Gathering at the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi, India, thousands of farmers demanded that the Indian government fulfill their years-long promises on March 20, 2023. The organization that brought them together was Samyukta Misan Morcha (SKM), a farmer union collective that also organized against the unpopular agriculture reform laws at the center of the 2020-2021 Indian farmers’ protests.
Though the Farm Bills were finally withdrawn by the Indian Parliament in November 2021, farmer protests continue in pursuit of other demands. Women have been an integral part of this ongoing fight for farmer justice.
The government anticipated the March 2023 protests with more than 2,000 security authorities altering traffic patterns and posting public recommendations for how to interact with the protest. The SKM’s demands are a continuation of the original government assurances shared in writing on December 9, 2021, which have yet to be met. Farmers rallied, and threatened to organize another large-scale protest if demands were not met, including a “legal guarantee on the minimum support price (MSP), withdrawal of cases registered against farmers, compensation to families of farmers who died during the protest, pension, debt waiver, and withdrawal of the Electricity Bill.”
In the democratic country of India where 70 per cent of rural households practice agrarian lifestyles, agriculture remains a primary political concern for citizens and voters. The now-repealed 2020 Farm Bills would have enacted three main changes: to deregulate government support so farmers could sell directly to distributors and other intermediaries, allow farmers to sell in any market without additional taxes, and reduce regulation and oversight of agricultural marketing, storage and infrastructure.
This call for change instigated an extended wave of farmer protests, in which dignity and long-term stability became key demands.
Some scholars also view the protests as an important moment in gender relations, as women played significant roles publicly and privately in the movement. For example, on International Women’s Day in 2021, more than 20,000 female farmers held a sit-in at the Haryana-Delhi border, decked out in the yellow of mustard fields. This sit-in was one of many held across the region on this day, featuring female farming leaders and hunger strikes.
Throughout the protests, women have been involved in both the political organizing of protest logistics as well as supervising medical camps and industrial kitchens. Importantly, when the farmers refused to accept an 18-month hold and demanded a repeal, women helped hold the fort down as negotiations dragged on. The gender parity is a reflection of continued dual-responsibilities for women, who are responsible for both on-farm and domestic household operations.
“We have one foot in our homes and one foot at the protest,” said Jagpreet Kaur, a member of farmers’ collective Kisan Sabha, to The Diplomat. In fact, nonprofit Oxfam estimates that 80 per cent of farmwork is executed by women in India. In contrast to the disproportionately high share of the labour, they have less political power. Most land is inherited through the male head of household. In an especially tragic statistic of a survey undertaken by a women’s farmers rights forum, 40 per cent of the women widowed by farmer suicides (from 2012-2018) had yet to secure legal rights to their farmland. They’re paid less, have less control over land ownership, and have less access to rural credit lines and technology.
In particular, women make up a significant proportion of those farmers coming from tribal communities such as the Dalit. The Dalit are among the most oppressed of the traditional caste hierarchy which continues to live on informally despite legal abolition in 1950. Dalits are “untouchables,” and have often been restricted to menial labour jobs including scavenging, janitorial work, and waste management. Lower caste members have not had the opportunity to accrue intergenerational land wealth, which has resulted in exploitative wage labour contract arrangements for Dalit farmers. Exacerbated by the difficulties of being a female farmer, the darker-skinned Dalit women farmers face an intersectional social exclusion in the form of colorism, casteism, and misogyny.
Still, marginalized people in the farmer movement continue to speak up for change. Within a movement wrought with internal conflicts due to social conservatism and religious exclusion on all sides, third-gender activist Jasleen Kaur Patiala bravely led a protest before the crowd. Attorney Guneet Kaur said to Ms. Magazine on the ‘morcha’ protest spaces, “I’ve rarely heard or seen any trans person on a public platform in our community, so this was a refreshing change.”
She commented on the surprising connections formed through protest.
“These include young women coming together to make morcha spaces accountable, people forming friendships across districts and states, bonds formed due to a common experience of incarceration, solidarity and allyship beyond caste, class, religious and age location,” Kaur said.
