The speakers for the Proposition were Baroness Verma, Businesswoman also a Member of the House of Lords, Akash Banerjee, founder and host of the Deshbhakt, India’s first political satire platform reporting on Indian politics, promoting media freedom and Palki Sharma, journalist, news anchor and an editor at ‘World is One News’.

The speakers for the Opposition were Dr Ashok Dhawale, National President of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), one of the leaders of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and a member of the Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Prashant Bhushan, lawyer in the Supreme Court of India and co-founder of the Aam Aadmi Party and later of the Swaraj Abhiyan and Ajay Maken, former Congress MP and Union Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation from 2012-13.

Below is the intervention/ speech by Dr. Ashok Dhawale during this debate:

Mr Chairperson, distinguished speakers, friends, ladies and gentlemen,

“Let me first warmly congratulate the Oxford Union for completing the bicentenary of its vibrant debating tradition of free speech which began in 1823. It is a great and enviable track record, of which all of us are very proud!

“In today’s debate, I rise to speak on behalf of the Opposition. I am deeply convinced that Modi’s India is on the “right path” ONLY so far as the interests of the Adanis, Ambanis, other crony corporates, and of the rabidly communal and fascistic RSS are concerned. I firmly assert that Modi’s India is on the worst possible path so far as the interests of the massive majority of its 1.4 billion people are concerned.

“Modi’s path is in fact the path of destruction of all the noble values of democracy, secularism, sovereignty, federalism, and socio-economic justice that are ingrained in India’s Constitution, values which themselves are the result (and outcome) of India’s glorious two-century long bitter struggle against British colonialism. When I say India in this context, I also include what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh, because we were all part of one country that fought against British imperialism tooth and nail until a few years before we attained Independence.

“The freedom struggle of India led to millions of martyrs, from the Sanyasi-Fakir Rebellion and various tribal revolts from 1760; to the First War of Indian Independence in 1857; to the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre in 1919; to the terrible Bengal Famine in 1943; and to the horrifying communal Partition of India in 1947.

“Along with this was the British killing in cold blood of a long line of great patriots, who included Tipu Sultan, Mangal Pande, Rani Laxmibai, the Chapekar brothers, Birsa Munda, Khudiram Bose, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Alluri Sitarama Raju, Ashfaqulla Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, Jatin Das, Surya Sen, Pritilata Waddedar, Udham Singh, the Kayyur martyrs, and innumerable others.

“Let me remind you all here in Britain itself that the ruling classes of Britain have never once even apologised for these millions of deaths of Indians for which they were solely responsible, and also for their unprecedented loot and exploitation of India for two centuries, leave alone giving reparations and compensation to India for these priceless losses.

“Let us now briefly see the results of the nine-year long Modi rule under the following three major heads:

1. The danger to livelihoods,
2. The danger to democracy,
3. The danger to secularism and national unity.

Danger to Livelihoods

“What have the Modi regime’s economic policies in the last nine years led to? First, the disastrous demonetisation in November 2016 sucked out about 86 per cent of the cash in the economy in just a few hours. This destroyed the economy, particularly given the further shock of GST reforms in 2017.

“The unorganised sectors bore the brunt of demonetisation. Agriculture and the peasantry were severely affected. Millions of workers lost their jobs. GDP growth rates fell sharply in Q4 of 2016-17. The clearest indication of economic slowdown was the historic lows to which the offtake of bank credit fell after demonetisation.

“As the official narratives of “blocking terror financing and unearthing black money” proved to be bankrupt, the government shifted the goalpost. Demonetisation was projected as a step to usher in a cashless economy, or a less-cash economy. But data show that cash is back, as seen in the cash-to-GDP ratio.

