India’s great divergence: Liberal economics and illiberal politics
India’s great divergence: Liberal economics and illiberal politics
WRITTEN BY INDRAJIT ROY
25 February 2021
India’s government is worried. The latest source, environmental activist Disha Ravi, was arrested last week for updating a toolkit intended to help people wanting to join ongoing protests by farmers against legislation hastily passed in India's parliament last September. Ravi's arrest comes in the wake of celebrities such as Rihanna, Greta Thunberg, Mia Khalifa, Amanda Cerney and Meena Harris among others tweeting in favour of the protesting farmers. India’s Ministry of External Affairs tersely warned against “sensationalist social media hashtags and comments” and felt compelled to introduce the hashtags #IndiaTogether and #IndiaAgainstPropaganda. In a televised address to the upper house of India’s parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decried what he called “foreign destructive ideology” being imported into India.
Farmers' unions have protested the three laws passed by the Modi government from the moment of their arrival last September. Initially concentrated in Punjab (where these unions are the strongest and whose farmers are better-off relative to the rest of India) the protests have gradually drawn in agriculturalists from across the country. The divergence between the legislations deregulating agriculture and the state’s heavy-handed response to those protesting the legislation reflects a key feature of contemporary politics in India; the growing contradiction between liberal economics and liberal politics.
Liberal economics in Modi’s India
The three legislations at the heart of the farmers’ protests collectively aim to liberalise agriculture in India from state-guaranteed protections. The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill aims to dismantle the trade and distribution monopoly enjoyed by the state-run Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs), thus allowing farmers to deal directly with the markets. The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill allows farmers to engage in contract farming and opens up agriculture to domestic and global corporates for investment. Finally, the amendment to the Essential Commodities Act of 1955 deregulates items such as cereals, pulses, oilseeds, edible oils, onions and potatoes. Together, the legislations signal the Indian government’s long-standing attempt to liberalise agriculture, perhaps the most protected sector of the Indian economy (relatively untouched due to the exigencies of mass politics) as the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney noted almost two decades ago.
The Indian government’s attitude towards the protesting farmers betrays its illiberal instincts. The legislations were passed based on a voice vote rather than an appropriate parliamentary procedure. Since November, over 30 farmers unions have mobilised their members to sit-in peacefully at protest sites on Delhi’s borders.
Scholarly, policy and political opinion on the liberalisation of the Indian economy have tended to be polarised, shedding much heat but little light. Anti-reformers ignore the very real constraints posed by venal bureaucracies and archaic procedures that patronise and undermine farmers’ enterprise. Pro-reformers tend to ignore the complexities of farmers’ practical engagements with bodies such as the APMCs which are organic and dynamic entities, rather than the fossilised institutions as they are caricatured. The zealousness with which the present Indian state has pursued the reforms and ignored, disparaged and dismissed concerns raised by the protesting farmers signals its commitment to liberal economics that sees little or no role for the state in protecting farmers from market uncertainties.
As rational actors interested in maximising gain and minimising loss, the farmers are sceptical of the benefits promised by the reforms of Modi and the BJP. The state-regulated APMCs (riddled though they may be by corruption and inefficiency) are familiar spaces. Furthermore, the farmers fear that liberalisation of agriculture will see the abolition of the minimum support price (MSP) — the assured price at which the government procures farmers’ produce — an arrangement that has been in operation since at least 1967. The fate of agriculture in Bihar, the one state where APMCs were dismantled in 2006, hardly inspires confidence. As the economist Himanshu reports, an official study observed volatility in grain prices adversely affected crop choices and cultivation decisions. Indeed, the dismantling of the APMCs might have been the cause of the low rates of agricultural growth in Bihar since 2006.
Impoverished Bihari farmers frequently seek work in the fields of farmers in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, from where the majority of the protesting farmers are drawn. Their anxieties may well be enhanced by the experience of their Bihari counterparts — once-proud peasants now reduced to agricultural labour, a loss of status that strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a farmer. Thus, the farmers protesting the legislations are not driven by misleading propaganda as the government claims or a moral economy as well-meaning supporters suggest. Rather, their protest is borne out by a rational consideration of the costs and benefits of the proposed reforms.
