Is the New Farmers’ Movement Really New? A Critical Debate

When scholars discuss India’s farmers’ movements, a fundamental question emerges: is the New Farmers’ Movement that arose in the 1970s and 1980s genuinely “new,” or simply a continuation of earlier peasant struggles under a different banner? This debate cuts to the heart of how we understand agrarian mobilization in post-independence India, revealing deep divisions among academics about the nature of rural protest and political organization.

The critics: why some say “new” is just old wine in new bottles 🔗

Several scholars have challenged the very premise that the farmers’ movement represents something fundamentally different from earlier peasant mobilizations. Ramchandra Guha, writing in 1989, dismissed claims of newness by characterizing the movement as essentially an “old” kulak-rich peasant mobilization rooted in class-based interests rather than any novel framework.

V.K. Arora has systematically questioned several claims made by proponents of the movement’s novelty. Her critique targets multiple dimensions. First, while the movement emphasized remunerative prices over land distribution, she argues that land remained a live political issue within the movement, just in altered form. Second, the supposedly “novel” agitational methods-road blockades, rail disruptions, and village bans on officials-were actually old tactics previously employed by farmers in Maharashtra and by women in anti-famine agitations decades earlier.

Arora further challenges the ideological and political dimensions of the “newness” claim. She draws similarities between the farmers’ movement ideology and earlier traditions of agrarian populism, suggesting nothing fundamentally new in its intellectual framework. The movement’s claims of being apolitical also ring hollow to critics, who note that various farmers’ organizations extended support to different political parties and even contested elections. The Shetkari Sanghatana had five MLAs in the Maharashtra assembly between 1990 and 1995, and Sharad Joshi himself formed the Swatantra Bharat Party in 1994.

The case for novelty: what made these movements different 🔗

Proponents of the movement’s newness point to several distinguishing characteristics that set it apart from earlier peasant struggles. Unlike traditional movements that romanticized village life and rural simplicity, these new movements rejected pastoral romanticism entirely. They approached farming as a commercial enterprise requiring market access and fair pricing rather than a spiritual or culturally superior way of life.

The movement also demonstrated a fundamentally different spatial orientation. Earlier peasant movements focused primarily on local grievances against landlords and moneylenders. The new farmers’ movement, by contrast, transcended local boundaries and emphasized internationalism over narrow nationalism. Farmers began seeing themselves as part of a global agricultural community facing similar challenges from state policies and international trade regimes.

A unified identity across class divisions 🔗

Perhaps most significantly, the new movement attempted to construct a unified farmer identity that cut across traditional class divisions within the peasantry. Rather than distinguishing between rich, middle, and poor peasants as Marxist analysis demanded, leaders like Sharad Joshi argued that all cultivators faced common exploitation from the state and urban-industrial sector. As Joshi articulated, the real contradiction was not between big and small peasants within the village, but between the entire agrarian population and the rest of society.

This identity politics found powerful expression in Joshi’s famous slogan of “Bharat versus India”-positing rural agricultural India (Bharat) as an internal colony exploited by urban industrial India, much as the entire subcontinent had been exploited under British rule.

The remunerative prices paradigm: a new analytical lens 🔗

A defining characteristic that supporters cite as genuinely “new” was the movement’s single-point focus on remunerative prices for agricultural produce. This represented a paradigm shift from earlier movements focused on land redistribution, tenancy reform, or debt relief.

The core argument was straightforward: analyze rural backwardness through the lens of what farmers receive for their produce. If agricultural prices were set fairly-reflecting true costs of production plus reasonable profit-the benefits would trickle down to address poverty and underdevelopment throughout rural India. This economistic approach believed that getting prices right would solve multiple problems simultaneously, from farmer indebtedness to rural unemployment.

The movement demanded that the gap between what farmers spent on inputs and what they received for outputs be corrected. As the Shetkari Sanghatana argued, farmers faced a “negative subsidy” where for every rupee spent on production, they received back far less in market returns. The solution lay not in government handouts but in fair market access and prices reflecting true value.

