Party Politics and Splits in India's Farmers’ Movements

India’s farmers’ movements after Gandhi represent one of the most significant chapters in grassroots political mobilization. What began as determinedly non-partisan pressure groups in the 1970s and 1980s gradually became entangled with electoral politics, leading to strategic divisions and ideological rifts that continue to shape agrarian activism today. The tension between remaining above party politics and engaging directly with electoral democracy has been the central dilemma for these movements.

The non-political stance and its erosion
Early forays into electoral politics
Formation of political parties
The persistent pressure group: Uttar Pradesh’s BKU
The great liberalization schism
The weakening of collective power

The non-political stance and its erosion

The Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) emerged in 1978 when the Punjab Khetibari Union, formed in 1972 through the merger of 11 peasant groups in Chandigarh, transformed into a national platform. The original intent was ambitious: creating a nationwide forum for farmers while maintaining independence from electoral machinations. The BKU explicitly positioned itself as a pressure group operating outside the establishment of electoral politics, providing issue-based support to candidates across party lines without affiliating with any single political party.

This non-partisan approach distinguished the new farmers’ movements from earlier peasant struggles. Farmer leaders like Mahendra Singh Tikait reorganized the BKU in 1986 as a specifically non-partisan organization, departing from its earlier association with former Prime Minister Charan Singh’s political apparatus. The movement’s meetings were notably informal, egalitarian, and modeled on traditional institutions like village panchayats and khap panchayats, reflecting its roots in rural community structures rather than urban political culture.

However, this apolitical stance proved difficult to maintain. Many farmer leaders came to believe that without direct engagement in electoral politics, their demands for remunerative prices, loan waivers, and lower tariffs would remain at the mercy of whichever party happened to be in power. The movements had demonstrated their capacity to mobilize hundreds of thousands of farmers, yet translating that strength into lasting policy changes seemed to require political representation.

Early forays into electoral politics

The first significant attempts to bridge the gap between movement and party came from Tamil Nadu. C. Narayanasamy Naidu, born in 1925 in Coimbatore’s Sengalipalayam area, became one of the pioneering figures in organized farmer activism in the state. Known among farmers as “Uzhavar Perunthalaivar” (Great Leader of Farmers), Naidu led various protests from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, particularly against power tariff increases affecting agricultural operations.

Naidu’s vision extended beyond protest to political organization. He sought to create a comprehensive framework for farmers’ welfare that included crop insurance, pension schemes, and rightful compensation for natural disasters. While his electoral ventures achieved limited success compared to the established Dravidian parties that dominated Tamil Nadu politics, they set an important precedent for farmers’ movements entering the political arena.

At the national level, a brief split occurred within the BKU in 1982, resulting in two factions: BKU (N) led by Narayanasamy Naidu and BKU (M) led by Bhupendra Singh Mann. This division was eventually resolved through the intervention of Sharad Joshi, who helped reunite the organization under a federal structure with autonomous state units. But the episode revealed the persistent tensions within the movement over questions of leadership, strategy, and political engagement.

Formation of political parties

Sharad Joshi of Maharashtra’s Shetkari Sanghatana became perhaps the most prominent farmer leader to transition into formal politics. After founding the Sanghatana in 1979 following an agitation by onion growers blocking the Pune-Nashik highway, Joshi built what was at one time called the world’s largest farmers’ movement. The organization championed demands for remunerative prices and freedom of access to markets and technology, with slogans like “we don’t want alms, we want the price of our sweat and toil.”

In the mid-1990s, Joshi founded the Swatantra Bharat Party, taking his economic liberalism into electoral competition. The party advocated for minimal government intervention in agriculture and farmers’ freedom to access both domestic and global markets. Joshi eventually served as a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from 2004 to 2010. However, his political journey came at a cost-critics accused him of making political compromises, and the Sanghatana splintered into several factions.

In Karnataka, the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) under M.D. Nanjundaswamy took a different path. Founded in 1980, the movement’s ideological foundations drew from Gandhian principles of self-reliance and Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialist thought. While Nanjundaswamy served as an independent, non-party member of the Karnataka State Parliament from 1989 to 1994, the movement experimented with various political formations. These included associations with the Kannada Desha Party and later engagement with the Sarvodaya Party, though none achieved significant electoral success.