“Four years later, the sudden countrywide Covid lockdown in March 2020 with just a four-hour notice, the bankrupt Covid vaccine policy, and the terrible state of the public health system led to the unprecedented misery of millions. While the Modi government officially estimated Covid deaths in India through the end of 2021 as just 481,000, the WHO estimated them as 10 times higher, at 4.7 million, the highest in the world. The prestigious British medical journal ‘Lancet’ estimated the Covid deaths in India to be 6 to 7 times the official count.

“The number of poor in India (with income of $2 per day or less in purchasing power parity, according to the UNO) has more than doubled from 60 to 134 million in just one year 2020 due to the pandemic-induced recession. It is estimated that 150 to 199 million additional people have fallen into poverty by the end of 2021. During the pandemic, India accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the global increase in poverty.

“The number of Indians in jobs shrank from 440 million in 2013 to 380 million in 2021 – a straight drop of 60 million in eight years of the Modi regime. However, the working age population grew from 790 million to 1060 million during that same period. Recession hit thousands of factories, which closed down. Unable to find jobs, millions of people just stopped looking for them and headed back to rural India for survival, which was also hard.

“Women in the work force had fallen from 36 per cent in 2013 to 18 per cent in 2019 even before the pandemic lockdowns. In February 2021, this figure plummeted to only 9.24 per cent, underlining the dire straits that women were in.

“The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which is directly under the Union Home Minister Amit Shah, estimated that over 100,000 farmers and agricultural workers in India were forced to commit suicide due to indebtedness in the last eight years of the Modi regime. Further, the monthly income from “cultivation” fell in real terms from Rs 2,855 to Rs 2,816 (a fall by -1.4 per cent). The enormity of the contemporary distress in India’s agrarian society is fully borne out by the farmer suicides and the absolute fall in real incomes from cultivation.

“The 2022 Global Hunger Index ranked India at 107 out of 121 countries. Last year the rank was 101 and a year before it was 94. India is now categorised as a country with a ‘serious level of hunger’. Hundreds of thousands of Adivasi and Dalit children died in rural India every year due to malnutrition and starvation.

“All through the Covid period when people’s misery was rising, petrol and diesel prices were hiked almost on a daily basis, until both petrol and diesel crossed an unprecedented Rs 100 per litre. Prices of cooking gas cylinders sky-rocketed from Rs 400 in 2014 to over Rs 1150 per cylinder in 2023. These massive price rises were a result of increase in government taxes on petrol and diesel and cut in subsidies on cooking gas. The Union Finance Minister informed Parliament that during the last three years the Centre had through this loot earned a whopping Rs 8.02 trillion between 2018 and 2021. These price hikes of petroleum products triggered an inflationary spiral due to rise in transportation and other input costs. Food, vegetables and other essentials saw a massive price hike, scaling a 12-year record. Now, for the first time in 75 years of independence, GST was imposed on food items. For the poor, even living has now become difficult.

Survival of the richest

“On the other hand, there has been an engineered transfer of incomes to a few at the top of the pyramid. According to ‘The Economist’, published from London, Mukesh Ambani’s net worth increased by 350 per cent between 2016 and 2020 and rose to Rs 7.18 trillion; while Gautam Adani’s net worth increased by 750 per cent during the same period and rose to Rs 5.06 trillion. When the Modi government assumed office in 2014, the Adani group had a market capitalisation of only $ 7 billion. This zoomed to $ 200 billion in 2022. In international rankings, Adani was No. 609 in 2014 when Modi came to power; he astronomically rose to become No. 2 in the world in 2022, until the Hindenburg exposures in January 2023 pricked his inflated balloon. In spite of revelations of massive wrongdoings, the Modi regime is still protecting Adani by stonewalling any Parliamentary enquiries against him.

