Class and Caste: The Social Bases of India’s Farmers’ Movements

When studying India’s farmers’ movements that emerged in the 1970s and gained momentum through the 1980s, one critical question persists: who exactly do these movements represent? While leaders like Sharad Joshi and Mahendra Singh Tikait projected an image of unified rural struggle against urban exploitation, the reality reveals complex layers of class privilege and caste dominance that shaped-and ultimately limited-these powerful mobilizations.

The class bias critique: whose interests are really served? 🔗

The New Farmers’ Movement has faced persistent criticism for primarily serving the interests of rich and middle-class, market-oriented farmers rather than the entire agrarian population. Unlike earlier peasant movements that fought for land redistribution and protection of tenants, these movements centered on demands that disproportionately benefited those already well-positioned in the agricultural economy.

The core demands tell the story clearly. These organizations fought for remunerative prices for agricultural commodities, loan waivers, lower electricity tariffs, and abolition of tractor loans-all issues that primarily help farmers with surplus produce to sell, access to formal credit, and mechanized farming operations. As scholar Dipankar Gupta observes, these mobilizations explicitly stated that anyone who did not own land was not really a farmer, effectively excluding agricultural laborers from the very definition of their constituency.

The traditional concerns of peasant movements-implementation of land reform laws, distribution of surplus land, protection of small peasants and tenants, and raising minimum wages for farm laborers-have been largely absent from the agenda. This selective focus reveals what critics like Ramchandra Guha termed as essentially a kulak or rich peasant mobilization dressed in new ideological clothing.

Neglect of marginal farmers and dryland regions 🔗

The geographical and economic footprint of farmers’ movements further exposes their narrow social base. These mobilizations flourished predominantly in regions that benefited from the Green Revolution-Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, irrigated districts of Maharashtra and Karnataka, and parts of Gujarat. Meanwhile, subsistence farmers in non-irrigated, dryland areas remained largely invisible.

This regional bias has structural roots. The government’s grain procurement through Minimum Support Price was concentrated in Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh, creating vastly unequal market infrastructure. In Punjab, there is a regulated market yard every 116 square kilometers, but in Andhra Pradesh, a single market yard serves villages within 853 square kilometers. For small and marginal farmers, this distance translates directly into higher transport costs and reduced access to support systems.

The Green Revolution’s benefits were never evenly distributed. In 1961, twelve percent of rural households owned more than sixty percent of cropland. Government policies focused on increasing production through large capitalist farmers rather than redistributing resources. Rich farmers cornered government bank credit while marginal farmers continued depending on moneylenders charging exploitative interest rates, trapping them in debt cycles that movements rarely addressed.

The subsistence farmer’s invisible struggle 🔗

While movements fought for better sugarcane prices and cotton procurement policies, subsistence farmers dealing with monsoon failures, fragmented landholdings, and lack of irrigation had different priorities entirely. The result was a narrowing of social appeal that prevented these movements from building the broad-based coalitions necessary for sustained political impact. As neoliberal policies deepened the agrarian crisis since the 1990s, small farmers and farmer-labourers who now account for over 85 percent of farming households found themselves largely unrepresented by organizations claiming to speak for all farmers.

Caste composition of major movements 🔗

Perhaps nothing reveals the social limitations of farmers’ movements more clearly than their caste composition. Across different states, these mobilizations drew their leadership and primary support base from locally dominant landowning castes, reflecting existing rural power structures rather than challenging them.

Karnataka: Lingayats and Vokkaligas 🔗

In Karnataka, the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) under M.D. Nanjundaswamy drew support predominantly from the two dominant agricultural castes. The Vokkaligas, traditionally the landed gentry and warrior class of Karnataka, historically owned most cultivated land alongside the Lingayats. These communities wielded demographic, political, and economic dominance in the region and naturally formed the backbone of organized farmer politics. Their historical control over land made them the primary beneficiaries of any movement focused on agricultural prices rather than land redistribution.

Maharashtra: Maratha Kunbis 🔗

The Shetkari Sanghatana under Sharad Joshi, while projecting itself as representing all farmers, found its core support among the Maratha Kunbi community. The Marathas, constituting roughly thirty percent of Maharashtra’s population, have historically been the dominant agricultural and political community in the state. Their control over sugarcane cultivation in western Maharashtra made issues like sugar prices central to the movement’s agenda-priorities that aligned with landed Maratha interests.

