[An ideological void marks the farmers’ protests, just as it marked
the earlier “reservation” demands of peasant castes. The multiple
groups that have jumped into forming the coordination committee in
Maharashtra, for instance, are both incapable of and disinterested in
taking a holistic view of agrarian distress. These include freshly
anti-BJP faces (like Raju Shetti), simplistically pro-agriculture
crusaders or confused anti-developmentalists. Such a crowd is not
likely to present a robust critique of the present dispensation that
governs India’s political economy.
And yet, protests, such as the ones unfolding in Maharashtra or Madhya
Pradesh, clearly indicate the deep void the present policy and
governance regime is causing. The current protests, for the first
time, are likely to stir the Modi government out of its PR-driven
complacency. For the first time in three years, the battle between
imaginary acche din and lived reality on the ground is being waged out
in the open. This development holds three possibilities.]
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/if-the-farmer-protests-rise-of-bjp-fury-fragments-4710591/
If the fury fragments
Farmers’ protests threaten the BJP’s rise. But local character, lack
of ideological vision limit their potential.
Written by Suhas Palshikar | Published:June 19, 2017 12:30 am
It is to the BJP’s advantage that the agitation has not been initiated
by any political party, but by diffuse groups of farmers — both in
Maharashtra and in Madhya Pradesh, the agitation has not had a
prominent face. (Source: PTI)
The protests by farmers in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh should not
be seen in isolation. Besides the political economy of these protests,
the implications for competitive politics are going to be complex. In
order to appreciate these implications, the farmers’ protests need to
be situated in the larger backdrop — despite the seeming stability of
the Narendra Modi regime, the past three years have been marked by one
protest after another. In contrast to claims that we are moving
towards a “new India”, the regime is marked by tensions that have
dotted the glorious acche din of the last three years.
Even if we leave out the protests by sections of the intelligentsia
over freedom of expression — the ordinary voters did not appreciate or
care about this broader question — India has witnessed many sporadic
eruptions of popular protests in the last three years.Beginning with
the students’ protests in Hyderabad University and later at JNU, we
have witnessed a series of street protests — the agitations by the
Jats of Haryana, the Patels from Gujarat, the Marathas from
Maharashtra, over reservations. The protests by Dalits in Gujarat, and
more recently, in Uttar Pradesh too demanded serious attention.
Earlier this year, Tamil Nadu was on the boil over the issue of
Jallikattu. For the past few weeks, most issues have been eclipsed as
the farmers’ protests erupted in many parts of the country.
These protests are disparate. They cannot be said to be linked by any
common factor; they are not directed against the Modi government as
such. It is noteworthy that almost all these protests took shape
entirely outside the party domain — they were neither organised, nor
sustained by the non-BJP parties. True, once the protests erupted,
non-BJP parties made efforts to jump into the fray and take them under
their wings. But these efforts have not been successful.
This has been for two reasons: One, the non-BJP parties are still far
away from forging an all-India coalition against the BJP. They don’t
have an anchor — the Congress, which would claim to be the main
contender to having an all-India presence, has singularly failed to
build a larger coalition or to mobilise public protests systematically
by itself.
Second, the BJP has been able to contain these protests at state-level
itself because of the very nature of most of these protests, and also
because of the BJP’s management skills.Hardik Patel did seek to unite
the “peasant castes”; Kanhaiya Kumar traveled across the country and
addressed students and the youth; Jignesh Mewani was made out to be
the new hero of the angry Dalits; but each time, the issue got
localised.
In a sense, the BJP has benefitted from a feature of Indian politics
that took shape through the nineties; the states have been the main
theatre of politics, and while the BJP wants to brush this feature
aside to benefit from Modi’s larger-than-life national image, at the
same time, it is also the beneficiary of this factor.
During the past three years, each of the protests got localised at the
state level. When the Patel agitation erupted, it was the failure of
the Gujarat government. In the case of the Jat agitation, the Haryana
government was responsible for handling it — the heat never reached
Delhi, it stopped at state capitals.
More importantly, a national narrative of popular disenchantment did
not emerge from these isolated protests, while, on the