“According to the Oxfam India Inequality Report 2023, aptly called ‘The Survival of the Richest’, the top 1 per cent people in India hold 40 per cent of the country’s wealth; the top 5 per cent hold 62 per cent of India’s wealth; while the share of the bottom 50 per cent (700 million) is only 3 per cent. Since the pandemic began in March 2020 up to November 2022, the total number of billionaires in India increased from 102 to 166, and their wealth surged by 121 per cent, i.e. by Rs 25 million every minute. The richest 21 billionaires have more wealth than 700 million Indians. But in this same period, the number of hungry Indians increased from 190 million to 350 million. In the last seven years of the Modi government, loans taken by corporates worth Rs. 10.72 trillion have been written off. Corporates have been favoured with tax concessions of millions of rupees.

“With receipts from disinvestment (privatization) budgeted at Rs 17,50,000 million in 2021-22, some of the best profit-making public sector firms and financial institutions have been put up for sale to domestic and foreign corporates. Public sector banks and insurance companies are to be privatized. The National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) is to sell off Rs 6 trillion of land and other public sector assets to the corporate lobby. The entire country – railways, airports, airlines, ports, steel, coal, oil, telecom, banks, insurance, health, education, and even defence production – is being put up for sale to the domestic and foreign corporates for a pittance. Along with the massive loss to the country, this is also attacking the workers and employees through massive retrenchment.

“Sharp cuts in public expenditure on infrastructure and its growing privatisation are having their disastrous impact, as seen just last week in the horrific multiple train accident at Balasore in Odisha, which claimed nearly 300 innocent lives. While the railways are starved of funds for their development and modernisation, PM Modi goes about the country inaugurating several elitist Vande Bharat trains which will run on the same hazardous railway lines.

“The Modi government sharply attacked the working class, the peasantry and the agricultural workers through the four Labour Codes, the three Farm Laws, and the assault on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

“The three Farm Laws had to be repealed as a result of the SKM-led historic one-year long struggle of the farmers of India. But the BJP government’s repression on the farmers’ struggle was intense, and it led to the martyrdom of 715 farmers. The worst case was the horrifying mowing down of four farmers and a journalist at Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh under the cars of the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, Ajay Mishra Teni, who is still shamelessly allowed to continue to remain in office. This would never have happened in any real democracy. In the UK itself, we have the example of Boris Johnson being forced to resign first as Prime Minister, and then as Member of Parliament, over the ‘Partygate’ scandal, which though serious in itself, pales in comparison with the five murders committed through conspiracy by Minister Ajay Mishra Teni.

“The classes that actually produce the wealth of the country through their labour – the workers, the peasants and the agricultural workers – are being viciously attacked. This is the real meaning of corporate communalism, whose symbols today are Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Gautam Adani, and Mukesh Ambani.

Attacks on Democracy

“One of the main architects of the Constitution of India, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, had written this just before independence came, “If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country…It is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity. On that account it is incompatible with democracy. Hindu Raj must be prevented at any cost.”

“The attacks on democracy by the BJP-RSS government in India are unprecedented.

“The draconian use of the Sedition laws, National Security Act (NSA) and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) on the one hand, and of the CBI, ED, IT and other central agencies against political opponents, has crossed all limits. Hundreds of innocent human rights activists, intellectuals, students and journalists have been thrown into jail for years without charge sheets being filed against them. They include the Bhima Koregaon detenus and the Delhi riots detenus. Along with them, the arrests of Sanjiv Bhatt, R B Sreekumar, Umar Khaled, Teesta Setalvad, Kappan Siddiqui, Safoora Zargar, and Mohammed Zubair are some other shocking examples. The mysterious and sensational deaths of Haren Pandya and Judge Loya are, of course, the most serious cases.

“The removal of opposition state governments in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, and some North Eastern states through a combination of corrupt money power and ED-CBI threats is another manifestation of the BJP-RSS murder of democracy. All constitutional bodies – parliament, judiciary, election commission, central agencies – are being subverted.

“Most of the print and electronic media in India are already owned by the corporate lobby, led by Ambani, Adani and the rest. They are kept in line by the grant or denial of government advertisements, and other coercive measures. They are called the Godi media in India, and they are engaged in a competition to glorify the Modi regime and to stamp out any opposition and dissent against it.

