SOAS Research Online

Abstract

India’s farmers’ movement (Kisan Andolan) of 2020–2021 has been the most successful movement against Narendra Modi’s authoritarian populist government since it came to office in 2014, forcing a reversal of the three farm bills that aimed at an accelerated resolution of the so-called ‘agrarian questions’, leading to a rapid transition to capitalist agriculture. Modi’s BJP government argued these bills were necessary to improve farmers’ incomes and ensure food security. The farmers’ movement, an agrarian populist coalition, contended the opposite: that the bills would spell economic disaster for all social groups involved in agriculture and affect national food security negatively. They successfully demanded protection from a further integration of Indian agriculture into global capitalism. The agricultural crisis, movements from above and below to resolve it and the success of these movements, this chapter suggests, are located in the dynamics of postcolonial capitalist development. The chapter argues, however, that the stability of the movement’s coalition was challenged by heterogeneous groups contained in the word ‘farmer’ and their contradictory interests and the success of Modi’s authoritarian populism in enlisting some of these same groups for its larger political project.