The New Farmers’ Movement in India: Origins and Impact

The 1980s witnessed a remarkable transformation in India’s agrarian landscape as a new breed of farmers’ movements emerged, fundamentally different from traditional peasant struggles. Unlike earlier agrarian movements that focused on land reforms and tenant rights, these new formations centered on demanding fair prices for agricultural produce and opposing state policies perceived as exploitative of the rural sector. What began as localized protests in Maharashtra and Punjab would evolve into a nationwide phenomenon that reshaped India’s political discourse around rural issues.

The roots in the 1970s
The 1980s: A decade of mass mobilization
Key organizations and leaders
The declining terms of trade
Major agitations and struggles
The Meerut siege (1988)
The Boat Club Rally
Karnataka’s rural uprising
Expanding the agenda: Social issues
Lakshmi Mukti: Liberating rural women
Inter-caste marriages and social reform in Karnataka
From local demands to global concerns
Opposing liberalization
The anti-globalization campaigns
Operation Cremate Monsanto
Legacy and continuing relevance

The roots in the 1970s

The foundation of the New Farmers’ Movement can be traced to the early 1970s, a period marked by significant political and economic shifts in rural India. The Punjab Khetibari Zamindari Union was formed in May 1972 through the merger of eleven peasant groups in Chandigarh. This organization would later be renamed the Punjab Khetibari Union and eventually transformed into the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) in 1978, with the intention of creating a national forum for farmers.

The political influence of Chaudhary Charan Singh, a prominent farmer leader and former Prime Minister, was instrumental during this period. He had carved his electoral constituency as a peasants’ leader and remained connected to agrarian issues. However, the movement that would eventually emerge in the 1980s deliberately distanced itself from direct political party affiliations, marking a significant departure from Charan Singh’s approach of combining electoral politics with farmer advocacy.

In Maharashtra, Sharad Joshi’s journey into farmer activism began in 1979 when he led a group of onion growers to block the Pune-Nashik highway demanding higher prices for their produce. This protest, where farmers dumped their onions on the highway, marked the genesis of the Shetkari Sanghatana. Joshi, an unlikely leader with a master’s degree in economics and previous experience as an international civil servant, had left his prestigious job in 1975 to become a farmer, only to identify government policy as the root cause of farmers’ poverty.

The 1980s: A decade of mass mobilization

The New Farmers’ Movement formally burst onto the national political stage in 1980 with the road and rail blockade agitation in Nasik, Maharashtra, led by the Shetkari Sanghatana. This event marked the beginning of what would become a decade of unprecedented rural mobilization across India.

Key organizations and leaders

Several major organizations emerged during this period, each operating under different names in specific regional contexts. The most significant included the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra led by Sharad Joshi, the Bharatiya Kisan Union in Uttar Pradesh reorganized by Mahendra Singh Tikait in 1986, and the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) founded by M.D. Nanjundaswamy in 1980. Other important organizations included the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh in Gujarat and the Tamil Nadu Agriculturalists’ Association.

Sharad Joshi articulated a distinctive ideology for the movement through his theory of “Bharat versus India”-framing the struggle as one between rural producers and urban consumers who benefited from state policies. He argued that independent India had merely replaced white colonial rulers with black ones who continued to exploit the agricultural sector for the benefit of urban industrial development.

The declining terms of trade

The primary catalyst for these movements was the deteriorating agricultural terms of trade-the ratio of prices farmers received for their produce compared to what they paid for industrial inputs and consumer goods. The Green Revolution had increased agricultural productivity, but farmers found that rising input costs and stagnant output prices left them with diminishing returns. This created new aspirations among middle and rich farmers who sought greater control over agricultural policies, pricing, and credit.

Major agitations and struggles

The New Farmers’ Movement employed a range of protest tactics that drew inspiration from Gandhian methods of non-violent civil disobedience, though adapted to the specific conditions of agrarian struggle.

The Meerut siege (1988)

The Bharatiya Kisan Union achieved national prominence through the Meerut siege in January-February 1988, a 25-day long protest around the District Commissioner’s office. Thousands of farmers from western Uttar Pradesh converged on Meerut demanding the waiving of power and water bills, writing off loans, and higher prices for sugarcane. The protest gathered hundreds of thousands of farmers and forced state authorities to negotiate.

M.S. Tikait’s leadership during this period was characterized by his emphasis on maintaining non-violent discipline. When violence erupted in Rajabpur, Amroha during the protests, Tikait withdrew the agitation, demonstrating his commitment to Gandhian principles of peaceful resistance.

The Boat Club Rally

In October 1988, the BKU mobilized approximately 500,000 to 800,000 farmers for a week-long siege at Delhi’s Boat Club lawns near Parliament. Farmers arrived with tractors and bullock carts, creating a procession that stretched three kilometers from India Gate to Vijay Chowk. Their demands included higher minimum support prices for sugarcane, waiver of water and electricity dues, and tariff concessions. This massive demonstration paralyzed the heart of the national capital and forced the Rajiv Gandhi government to grant significant concessions.

Karnataka’s rural uprising

The Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha gained momentum through the Naragunda-Navalgunda uprising, where two farmers were killed in a historical confrontation over water tax imposed by the government. The harsh handling of this rebellion by Chief Minister R. Gundu Rao contributed to the formation of the first non-Congress government in Karnataka and helped the KRRS consolidate its position as a statewide organization.