“The V-Dem Institute has called India an ‘electoral autocracy’. Freedom House has described India as ‘partly free’. IDEA has said that India scores ‘at the level of 1975’ when a formal Emergency was in place. ‘Reporters without Borders’ has placed India at number 161 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. This is the shocking record of the so-called “largest democracy in the world” under the Modi regime.

Danger to secularism and national unity

“The grave danger of the Modi regime to secularism and national unity is seen from the regular attacks on, and lynching of, the Muslim and Christian religious minorities. This is hardly surprising, considering Modi’s key role in the 2002 horrendous Gujarat communal carnage, that killed nearly 2,000 Muslims, raped hundreds of women, and slaughtered even children. The BBC documentary “India: The Modi Question” was banned in India. However, thousands of students across University campuses in the country broke the ban and screened the documentary nevertheless.

“Communalism is a legacy that the RSS has faithfully lifted from British colonialism and from its dictum of ‘Divide and Rule’. It is no wonder that all three communal organisations in India at that time – the Muslim League of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Hindu Mahasabha of Savarkar, and the RSS of Hedgewar and Golwalkar, strictly stayed away from the glorious freedom struggle of the Indian people against British colonialism. The latter two organisations were directly involved in the dastardly assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Decades later, similar forces were responsible for the killings of Dr Narendra Dabholkar, Comrade Govind Pansare, Prof M M Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh. No progress has been made in the investigations into their murders.

“One of the most shocking recent instances is that of the BJP-led Gujarat state government setting free 11 criminals convicted of killing 14 Muslims during the Gujarat inferno of 2002, gang-raping the then 21-year old pregnant woman, Bilkis Bano, and killing her 3-year old baby daughter also. The release of these 11 criminals was carried out on the 75th anniversary of India’s freedom – 15 August 2022 – and on the eve of the Gujarat state assembly elections, clearly in order to sharpen communal polarisation.

“The BJP’s attempt to link citizenship to religion through the CAA-NRC-NPR elicited remarkable countrywide protests for months, including the prolonged and remarkable Shaheen Bagh protest by women in Delhi, which was eventually crushed by engineering communal riots in the capital. The sudden withdrawal of statehood to India’s only Muslim majority state, Jammu & Kashmir, and the abrogation of Article 370 and 35 A of the Constitution that had made special provisions for that state, was followed by an unheard-of crackdown and repression on the people there.

“Dalits, Adivasis, backward castes, and women are also at the receiving end of these casteist proponents of the Manusmriti. In the last few years, we have seen the terrible instances of atrocities on Dalits, particularly on Dalit women, at Hathras and Unnao, and in the tragic institutional murder of Rohith Vemula.

“The RSS-BJP allegiance to the Manusmriti was clearly shown in the case of the foundation stone laying and inauguration ceremony of the new Parliament building in Delhi. Although the President of India is the highest constitutional authority in the country, both successive Presidents of India were kept out of the two ceremonies – first Ramnath Kovind, a Dalit, and then Draupadi Murmu, an Adivasi woman. Although both of them had been hand-picked and elected to these high posts by Modi, it was Modi alone who conducted both these ceremonies himself, with a host of saffron-clad sadhus, seers and mahants in tow.

“The BJP government’s determined opposition to a caste census for the accurate enumeration of OBCs is yet another example of its Manuwadi mindset.

“The implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006 is being undermined. Adivasis are being driven out of their forest lands to help the corporate lobby acquire their land for mining, industry and other purposes. The recent changes in the Forest Conservation Act (FCA) of 1980 are meant precisely for this purpose.

“Atrocities on women and girls have shown a sharp increase in the last nine years of the Modi regime. Many of these atrocities are perpetrated by BJP leaders themselves, and there is no punishment meted out to them. All laws giving protection to women against violence are being systematically diluted. The right to freedom of choice is being snatched away and the growth of ‘honour killings’ is a matter of grave concern. Laws passed by BJP state governments are a direct attack on the freedom of choice and seek to impose even more control on women.

