Fellowship with Indian Farmers
On a sunny, crisp Saturday, a group of 10 South Asians gathers at 176th Street and 64th Avenue in Cloverdale. They wave flags adorned with the Sikh Khanda symbol and hold signs with messages of solidarity for fellow farmers several continents away. Passersby honk their horns in support and with each beep, protesters respond with an excitable cheer and a wave, as though they’re hoping the sound of each horn blast can be heard thousands of miles away in India.
From solidarity rallies to bumper stickers, the farmers’ protest in India, a rotating series of protests, has captured global attention, raising questions about food and land sovereignty and the role corporate interests play in the food on our plates.
Locally, the protests have struck a chord with the Punjabi population, which operates some of the largest farms in the Lower Mainland. Many have connections to family farms in the Punjab region of India. They feel these farms are under threat after the Indian government implemented three controversial farm bills in September 2020. The bills, introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, minimize the government’s role in agricultural markets and encourage a free-market system, much like we have in North America.
The introduction of the new agricultural laws instigated a mass protest last November that drove tens of thousands of farmers to Delhi where camps as big as cities continue to clog major arteries in and out of the city. The protest, which remained peaceful for several months, turned violent in January as tension grew over the deadlock in negotiations. Since then, dozens have died or been injured and the government is increasingly being called out for censorship, including blocking the internet and silencing journalists. To add fuel to the fire, India is experiencing an unprecedented spike in COVID-19 cases, reporting 4,000 deaths in a single day.
Clearly, there’s a lot at stake. Until these recent laws were passed, the government had supported farmers by offering a guaranteed minimum price for their goods. The support measures were implemented in the 1960s when India was suffering from food scarcity and was overly dependent on imported food from coun- tries such as the U.S. To pull the country out of famine, the government implemented programs that encouraged farming in its “bread basket” states, particularly Punjab and neighbouring Haryana.
Here in Canada, ex-pats such as Dalbir Benipal, vice-chair for the B.C. Blueberry Council, are concerned about their families in India. Benipal moved to B.C. from Punjab to work as a veterinarian, which he continues to do, and nearly a decade ago, he added blueberry farming to his resumé. He still has family and close ties to India’s northern state.
“The farmers are all worried right now because their future is not secure,” Benipal says. “If the laws are not taken back by the government, then in five to 10 years, most of them will be in big trouble. They will be bankrupt.”
“Punjab farmers are very progressive and hardworking and when they started to grow, they actually made a surplus of grains and other states started to follow suit,” Benipal says.
Not only did India pull itself out of famine, but it became a food-surplus country, which exported nearly $40 billion USD in agricultural goods in 2018.
If the new legislation implemented hurriedly by the Modi government stays, farmers would lose their rights to that minimum guaranteed price, which means they would have to sell directly to buyers.
It’s not a problem that’s terribly foreign to Canadians. A similar situation happened in 2012 when the Conservative government of the day dismantled the Canadian Wheat Board.
The board was a farmer-elected organization that oversaw the wheat industry, controlling where farmers could sell their wheat and at what price. But the Conservatives deemed it an oppressive monopoly that kept wheat farmers from prospering on an open market. Eight years later, in a 2020 update, the National Farmers Union lamented that as a result of the board’s dismantling, much of the infrastructure once owned by Canadian farmers now belongs to multinational corporations.
A way of life
Gurprit Brar also comes from a farming family in Punjab. He moved to Canada and now farms 60 acres of blueberries, raspberries and rhubarb on his farm in Langley. To him, farming is a way of life deeply rooted in the Punjabi culture.
“That’s one of the reasons that we are so strongly connected to this movement,” Brar says. “We are, especially all of the Punjabis, the stewards of the land. Our forefathers have always had that land and we’ve made a living from family farms forever. In simple words, it’s a way of life. Farming is a part of our culture.”
