Protesting Farm Leaders Must Live Stream Meetings with Govt Ministers

Protesting Farm Leaders Must Live Stream Meetings with Govt Ministers

Farm leaders should demand that all their meetings with the government should be recorded and live-streamed.

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By Rakesh Raman

In the ongoing farmers’ protest, the government of prime minister (PM) Narendra Modi continues to hoodwink the gullible farm leaders who are wasting time on futile meetings with government ministers.

After holding secret meetings on February 8 and February 12, the third meeting between the farm leaders and Modi’s ministers – Arjun Munda, Piyush Goyal, and Nityanand Rai – was scheduled in Chandigarh on February 15.

Sarvan Singh Pandher, coordinator of the Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM) which is leading the protest, and Jagjit Singh Dallewal, president of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Sidhupur) represented farmers in the meeting.

The farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and a few other states had started a march on February 13 toward Delhi to demonstrate in the national capital to get their demands accepted by the Modi regime. 

However, the despotic Modi government in Haryana deployed a brutal police force which used concrete walls, sharp nails on roads, tear gas shells dropped from drones, and lethal weapons or explosives to stop the entry of Punjab farmers who were going to Delhi for protest. 

Farmers complain that many peaceful protesters were injured and hospitalized after police attacks and drone air strikes on them. Moreover, Delhi Police – which is known for its brutality and criminality – has also imposed Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to prohibit the assembly of people in the city so that farmers should not hold their protest in Delhi.

Farmers have been demanding a legal guarantee of minimum support price (MSP) for certain crops and  withdrawal of police cases against farmers who participated in the year-long protest that began in November 2020.

Although Modi announced deceptively that he has withdrawn the three draconian farm laws as demanded by farmers, it is believed that these laws have only been suspended and not yet formally repealed. 

In their list of demands, the protesting farmers also demanded the arrest of Modi’s minister Ajay Mishra who is accused of a conspiracy to murder a few farmers in 2021 at Lakhimpur Kheri in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) state. However, farmers were shocked to know that, let alone arresting the minister, even his accused son was released from jail. 

In a nutshell, the Modi government did not accept any of the farmers’ demands during the past three years of their protest. But now instead of going to Delhi for holding their planned protest, the weak farm leaders have decided to hold another perfunctory meeting with government ministers on February 18.

Although farmers across the nation oppose the Modi government’s anti-people actions, the current movement is being led by farmers of Punjab, an Indian state which contributes the lion’s share to the Indian agriculture sector.

[ Also Read: UN Human Rights Petition to Protect Rights of Indian Farmers ]

Farmers do not understand that the government is wasting time in useless discussions because the government knows that it will be almost impossible for farmers to sustain their agitation for a longer period. 

In fact, now no discussion is required because farmers have asserted that the government should simply accept their demands. Now, the government should only communicate its decision for which meeting with the farmers is not needed.

Although protesting farmers show overconfidence in their struggle and hope to win, they are so naive in their approach that soon they may have to end their agitation without getting anything significant from the government.

As most farmers are uneducated, they do not understand various aspects of messaging and mass communications which are required to lead intellectual campaigns.

All farm organizations participating in the protest do not have a communications strategy. They do not even have a central website to regularly inform about their activities and campaign in multiple languages to draw local and global attention to their struggle. 

All their interactions with their own people and with the government representatives are being held in an ad hoc manner. While farm leaders are blindly accepting the calls of the government to hold meaningless meetings in government offices, there is no record of their meetings.

Some farmers fear that the farm leaders who are going regularly to meet the ministers may be lured by the government with some surreptitious reward to end their struggle without any significant outcome. 

Therefore, there should be greater transparency in the farm leaders’ dealings with the government. For instance, representatives of Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM) and other farm leaders should not hold closed-door meetings with the government. 

Rather, they should demand that all their meetings with the government should be recorded and live-streamed. They should also hold virtual meetings instead of going to the government offices. 

Moreover, KMM or any other farm union should make a modern interactive website in different languages (such as English, Hindi, and Punjabi) and update it regularly after taking daily feedback from all stakeholders in India and abroad. 

Farmers must understand that the social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are not effective channels of communications for long-term campaigns because they can host only curt and volatile content. Plus, these sites cannot be fully trusted and the government can block them arbitrarily.

If farmers want to win this battle against some of the most despotic leaders in the world, they need to run a modern, multidimensional campaign that should have adequate intellectual components in it.

Now the weak farm leaders have succumbed to the force being used by Haryana police which has stopped them from moving toward Delhi. However, instead of idly sitting on the Haryana-Punjab border, protesters should immediately reach Delhi to hold their planned protest. Their agitation in Delhi only will hold some significance, because their fight is against the central Modi regime.

By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of the humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society.