“The most striking recent instance which has rocked the country is the agitation by Olympic medalist women wrestlers against sexual harassment by the then President of the Wrestling Federation of India, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, a BJP MP. In spite of the wrestlers conducting an agitation for over a month in Delhi, which got mass support from the people, the accused BJP MP has still not been arrested; on the contrary, the wrestlers were manhandled and arrested on the very same day that the new Parliament building was inaugurated by Modi.

The tide is turning

“But as Abraham Lincoln famously said, you cannot fool all the people all the time. Accordingly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s aura of invincibility is being eroded in recent years. In the last two years, the BJP has been resoundingly defeated in elections and has received other setbacks in the states of Kerala, Tamilnadu, West Bengal, Punjab, Bihar, Delhi, and recently in Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka, where its state governments were ousted by the people.

“The BJP has lost three of its long-standing regional allies in the NDA in recent times – the Akali Dal in Punjab, the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, and the JD(U) in Bihar. There are four important state assembly elections later this year, and these will be followed by the parliamentary general elections in April-May 2024.

“If most of the secular opposition parties unite to minimise the splitting of the anti-BJP vote, if peoples’ struggles around their real burning issues are intensified, like the iconic farmers’ struggle of 2020-21, and most important, if the RSS-BJP attempts at communal polarisation are fought politically tooth and nail, it is surely possible that the Modi-Shah-led BJP-RSS regime can and will be defeated, and the people of India will be saved from a dark, divisive, and fascistic future. Let us all bend our energies towards that end!

Thank you very much!
Jai Hind!

Long Live Revolution!

[Dr Ashok Dhawale is National President of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), one of the leaders of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and a member of the Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)]

Related:

“Demonetisation: Modi’s Himalayan Blunder and its Lingering Consequences” (Part 1)

Challenge to demonetisation not academic : SC seeks affidavits of both Union & RBI, including RBI decisions at the time

RBI data reveals demonetization was a failure, 99% of banned cash recovered

Money Mayhem – Demonetisation Cartoons

Demonetisation: The grandest of blunders made by anyone in Indian political history?

Modi’s RBI and its myopic monetary measures

Inequality is not inevitable, it’s a policy choice, says Oxfam

Undesirable but prevalent inequalities in India

The post “The Modi Regime can and will be defeated”: Oxford University Union Debate appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In a brutal and inhuman attack on peacefully protesting farmers led by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) at Tikonia in Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh on October 3, 2021, a convoy of vehicles associated with BJP’s Union Minister of State for Home, Ajay Mishra Teni, his son Ashish Mishra Teni, and other goons ran over several farmer protesters. It is reported that one of the farmers was shot dead by the son of the Union Minister. Four farmers and one local journalist were killed in the incident, and several others were seriously injured. Terai Kisan Sanghatan and SKM leader Tajinder Singh Virk was also seriously injured.

Thousands of farmers started assembling from the morning of October 3 in Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh for a black flag protest against Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya and Union Minister of State Ajay Mishra Teni, for the latter’s open threat issued against farmer leaders in a public meeting. The farmers with black flags occupied the helipad at Maharaja Agrasen Ground to prevent the Deputy CM from landing there. The brutal attack on farmers happened as the farmers were dispersing and leaving from the protest site. Mr Teni’s son, uncle and other goons are then reported to have run over the protesters who had lined up on the roads with black flags.

On the very same day, October 3, in another condemnable development, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar was heard in a video clip encouraging BJP-RSS men to pick up lathis and attack farmers, even if this means ending up in jails for a few months! While the farmers’ movement has explicitly made peace and non-violence as its values, it is clear that the BJP governments are acting with murderous intent on their own citizens. SKM condemned the BJP CM’s violent intent and demanded that he resign from his constitutional post. 

