. It is time for the government to take responsibility and put a stop to the human rights violations being perpetrated against protestors. These farmers are simply exercising their right to peacefully protest legislation that they believe will have devastating effects on the lives of millions of Indians.
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