Brar points out that farming in India, particularly in Punjab, is different from farming here. A 60-acre farm is nearly unheard of and most farms are fewer than four acres. Or as Benipal puts it, “the farms are the size of hobby farms here, but people making their living off them.” With farms that small, it is difficult for farmers to store food or bring it to market, so the government acted as a food hub, or middle man, between farmers and buyers. These small farmers will now have to negotiate directly with buyers, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.
Their fears are not unfounded. Similar laws were put in place in Bihar, another Indian farming state, 15 years ago. Since then, farmers have routinely received less money for their grains. For example, in Punjab, farmers sold rice for $25 per 100 kilograms. In Bihar, farmers received $16 for the same goods.
“It’s pretty clear that the intention of the government is to allow corporations to take over and limit the rights that small, marginalized farmers have over their land,” says Vancouver lawyer Raminder Hayre. “Allowing corporations to come in and not guarantee a minimum price for crops — what this does is take advantage of the vulnerable population that needs to make ends meet.”
Hayre is an outspoken advocate for farmers in India. For the past several months, she has made the farmers’ protest a central part of her social media presence. She has been spreading awareness of the farmers’ protest in opinion editorials and interviews.
She’s also experienced backlash for speaking out, facing online censorship (a big problem in India) and negative feedback from supporters of the new farm laws.
Hayre speaks out because to her and others the farm laws go beyond free-market idealism. They believe the laws are also about further oppressing the Sikh minority in India, where 80 per cent of the population practises Hinduism. The rest of the population is split between Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jain and more. To add more complexity, India’s caste system, a sort of class system that persists despite being officially abolished, puts minority groups such as Sikhs in a relatively powerless position. And since Punjab is the only state where Sikhism is the majority religion, it’s difficult for farmers not to see the farm bills as an attack on their way of life and choice of religion.
“We see it as this government does not like Punjabis and Sikhs, so they are targeting the industry that they are a part of and 70 per cent of Punjab is farming,” Hayre says. “Even when they come here, you can see it in Abbotsford and Surrey. It’s mostly Punjabi farmers.”
Farming data on the religious affiliations of farmers are collected every 10 years by Statistics Canada. The 2011 Census found there were 6,395 Sikh farmers in Canada, which is small compared to the number of Christian farmers, for example, but of those Sikh farmers, a full 6,260 work in B.C.
“They do so well here, but they are so impoverished in India,” Hayre says. “They aren’t allowed to thrive.”
This is not the first time Sikhs have been the target of oppressive policy and even violent opposition in their country. In 1984, there was an attack by the government on Sikhs, which led to the death of 3,000 civilians and an assault on the Golden Temple, the holiest place for Sikhs. After these attacks, more Sikhs began to move out of India to countries such as England, Australia and Canada.
“We still have family there,” Hayre says. “I’ve stayed on the family farm and you see how hard people work. I think it hits people who have been to India a little harder because [we’ve] seen it, and [we] wonder what would Punjab be without the farms?”
The Farmer’s Protest has garnered worldwide attention, which raises the question of why this and why now? Brar, who chairs the research committee on the B.C. Blueberry Council, frequently travelled to agricultural conferences and tradeshows, pre- pandemic, meeting with farmers from around the world. He says no matter where they came from, they shared similar challenges.
“What I’ve found is that farmers across different races, across different nationalities, are all the same people,” Brar says. “There is a constant sense of having to save our skin from being exploited by the markets and this is the same everywhere.”
Perhaps the pandemic has raised awareness of how interconnected we are and also raised questions on food and land sovereignty. Social media has connected us to like-minded people around the globe and the image of thousands of farmers storming Delhi on tractors has attracted our ever-fleeting attention.
“The protest is raising interest in why farmers are there and it’s opening a larger discussion. That’s one of its biggest achievements of the protest in India,” says Brar. “It has projected to farmers across the world.”
For Brar, Benipal and Hayre, the protest is about social justice, something deeply rooted in Punjabi and Sikh culture.
“As Sikhs, our belief is justice for everyone,” Brar says. “We cannot as Punjabi people tolerate injustice and this why this protest unites us in Punjab and here. We believe that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