Serial murder of farmers

This is the third serial murder of farmers by the BJP in a little over a month. The first was the murder of Sushil Kajal of Karnal in Haryana on August 28, as a result of the brutal police lathi charge by the BJP-JJP’s Haryana government, for which orders “to break the heads of farmers” were given by the notorious SDM Ayush Sinha, obviously under the directions of chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar. The second was the equally brutal killing of two Muslim farmers Saddam Hussain and 12-year-old Sheikh Forid on September 23 by police firing ordered by the BJP’s Assam government. Chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma was shameless enough to hail the police action. The third is the mowing down of four farmers Gurvinder Singh (19), Lovepreet Singh (20), Daljeet Singh (35) and Nachattar Singh (60) and a journalist Raman Kashyap on October 3 in the Lakhimpur Kheri massacre by BJP hoodlums in Uttar Pradesh. Besides these killings, over 605 farmers have died as martyrs on the Delhi borders during the last 10 months.

Eye witness accounts reveal how the murderous attack seems to be allegedly planned, facilitated by the UP police. It is reported that police removed barricades to allow the vehicles of the Minister’s son, who himself was driving the Thar vehicle, to mow down protestors indiscriminately, and the farmers retaliated thereafter. The police allegedly helped Ashish Mishra Teni in escaping from the scene, and it is reported that he fired as he escaped. The specific targeting of SKM leader Tajinder Singh Virk was narrated in eye-witness accounts. 

After the brutal and barbaric incidents in Lakhimpur Kheri, where four protesting farmers and a local journalist were mowed down by vehicles to their death, there were questions raised by the Godi media and by the notorious BJP-RSS IT cells about the protestors and their violent behaviour. It was only a matter of time that the true narrative of the reality of the incidents in Lakhimpur Kheri had to emerge.

Accordingly, a shocking video emerged on October 5, which forced even Godi TV channels of India to demand justice by their own standards, even though no media house offered any apology and correction for the false and spurious narrative that was spun since October 3. In this video, the explanation given by the Minister Ajay Mishra Teni and his son was proved to be false. The vehicles of the Minister fatally mowed down peacefully walking unaware protestors who were returning from their protest. Many eyewitness accounts are now being released on videos which also reveal that the Minister’s son Ashish Mishra was indeed driving the ‘Thar’ vehicle, from which he later got down and ran away, with cover and support provided by the police, and while firing on protesters. The journalist Raman Kashyap’s family pointed out that he also got killed by vehicles crushing him. 

In an urgently convened virtual press conference, members of the 9-member coordination committee of SKM addressed the media with regard to the ghastly incidents in Lakhimpur Kheri. SKM’s Richa Singh and Guramneet Mangat who were in Lakhimpur Kheri (the former during the occupation of the helipad in Tikonia earlier in the day and the latter throughout the murderous incidents also) also shared the details of the shocking events.

The SKM demanded that the Uttar Pradesh government must immediately impose cases with murder charges under IPC Section 302 against all those involved from the side of Ajay Mishra Teni, and the Union Minister must be dismissed immediately. The SKM also demanded a judicial inquiry by a sitting judge of the Supreme Court.

The Yogi Adityanath-led BJP Uttar Pradesh government tried numerous undemocratic ways of preventing various people going to Lakhimpur Kheri, whether it was SKM leaders, social activists, or political leaders. Many SKM leaders were arrested when on their way to Lakhimpur Kheri. Section 144 was imposed, and internet services were suspended. The UP Government went to the extent of disallowing certain people from arriving into, and leaving from particular airports, and also wrote to the Punjab government, asking that no person from Punjab should be allowed to enter Lakhimpur Kheri. The prevention of leaders of the Opposition from visiting the spot, including the former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and two sitting Chief Ministers (of Punjab and Chattisgarh), and disallowing the landing of a Deputy Chief Minister show the panic of the Yogi regime. All these incidents clearly show that the UP government has something to hide, and is protecting the culprits. Such draconian measures are unprecedented. SKM condemned all these undemocratic measures of the Uttar Pradesh BJP government. 