Illiberal politics
The Indian government’s attitude towards the protesting farmers betrays its illiberal instincts. The legislations were passed based on a voice vote rather than an appropriate parliamentary procedure. Since November, over 30 farmers unions have mobilised their members to sit-in peacefully at protest sites on Delhi’s borders. They were met with tear gas shells and water cannons. Although a 24-hour nationwide general strike, involving 250 million workers in support of the farmers passed without incidence, the government was rattled. Fearing a broader popular upsurge, it began to look for ways to discredit the protestors, a large number of whom were of the Sikh community in Punjab. Pro-government blogs started floating conspiracy theories linking the farmers’ protests with Pakistani machinations to support an independent Khalistan, invoking memories of the bitter Hindu-Sikh conflict that saw Punjab left asunder during the 1980s. Tactless remarks by individual protestors, from which the unions quickly distanced themselves, were marshalled as supporting evidence. The interconfessional basis of the farmers’ protests was consistently ignored, and images of turban-wearing Sikhs prominently displayed when discussing, and dismissing, the farmers’ legitimate claims.
Even so, such invocations of nationalism, laced with Hindu majoritarianism, failed. Unlike the 2019-2020 protests against laws that introduced a religious filter to citizenship, the government found it more difficult to discredit the farmers as anti-nationals. Then, the substantial Muslim presence among protestors allowed the government to foment Hindu fears. This time, however, it has been more difficult to foment fear against farmers, whether Hindu or Sikh, given the well-worn tropes of India as an agricultural nation. Political scientist Ravinder Kaur aptly wondered whether Modi had met his match in the farmers.
Matters came to a head on 26 January 2021. As India celebrated its 71st Republic Day, convoys of farmers planned to drive their tractors through the national capital as a mark of their continued protest and to commemorate a ‘People’s Republic Day’. While much of the ‘tractor rally’ through the capital's streets were peaceful, a small section of protestors clashed with the police and sought to occupy the iconic Red Fort the physical symbol of India’s sovereignty. The Nishan Sahib, a Sikh religious flag, was briefly unfurled from an empty flagpole at its base, prompting allegations that the Indian Flag (which flies atop the fort) had been insulted. India's pliant media lost no time in condemning the entire swathe of protestors, accusing them of conspiring to defame India and to damage the country's reputation. TV anchors outdid one another to shame the farmers and their allies, urging the government to take strict action against all protestors. Middle-class consumers of such news and views (who tend to be pro-government) denounced the protests as damaging to law and order while some actively encouraged police to beat and even shoot the protestors.
The farmers have refused to retreat with the most prominent of them, the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU, literally: Indian Farmers Union) drawing on a rich legacy of farmers’ movements against the Indian state. Formed in 1978 out of a coalition of Punjabi and North Indian farmers' groups, the BKU forged pan-India alliances with similar groups in southern and western India through the 1980s and successfully demanded the enhancement of MSPs, debt relief and other state interventions that are today under threat. Rakesh Tikait, the 51-year old leader of the BKU warned the state not to divide the farmers along confessional lines. Tears welling up in his eyes, he confessed to having voted for the BJP in previous elections, a decision he said he regretted deeply.
Tikait’s tears have turned the tables for the protests as caste associations, village assemblies and temples across north India urged farmers to march to Delhi in his support. Like Tikait, many farmers, who tend to be socially conservative, had turned to the BJP as their political party of choice, abandoning the farmer-centred political parties that held sway in that part of the country until as recently as 2013. That year, religious violence tore through farming communities in western Uttar Pradesh, as the BJP polarised Hindus and Muslims to successfully recruit rural Hindus to its overwhelmingly urban base. The BJP reaped immediate benefits from the Hindu-Muslim violence, winning 71 of 80 seats in the state during the elections held the following year, which swept it to power. The party repeated the feat in subsequent elections to the State Assembly (2017) and the Lok Sabha (2019). The growing support for Tikait signals the alienation of this new constituency and a potential reversal of fortunes.
