Why Farmers Are Marching Toward Delhi Again

This time they want a stronger guarantee that they can make money selling their wheat and rice crops.

Once again, India’s capital is bracing itself for a siege. Not by a foreign army but by an army of Indian farmers, streaming toward New Delhi from nearby states to protest government policies.

The farmers’ march has turned the city’s main points of entry into choke points, as the federal and local police go into overdrive: barricading highways by pouring concrete and stacking shipping containers to halt the advancing tractors.

The authorities have blocked the social media accounts of some protest leaders and even used drones that were once billed as an agricultural innovation to drop tear-gas grenades on the demonstrators.

Didn’t this happen before?

The scenes hark back to North India’s biggest protests of 2020 and 2021, when hundreds of thousands of farmers, mostly from the states of Punjab and Haryana, forced the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to abandon three bills meant to overhaul India’s agricultural economy.

If the farmers prevailed then — in a rare retreat for the powerful Mr. Modi — why are they massing again, threatening or even causing disruptions in and out of an urban area that is home to about 30 million people?

Farmers taking cover from tear gas about 150 miles from New Delhi on Tuesday.Credit...Rajat Gupta/EPA, via Shutterstock

This time, the farmers’ central demand concerns something called the minimum support price, or M.S.P. They want it to be increased, adding a 50 percent premium to whatever it costs them to produce wheat and rice.

Sarwan Singh Pandher, a leader of a committee representing hundreds of smaller farmers’ unions, said that many of their demands had been left hanging after they ended their protests more than two years ago, “especially about the M.S.P. being made a legal guarantee.”

A barrier intended to block farmers from reaching Delhi.Credit...Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Economists tend to hate the M.S.P. and its effects on farming. It leads directly to food price inflation, for one thing.

And by divorcing farmers’ earnings from the traded value of staple cereals, the controlled prices — in combination with free electricity and subsidized fertilizer — have encouraged overproduction of rice, for instance, in areas that are naturally semiarid. That depletes water tables and brings the kind of stubble burning that helps pollute Delhi’s air every autumn.

 

Why do farmers want price supports?

The M.S.P. should act as a form of social insurance, by sparing the majority of India’s population, which still depends on farming incomes, from the volatility that comes with changing weather patterns and internationally set grain prices.In practice, it is India’s better-off farmers who would stand to lose the most if the M.S.P. was eliminated; annual incomes in Punjab are higher than in the rest of the country’s grain belt.Farmers who are inching closer to the middle class often feel the pinch of stagnating incomes most sharply. Many families in Punjab have invested in higher education as a way up. But acute unemployment makes those debts hard to pay down. In the poorer parts of the country, indebted farmers often resort to suicide

 

Mr. Modi had promised to double the incomes that they had in 2015, and on that the government has fallen far short. It makes farmers’ demands more urgent, Mr. Pandher said: “Either the government should come around or grant us the right to protest peacefully in 

Delhi.”

How did it all end last time?

The earlier round of protests reached its peak in January 2021. After camping outside the capital, farmers who had endured pandemic hardships stormed through barricades to challenge Mr. Modi’s own Republic Day parade, a confrontation that had long-lasting political consequences. 

Farmers protesting in New Delhi in January 2021.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times

The farmers seemed to win; the proposed laws were repealed later that year. But with Punjabi Sikhs highly visible in the movement’s leadership, the government began cracking down on Sikh separatists soon after. And apparently not just by lawful means: The government has been accused of orchestrating assassination attempts in Canada and the United States.

Apart from Sikh politics, the leadership of the farmer movement may be bargaining that now is the best time to make their demands, when election season is upon Mr. Modi and he would presumably not want to be seen fighting back poor farmers circled around Delhi.

• Alex Travelli is a correspondent for The Times based in New Delhi, covering business and economic matters in India and the rest of South Asia. He previously worked as an editor and correspondent for The Economist.
• Suhasini Raj is a reporter based in New Delhi who has covered India for The Times since 2014.