Farmers compel state govt to concede compensation

On October 4, an agreement was reached between SKM leaders along with local protesting farmers and families of the deceased, and the state administration, which paved the way for the last rites to be performed of the martyred farmers, after the postmortem. The bodies of the four martyrs had been kept in an overnight vigil by thousands of farmers and their families in Tikunia’s college ground. The state government will give 45 lakh rupees each and a government job each to the families of the farmers who were killed. The injured will be given 10 lakh rupees each. An FIR has been registered against Ashish Mishra Teni and 15 others under Sections 302, 120B and other charges, and the government said that it will arrest all the accused within a week. A case has been registered against Union Minister Ajay Mishra Teni also, under Sections like 120B. The Government has agreed to get a retired High Court judge to probe the matter. The demand for Ajay Mishra Teni’s dismissal from the Union Government is still pending.

Among those SKM leaders who took part in the negotiations with the state government and later addressed the huge condolence meeting in Tikonia were BKU leaders Rakesh Tikait, Dharmendra Malik and Rajvir Jadaon, AIKS leaders D P Singh, Mukut Singh and Chandrapal Singh, and also Gurmeet Mangat, Jagtar Singh Bazwa and Baba Anup Singh. The huge meeting was attended by thousands of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh farmers in a spirit of exemplary unity.

The agreement with the administration on October 4 was only to pave the way for the last rites of the martyrs to be performed. The key demands of SKM remain, and it will soon announce a programme of action for getting these demands met.

Massive protests break out, countrywide

SKM called upon all farmers’ organisations across the country to protest at Government offices in all districts on October 4, to press for the above demands. SKM appealed to all citizens participating in the farmers’ movement to continue their protests peacefully and non-violently, as they have done all the past ten months. The movement recognises the various dirty ways in which BJP-RSS forces are desperately trying to break it, and will combat any such attempts by holding on to satya and ahimsa, said SKM. 

There were spontaneous protests in response to the massacre in Lakhimpur Kheri from October 3 night itself, when candlelight marches and rallies were taken out in places like Ambala, Kurukshetra, Chandigarh and others. In Puranpur and elsewhere, highways were jammed by protesting farmers. Thousands of farmers poured into Tikunia on October 4, at the site of the violent incidents, where the bodies of the martyrs were kept.  

On October 4 and 5, large protests were organised at DC/DM offices and other locations in many places across the country. Reports have come in from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and other states about these protests. A protest organised outside UP Bhawan in New Delhi ended with scores of protestors being picked up and detained for many hours by the Delhi Police in Mandir Marg Police Station.

In stark contrast to the violence let loose by the BJP governments and its leaders, the farmers’ movement marked the birth anniversaries of Mahatma Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri with great respect and renewed inspiration on October 2. A one day fast was observed in the Morchas to mark the occasion. Across India, farmers’ groups organised events to mark the day in memory of the two great leaders who shaped our nation’s independence, destiny and ethos towards rural India. “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” is a slogan that reverberates to this day in the farmers’ movement, a slogan coined and made popular by Shastriji. It is a slogan that makes farmers of the country feel proud and recognised for their immense contributions. The farmers’ movement has been running peacefully for the last 10 months, based on the strength of Satya and Ahimsa, the touchstones of Gandhiji’s Satyagraha philosophy. It will continue to do so, facing and overcoming all odds.

Related:

Lakhimpur Kheri: Ashish Mishra still not arrested 
Lakhimpur Kheri farmer deaths: Families to light candles, not pyres until post mortem
Lakhimpur Kheri deaths: A Timeline
I was not in the car: Ashish Mishra’s feeble defence in Lakhimpur Kheri farmer deaths
‘Godi media’ on a rampage: Mowing down of farmers labeled ‘clashes’, victims ‘khalistanis’

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