Let Poor Farmers Reap A Good Harvest: PM Modi's Farm Laws Outreach to Opposition

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi’s reply to the motion of thanks on President’s address in the Rajya Sabha today was a work of uncharacteristic restraint. Given the tricky situation on farmers protests the Modi government finds itself in, the restraint was perhaps meticulously planned with a single objective in mind - persuasion. Today’s speech was more like a final retrieving act. He listed the number of schemes that his government has launched for the welfare of farmers, the amount of money that has been directly credited to their accounts plugging leakages and corruption, the opportunities these reforms would open up, particularly for the small and marginal farmers, the number of whom as proportion of total farming population has swelled from 51 to 68 per cent. He quoted Chaudhary Charan Singh from 1970s to former PM Manmohan Singh to UPA Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar – all non-BJP leaders – in favour of the reforms. And ultimately committing, yet again, that MSP is going to stay.

But then is the farm laws debate about facts anymore? Prime Minister himself has led from the front in communicating the imperatives and impact of the reforms, having spoken at least two dozen times in the last three months alone. Experts like former Committee on Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) head Ashok Gulati have openly batted for the laws as game changers. Modi also underscored the little-known fact that a deregulated dairy industry does better as a subset of larger agriculture sector contributing more than the share of cereals and pulses combined!

Public memory is short. It is not very long ago that the Akalis sat in parliament as the farm-laws were passed in September of 2020. Or the 2019 Congress manifesto that promised almost exact same reforms. That’s where facts coalesce into politics. Picking from here, PM launched a charm offensive, at least on two occasions exhorting the opposition to take full credit of any good that might come out of the reforms, and leave the abuses for him to handle. “Feel pride in the fact that I am doing something suggested by Manmohan Singh.” Or “feel pride in your legacy of the dairy industry foundation for which was laid before me,” he said.

Hinting that the laws can be easily amended in future based on feedback, he said: “Social life is subject to change. Obstruction does not lead to progress. Politics can’t be so compelling that you leave aside your own thoughts to corner the government,” Yet, you think this olive branch from the PM would have cut much ice?

It is a measure of the spite that the opposition has for the Prime Minister that they would rather see over 12 crores small and marginal farmers suffer penury for longer, then let the agriculture reforms make the profession of farming little more remunerative in the country. Parallelly, in their politics, farm protests are an experiment in testing the power of the opposition in countermanding the Modi mandate. A sort of creep that began with award-wapsi intolerance debate in the first Modi term, consolidated with the CAA-NRC protests last year, and is now a fracture that showed up at the Red Fort on January 26. The renting of the likes of Rihanna and Mia Khalifa by separatist elements – the Khalistanis named as Foreign Destructive Ideology (FDI) - injects the element of sinister in the opposition’s compromise-Modi project. The PM ended by highlighting the dangers of the game for Punjab, recalling how the state has already suffered earlier.

Despite the restraint, despite the indulgence, despite all the cajoling, what are the chances that the Modi government would succeed in retrieving and implementing the farm laws? I would wager the whole thing has got so cluttered that the retrieval in present form is unlikely. The solution lies in one line used by Modi. “States have done all this in some measure (Rajyon ne adha adhura toh kiya hi hai),” he said, adding that even states have faced the brunt of the rent-a-cause protesters – coining the word Andolanjeevi (Protest parasites) for them. Modi government can draw from the first wave of opposition obstructionism to land reforms it faced in its early days in the first term. The matter was left to the states. With the BJP in power in great part of the country, this route to get the farm laws effectively implemented provides the best-case scenario. It helps that Agriculture is a State subject in the constitutional scheme of things.