The Political Economy of the Farmers’ Protest: Emerging Perspectives from the Field

This chapter makes a case for the class-based analysis of the farmers’ protest movement as against viewing the movement as a struggle of a unified, undifferentiated peasantry against the neoliberal restructuring of the agrarian sector. It does so by unpacking the category of farmers and identifying the differentiated class (and caste) structure in rural Punjab and follows it up with a discussion on how the existing system of public procurement at a Minimum Support Price through regulated agricultural markets figures in the reproduction of the various class groups or categories of farmers. The chapter concludes that while it is true that the farm laws, by design, created a basis for a broad alliance of different categories of farmers (and labourers), the response to the laws came from a variegated vantage point: while for the big capitalist farmers, the fight against the farm laws was an attempt to secure their increasingly insecure accumulation, for the petty producers, it was a fight against their impending marginalisation.