India’s protesting farmers breach the walls of Delhi’s Red Fort
The act may cost them public sympathyIT WAS THE moment with which India’s farmers’ protest movement will be forever identified. All of a sudden, on the afternoon of January 26th, Republic Day, a singular image flashed across the country’s television screens. Hundreds or possibly thousands of protesters made it to the Red Fort in the heart of old Delhi. Somehow breaching its towering walls, they scrambled up its parapets and unfurled flags. Not just India’s national tricolour, but also a union’s garish flag and the Nishan Sahib, a brilliant triangle representing the Sikh faith. The moment did not last long and it was bookended by scenes of minor violence—police firing tear-gas canisters and charging the protesters with rods—but its power as a spectacle overwhelmed everything else on the chaotic stage of the day.It can be hard to grasp the scale of the protest that has gripped India’s capital for the past two months. Since November 26th hundreds of thousands of farmers, organised through a panoply of more than 40 unions, have been holding down a series of camps surrounding an area of 1,500 square kilometres. Though they come mainly from the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, they are a mix of old and young, rich and poor, Hindu and Sikh. They joined arms against a set of agricultural-reform laws that the government of Narendra Modi, the prime minister, rammed through parliament in September. They fear that big agri-business will take them for a ride. They have attracted broad sympathy from across the country; more than 50% of the workforce is in agriculture. But the protesters’ grievances are stubbornly diverse.The crowd that stormed the fort had spun off from a mobilisation that is orders of magnitude larger. Two months ago Mr Modi’s government had prevented the farmers from entering Delhi, so they pitched their tents on the city’s border. Republic Day was chosen for their show of strength because of the national holiday, which commemorates the adoption of the Indian constitution. In a normal year, the prime minister plays host to foreign dignitaries at a colourful review of the country’s fighting forces. To outdo the tanks and missile-launchers, for the past two weeks columns of tractors and lorries, summoned for a rally to eclipse Mr Modi’s, had been snaking their way towards Delhi from across northern India. One of the unions estimated that 200,000 tractors were mustered for the day itself. The initial idea was to parade them through New Delhi, the British imperial capital, just as Mr Modi would be presiding over the customary military pageantry. The Supreme Court refused to issue an outright injunction against the rally and instead directed the Delhi police—controlled by the national government—to hash out permissible conditions with the farmers’ unions. On January 24th they struck a compromise allowing the tractors to rally on three designated circuits far from the city centre, to start after Mr Modi’s parade had ended. Instead, some factions within the movement jumped the gun. They barged through the borders at 8am and, in some cases, deviated deliberately from the rally’s planned routes. Other farmers, many seeing the big city for the first time, followed. An even greater number patrolled their assigned routes, where they were greeted in some places by Delhiites throwing marigold petals.Indian television commentators remarked on the resemblance between the scene at the fort and the scenes beamed from America’s Capitol building on January 6th. The violation of a national symbol was striking. The Red Fort was built in the 17th century by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (who erected the Taj Mahal). Delhi was much smaller then, but the red-sandstone fortress was the nerve centre of an empire roughly the size of modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru announced the birth of independent India with a resounding speech about the nation’s “tryst with destiny” at midnight on August 15th 1947 from the ramparts of the Red Fort. Every prime minister since has marked that anniversary from the same place. (To Punjabi Sikhs especially, the location represents the distant authority of the state. The ninth of their religion’s founding gurus was martyred there by the last of the great Mughals, Shah Jahan’s murderous son.) But the American rioters who rushed their Capitol had gone there with the aim of overturning an election, intending at least to disrupt a formal counting of the vote. Raising only a shout and a banner or two, India’s farmers wanted only to be heard.Indians are too accustomed to seeing their police clash with protesters. A whole vocabulary exists to describe skirmishing. But the effect of seeing lathi-charges and stone-pelting at the Red Fort, and especially of seeing the wrong flags flying on a national monument, on Republic Day, was transformative. Captain Amarinder Singh, the chief minister of Punjab and a great supporter of the farmers’ cause, deplored the “shocking scenes” and predicted that they will “negate the goodwill generated by peacefully protesting farmers”. Other members of his Congress party, the face of the opposition to Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, sought to distance themselves from the unruliness, as did the Aam Aadmi Party that governs Delhi.Since taking office in 2014 and then strengthening his hand further with re-election in 2019, Mr Modi has won more political battles and assumed greater control over India’s centres of power than any leader since Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. The other politicians are certainly no match for his re-energised BJP. Even now, with the economy in an unprecedented recession, Mrs Gandhi’s old Congress party barely musters a whimper at the national level, and regional parties prefer to be co-opted by the BJP than to confront it. But a social movement, like these farmers’, or the one that sprang up to decry a discriminatory new citizenship law a year ago, is a different matter—both harder to predict and more slippery in combat. It was such a movement that provoked Mrs Gandhi into declaring an emergency in 1975 and, notoriously, suspending India’s democracy.Last year’s movement against the citizenship-amendment act was eventually dispersed by the pandemic. Since then the issue has been kept quiet and the movement’s leaders harassed or co-opted into quietening down. Many of them were Muslims, which perhaps limited their appeal among a national population that is becoming prouder of its Hindu majority. The Sikh flag atop a national monument could cramp the farmers’ movement by associating them with another minority religion. Some members of the BJP had already tried to tarnish the Punjabi farmers by calling them separatists. Mr Modi’s team may be able to win the war of perceptions against this army of agitated farmers. But it would be better to devise clever policies and then win elections on the basis of their popularity.Reuse this contentThe Trust Project