Gail Omvedt and the new form of exploitation 🔗

Scholar Gail Omvedt, who extensively studied peasant movements in India, identified what she considered a genuinely novel element in these movements: their understanding of exploitation itself. Traditional movements located exploitation in local power structures-the landlord extracting rent, the moneylender charging usurious interest, the trader cheating on weights and measures.

The new farmers’ movement, Omvedt argued, identified exploitation as rooted in a larger market system extending far beyond localities. This market operated at national and even global levels, determining prices in ways that systematically disadvantaged agricultural producers. The enemy was not the local intermediary but structural forces embedded in how the national economy was organized-with urban industry favored over rural agriculture through government pricing policies, import controls, and investment priorities.

This analytical shift had significant implications. It meant farmers needed to engage with national policy debates, international trade negotiations, and macroeconomic frameworks rather than simply confronting local oppressors. Some organizations, like Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana, even supported WTO membership and trade liberalization, believing global market access would benefit Indian farmers-a position that distinguished them sharply from anti-globalization movements.

The Maharashtra model’s five defining tenets 🔗

The Shetkari Sanghatana explicitly defined itself as a “New Farmers’ Movement” through five distinguishing characteristics that set it apart from earlier agrarian mobilizations.

An economistic focus 🔗

The movement prioritized economic demands-prices, market access, input costs-over social reform agendas. While it engaged with women’s issues through initiatives like the Lakshmi Mukti program for women’s land rights, economic rationality remained central to its identity and demands.

Commitment to secularism 🔗

In an era of rising communal politics, the Maharashtra movement maintained secular principles, refusing to mobilize farmers along religious lines. This distinguished it from other rural movements that sometimes aligned with communal parties or drew on religious identities.

Constitutional agitation methods 🔗

While employing disruptive tactics like road blockades (rasta roko) and village bans on officials (gav bandhi), the movement operated within constitutional frameworks. It introduced innovative protest techniques while avoiding violence and working through legal channels when possible.

Rejection of pastoral romanticism 🔗

Unlike Gandhian visions of ideal village republics, the Shetkari Sanghatana did not glorify rural life as spiritually superior or advocate return to pre-modern ways. Instead, it embraced modernization, technology, and integration with national and global markets as paths to farmer prosperity.

Positive liberalism as worldview 🔗

The movement advocated what Joshi termed “positive liberalism”-supporting free markets, opposing state intervention in agriculture, and viewing economic freedom as essential to farmer welfare. This position, notably, was contested by other farmers’ movements like Karnataka’s KRRS, which saw such liberalism as perpetuating Western capitalist domination over the Third World.

An unresolved debate 🔗

The question of whether these movements were truly “new” remains contested among scholars. What seems clear is that they represented a significant shift in agrarian politics-moving the focus from land to prices, from local to national and international arenas, and from class-based analysis to identity-based mobilization around the farmer category itself.

Whether these shifts constitute genuine novelty or simply adaptation of old forms to new circumstances may ultimately depend on one’s theoretical framework. What cannot be denied is that these movements transformed how farmers organized, what they demanded, and how they understood their place in India’s political economy.

What do you think? Can a movement be considered “new” if it employs familiar tactics for different ends? And does the debate over newness matter practically, or is it primarily of academic interest?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc14/chapter/farmers-movement-in-india/
2. https://indianliberals.in/content/sharad-anantrao-joshi/
3. https://triumphias.com/blog/neo-farmer-movement-in-contemporary-india/
4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-25448-4_6
5. https://indianliberals.in/content/unchanged-quarter-century-for-farmers-sharad-joshi/
6. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14672715.1988.10404445
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharad_Anantrao_Joshi
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/33950/1/Unit-8.pdf
9. https://libertarianparty.in/what-does-sharad-joshi-think-of-a-liberal-india