Punjab and Uttar Pradesh: Jat dominance 🔗

The Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) in western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab was deeply embedded in Jat community networks. Founded and reorganized by Mahendra Singh Tikait, a Jat landowner from Sisauli village in Muzaffarnagar district, the organization drew on local caste networks and utilized traditional institutions like khap panchayats for mobilization. Jats became the dominant landholding caste after post-Independence land reforms and were described as the archetypal working peasantry of northern India. The 2020-21 farmers’ movement from western UP was primarily driven by the Jat community, with the Tikait brothers serving as the most prominent leaders.

Gujarat: Patidar farmers 🔗

In Gujarat, organizations like the Gujarat Khedut Samaj and Bharatiya Kisan Sangh addressed agricultural grievances with strong Patidar representation. The Patidars, historically known as agricultural entrepreneurs, benefited significantly from land reforms in the 1960s when they received surplus land previously belonging to Rajput landlords. About 21 percent are well-to-do farmers, with the community having transitioned many members into successful business ventures while maintaining agricultural roots.

Limited inclusion of marginalized groups 🔗

While some movements made attempts to include Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and rural artisans, their representation remained minimal compared to the dominant caste base. The Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra was relatively more sensitive to women’s causes through initiatives like the Lakshmi Mukti programme that conferred land titles on rural housewives, and it recognized space for Dalit mobilizations within its network.

However, structural tensions persisted. Considerable friction existed between Jat farmers and Harijan laborers, and between owner-cultivators and landless workers generally. During the 2020-21 farm law protests, non-Jat communities in Haryana-including Dalits, Brahmins, and Khatris-expressed reservations about BKU-led efforts, viewing them as extensions of Jat dominance rather than inclusive farmer movements. In Punjab, where Dalits face routine harassment from upper-caste Jat farmers, grassroots Dalit support remained limited despite endorsements from some Dalit organizations.

The patriarchal nature of these movements further limited inclusion. The traditional institutions through which mobilization occurred-khap panchayats in north India, for instance-were themselves exclusionary structures that reinforced caste and gender hierarchies rather than challenging them.

Implications for all-India mobilization 🔗

The regionally and socially confined caste-class bases created fundamental obstacles to building a cohesive, nationwide farmers’ movement. Each state-based organization reflected its local dominant caste configuration, making coordination difficult beyond shared economic demands.

Political scientist Badri Narayan emphasizes that farmers are not an electoral bloc-they have multiple identities. Once farmers return from protest sites, they go back to being part of their caste or religious blocs, voting accordingly rather than as a unified agricultural constituency. This fragmentation explains why even the massive 2020-21 protests that forced the government to withdraw three farm laws did not translate into significant electoral setbacks for the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh.

The movements’ political impact has therefore remained largely confined to agitational politics-securing specific concessions like loan waivers, electricity tariff reductions, or MSP increases-rather than transforming rural power structures or agricultural policy fundamentally. The Shetkari Sanghatana’s attempt to enter electoral politics through the Swatantra Bharat Party in 1994 and Karnataka movements’ similar efforts met with limited success, demonstrating the difficulty of converting agrarian mobilization into sustained political power.

The challenge of unity 🔗

The ideological slogan of Bharat versus India-projecting a unified rural population against urban exploitation-has remained more rhetoric than reality. The internal contradictions between large and small farmers, owner-cultivators and laborers, dominant castes and marginalized communities, and irrigated regions and dryland areas have prevented the emergence of a truly unified farmers’ identity. Lowering input prices and increasing output prices for agricultural products benefit large cultivators more than small and medium farmers, creating divergent material interests within the supposed unity.

Recent developments suggest some shifts. The 2020-21 protests brought together farm unions, left organizations, and civil society groups in unprecedented alliances across caste, class, gender, and religion-at least temporarily. Smaller farmers are now more likely to ally with farmer-labourers and the landless, who are in turn less dependent on larger farmers due to the growth of non-agricultural wage labor. Whether these new solidarities can overcome the historical limitations remains to be seen.

What do you think? Can farmers’ movements in India ever overcome their caste and class limitations to build truly inclusive rural coalitions? How might the growing crisis facing small and marginal farmers reshape the social bases of future agrarian mobilizations?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc14/chapter/farmers-movement-in-india/
2. https://triumphias.com/blog/neo-farmer-movement-in-contemporary-india/
3. https://www.india-seminar.com/2021/748/748-SATENDRA%20KUMAR.htm
4. https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-41-india-agriculture/
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380229221116996
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatiya_Kisan_Union
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vokkaliga
8. https://shetkarisanghatana.in/indias-largest-farmers-movement/
9. https://gujarat.pscnotes.com/gujrat-polity/political-movements-and-their-influence-on-gujarats-polity/
10. https://grokipedia.com/page/Bharatiya_Kisan_Union
11. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/whats-the-politics-of-farmers-movements-did-farmers-protests-affect-bjp-electorally-in-uttar-pradesh