The persistent pressure group: Uttar Pradesh’s BKU

In striking contrast to Maharashtra and Karnataka, the Bharatiya Kisan Union in Uttar Pradesh under Mahendra Singh Tikait largely remained committed to the pressure group model. Tikait reorganized the UP branch in October 1986 with its headquarters in Sisauli, western Uttar Pradesh, and successfully built a formidable mobilization apparatus that avoided direct party formation.

The BKU demonstrated its power through massive agitations. The Meerut siege of January-February 1988 saw a 25-day dharna around the commissioner’s office, drawing hundreds of thousands of farmers from surrounding areas. Later that year, the Boat Club Rally brought approximately 800,000 farmers from western Uttar Pradesh to New Delhi, with tractors and bullock carts stretching 3 kilometers from India Gate to Vijay Chowk. These mobilizations successfully won concessions on sugarcane prices, loan waivers, and reduced water and power tariffs.

Tikait’s strategic choice to remain a pressure group rather than becoming a political party allowed the BKU to maintain broader unity across caste and religious lines, building what became known as the AJGR alliance (Ahir, Jat, Gujjar, and Rajput). This approach meant working with whoever was in power while maintaining independence-a model that continued to influence farmers’ movements in the region for decades.

The great liberalization schism

The 1990s brought India’s economic liberalization, and with it came the most significant ideological split in the farmers’ movement. The question of how to respond to globalization, the World Trade Organization, and structural adjustment programs divided movements that had previously cooperated despite regional differences.

Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra welcomed liberalization and privatization. Joshi argued that trade liberalization would reduce state control over agriculture and thereby increase farmers’ freedom. He supported the WTO because he believed Indian farming could be profitable if farmers had access to global markets. His position was that the problem lay not with capitalism but with the state’s regulatory chokehold on agriculture.

This stance was forcefully opposed by the KRRS of Karnataka under Nanjundaswamy, who developed a powerful critique of liberalization, privatization, and globalization reforms. For Nanjundaswamy, Western capitalism sought not only to capture Third World markets but also to appropriate natural resources and biological diversity. The KRRS burnt field trials of genetically modified seeds, ransacked KFC outlets and Cargill offices, and held protests against the Dunkel Draft that became the foundation of the WTO.

The BKU in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh under Tikait also opposed globalization, though with less dramatic confrontation than Karnataka. The union termed the WTO an “unreasonable regime” serving corporate interests while victimizing Indian farmers. They demanded that agriculture be excluded from WTO agreements entirely and opposed patents on seeds and agricultural products.

The weakening of collective power

This vertical split over globalization weakened the farmers’ movement’s collective bargaining power at a critical historical juncture. Movements that had collaborated during the 1980s now found themselves on opposite sides of fundamental economic and philosophical questions. The Maharashtra movement’s support for liberalization directly clashed with the anti-globalization positions in Karnataka, Punjab, and UP, making coordinated national action increasingly difficult.

The split reflected deeper questions about the nature of farmers’ problems and appropriate solutions. Was the problem state control that needed dismantling, or was it corporate power that required resistance? Should farmers seek integration into global markets or protection from them? These disagreements were not merely tactical but represented fundamentally different visions for Indian agriculture and rural society.

The internal divisions, combined with the rise of caste and communal politics through the 1990s and 2000s, contributed to the gradual weakening of farmer identity as a political force. Economic reforms shifted the agrarian economy toward non-farm occupations, and the class differentiation within farming communities became more pronounced. The rich farmer movements of the 1980s, which had helped overthrow the Congress government in 1989, lost much of their political potency.

Yet the legacy of these movements and their divisions continues to influence agrarian politics. The tensions between pressure group tactics and electoral engagement, between embracing and resisting global markets, and between maintaining unity and pursuing distinct regional strategies remain unresolved questions for farmer organizing in contemporary India.

What do you think? Can farmers’ movements remain effective as purely non-political pressure groups, or is direct electoral engagement essential for achieving lasting policy changes? How might the historical division over globalization inform current debates about agricultural policy and trade?

References

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Table of Contents

The non-political stance and its erosion 🔗

Early forays into electoral politics 🔗

Formation of political parties 🔗

The persistent pressure group: Uttar Pradesh’s BKU 🔗

The great liberalization schism 🔗

The weakening of collective power 🔗