Throughout the 1980s, farmers across different states employed similar tactics: refusing to sell produce in markets (causing price rises), organizing protest marches and rallies, refusing to pay tax arrears and electricity bills, and declining to repay loans from banks and credit cooperatives.

What distinguished the New Farmers’ Movement from purely economic agitations was its expansion into social reform, particularly regarding gender and caste issues. The movements in Karnataka and Maharashtra pioneered efforts to address these concerns within their broader agrarian agenda.

Lakshmi Mukti: Liberating rural women

The Lakshmi Mukti campaign, launched in the late 1980s by the Shetkari Sanghatana, represented a groundbreaking initiative for women’s land rights. The movement began in 1989 in the village of Vitner in Dhule district, where men and women of the Sanghatana took the significant step of registering half of family land in women’s names.

Sharad Joshi announced that villages performing specific acts for women’s empowerment would be honored as Jyotiba Gram, named after the nineteenth-century social reformer Jyotiba Phule. The campaign combined economic wisdom with cultural messaging, using stories from mythology to build moral legitimacy for women’s property rights. Within a couple of years, hundreds of villages had been honored as Lakshmi Mukti villages, with communities celebrating the transfers as festivals.

The Karnataka movement organized a massive rally in Haliyal in 1983 focused on shifting property relations in rural areas. More significantly, the KRRS organized thousands of simple inter-caste marriages, directly challenging the caste system that had long divided rural society. Women’s issues were interwoven into various struggles, including anti-liquor movements and campaigns against social forestry policies that affected women’s access to resources.

The Shetkari Sanghatana also established a women’s wing called the Shetkari Mahila Aghadi in 1986, which worked specifically on empowering women in farm households who had previously been mobilized only on economic issues affecting the agricultural sector.

From local demands to global concerns

By the early 1990s, the New Farmers’ Movement had expanded its scope far beyond local price issues to engage with national economic policies and eventually with global trade regimes.

Opposing liberalization

A pivotal event was the March 1993 rally in Delhi where approximately 200,000 farmers converged to protest the Dunkel Draft-the GATT proposal outlining terms that included agricultural liberalization and intellectual property extensions. Farmers feared that these provisions would compel them to purchase patented seeds annually from multinational corporations, eliminating traditional practices of saving and exchanging seeds.

Interestingly, different wings of the movement took divergent positions on globalization. While the KRRS in Karnataka vehemently opposed liberalization, viewing it as Western capitalism’s attempt to capture Third World markets and appropriate biological diversity, the Maharashtra movement under Sharad Joshi supported aspects of economic liberalization, framing it as freedom from harmful state intervention.

The anti-globalization campaigns

M.D. Nanjundaswamy emerged as a prominent international anti-globalization leader, leading campaigns against what he termed “Western biopiracy.” He was a vocal critic of multinational companies and the World Trade Organization, participating in the historic 1999 Seattle WTO protests.

The KRRS launched dramatic direct actions against symbols of globalization. In 1996, Nanjundaswamy protested the opening of the first McDonald’s outlet in Delhi and led the storming of newly-opened Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut restaurants in Bangalore. The Beeja Satyagraha campaign of the early 1990s challenged the introduction of biotechnology in agriculture, raising questions about farmer livelihoods, ecological concerns, and whether such technological applications were appropriate solutions for Indian agriculture.

Operation Cremate Monsanto

In 1998, the KRRS launched a global campaign called Operation Cremate Monsanto, which attracted participation from farmers’ movements in France and Indonesia. Activists uprooted and burned Monsanto’s genetically modified crop trial fields, arguing that GM technologies would impose dependency on patented seeds and erode traditional farming practices. These actions were framed within Gandhian principles of self-reliance, echoing historical calls for corporations to “Quit India.”

The KRRS joined La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, in 1996 and became part of People’s Global Action in 1999, cementing transnational ties with other groups protesting globalization. This international engagement transformed what had begun as local struggles over prices into a broader movement for food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture.

Legacy and continuing relevance

The New Farmers’ Movement of the 1980s and 1990s left an enduring impact on Indian politics and civil society. It demonstrated that farmers could organize effectively as a political force independent of traditional party structures. The movement’s emphasis on non-violent protest, its innovative use of symbolic actions, and its expansion into social issues like women’s rights and caste reform created templates that subsequent movements would follow.

The farmer protests of 2020-2021 against new agricultural laws drew directly from this legacy, with organizations like the BKU under Rakesh Tikait-son of Mahendra Singh Tikait-playing central roles. The continuity between generations of farmer activists demonstrates how the institutional frameworks and protest traditions established in the 1980s continue to shape agrarian politics in contemporary India.

What do you think? How do you see the balance between economic demands and social reform in farmers’ movements? Can movements focused on commercial agriculture also address the concerns of landless laborers and marginal farmers who were often left out of the New Farmers’ Movement’s agenda?

References

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The New Farmers’ Movement in India: Origins and Impact

Table of Contents

The roots in the 1970s 🔗

The 1980s: A decade of mass mobilization 🔗

Key organizations and leaders 🔗

The declining terms of trade 🔗

Major agitations and struggles 🔗

The Meerut siege (1988) 🔗

The Boat Club Rally 🔗

Karnataka’s rural uprising 🔗

Expanding the agenda: Social issues 🔗

Lakshmi Mukti: Liberating rural women 🔗

Inter-caste marriages and social reform in Karnataka 🔗

From local demands to global concerns 🔗

Opposing liberalization 🔗

The anti-globalization campaigns 🔗

Operation Cremate Monsanto 🔗

Legacy and continuing relevance 🔗