As the protestors regrouped, so did state repression. Internet connections were disrupted in the vicinity of Delhi, prompting Rihanna’s tweet, which was followed by a war of words between national and global celebrities. Ironically, only a handful of Indian celebrities tweeted in favour of the farmers, while the vast majority parroted the government line calling on everyone to maintain unity and cautioning against anti-Indian propaganda. War-like fortifications have since been installed in the vicinity of Delhi. Journalists covering the protests face arrest and charge if they are known to be sympathetic to the farmers. As the Modi government continues to criminalise dissent, the state’s commitment to liberal economics diverges spectacularly from its views on liberal politics.
Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.
An increasingly illiberal democracy
The Indian government’s attempts to retrench its regulatory role in agriculture sits well with the liberal orthodoxy that promotes ‘free’ markets over ‘predatory’ states. While the Indian state continues to permeate its market economy (relative to the US, Western Europe and Southeast Asia) it remains quite protectionist, a feature it shares with its BRICS counterparts. Of course, western economies are not as liberal as they claim — their farmers receive higher subsidies than their Indian counterparts. This has been a recurring source of dispute between India and the West at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) but the direction of travel as far as the Indian economy (including agriculture) is unmistakable; towards more liberal economics.
The contrast with the direction of travel for Indian politics is unmistakable. India’s democracy has steadily become less liberal. The repression faced by farmers is only the latest in a series of clampdowns by the Indian state and it spent much of the last year muzzling dissent, first to defend the laws that introduced a religious filter to citizenship and then under the garb of containing COVID-19. In a spectacular fusion of religion and politics, Modi consecrated the much-anticipated temple dedicated to Lord Rama at a site where a mosque stood till 1992 (when it was razed to the ground by mobs egged on by his predecessors in the BJP). While Disha Ravi’s arrest illustrates its authoritarian tendencies, what is perhaps more worrying from the viewpoint of liberal politics is that a plethora of celebrities (who might have been expected to speak truth to power and defend human rights and civil liberties) chose to defend the government’s knee-jerk dismissal of celebrity tweets.
So, what next?
The government is now willing to suspend the legislation for 18 months and Modi has conceded that no policy is set in stone and laws can be amended if considered necessary. The farmers continue to demand that the aforementioned legislation be repealed altogether and have vowed to continue their agitation until these goals are achieved. Notably, Tikait’s retort to Modi’s appeal was terse, “the country does not run on trust. It runs on the constitution and law”. Set against the government’s aim of dividing farmers along confessional lines, village assemblies across north India have resolutely rooted for inter-faith harmony.
In addition to large numbers of leftist organisations, a myriad of other groups (ranging from relatively ‘traditional’ clan associations to more ‘modern’ women’s groups) have lent support to the farmers. Dalit leaders, representing groups historically oppressed as untouchables have also promised assistance. The significance of their solidarity with farmers cannot be overemphasised. As agricultural labourers, Dalits have been in direct conflict with the farmers who employed them (often at below-market rates) though for now, both sides appear to have set aside their differences to join forces against the government.
The emerging solidarities suggest that a liberal renewal of politics in India may yet be possible. This is indeed a supreme irony that strikes at the heart of modernisation theories which look to urban middle classes as sources of liberalism. Contrary to such predictions, it is the socially conservative rural farmers protesting the proposed liberalisation of agriculture in India who may well emerge as the saviours of liberal politics in the country.
The farmers’ protests teach us two global lessons. First, liberal politics and liberal economics need not reinforce one another and global integration and free trade do not guarantee universal human rights and democratic deepening. If anything, the two may be in tension. And lastly, despite the profound crisis of liberal politics, there is yet hope. While renewal is possible, it may be full of surprises given its unlikely sources as the farmers' protest against authoritarian tendencies in India suggests.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Indrajit Roy is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development Politics at the Department of Politics of the University of York. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.