Central government has approved three agriculture related bills that make it easier for big private agriculture corporations to take over the farming sector. India’s farmers right now are mostly small-scale landowners and these bills would make them lose their lands and move to cities in search of wage labour. So the farmers are protesting it en masse.
They have been organising but the problem is that these farmers are the land-owning subclass of farmers (think kulaks) while most of the farm workers are landless. So these protests are good because they oppose further privatisation of agriculture because India right now has neither food security nor sovereignty. But this isn’t a broad-base worker movement and has active participation from other bourgeois political parties so CPIM cannot do much to stand out here.
But CPIM has been gaining some popularity lately. They were able to bag some seats in the recent Bihar election. So they can definitely propagate their platform in these protests but it wouldn’t be a massive turning point or anything like that.
EDIT: I contradicted myself so wanted to clarify a bit. Most farms are small-scale and privately owned while most farm workers are landless. The protests have the landowner class at the helm.
How much impact do you think these protests are gonna have on the legitimacy of Modi and his party? If one cannot push a socialist agenda, at the very least it could hopefully undermine a fascist, pro-US anti-PRC project.
BJP have been losing footing ever since the pandemic began. It is truly a testament to the ineptitude of the other bourgeois parties that BJP are still in contention for the next general election though it won’t be smooth sailing like the last two.
I am not sure how other parties like Congress would place itself on the China-USA spectrum because of my limited knowledge but hopefully it’s nothing like the shameless bootlicking that we have seen from BJP.
Central government has approved three agriculture related bills that make it easier for big private agriculture corporations to take over the farming sector. India’s farmers right now are mostly small-scale landowners and these bills would make them lose their lands and move to cities in search of wage labour. So the farmers are protesting it en masse.
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They have been organising but the problem is that these farmers are the land-owning subclass of farmers (think kulaks) while most of the farm workers are landless. So these protests are good because they oppose further privatisation of agriculture because India right now has neither food security nor sovereignty. But this isn’t a broad-base worker movement and has active participation from other bourgeois political parties so CPIM cannot do much to stand out here.
But CPIM has been gaining some popularity lately. They were able to bag some seats in the recent Bihar election. So they can definitely propagate their platform in these protests but it wouldn’t be a massive turning point or anything like that.
EDIT: I contradicted myself so wanted to clarify a bit. Most farms are small-scale and privately owned while most farm workers are landless. The protests have the landowner class at the helm.
How much impact do you think these protests are gonna have on the legitimacy of Modi and his party? If one cannot push a socialist agenda, at the very least it could hopefully undermine a fascist, pro-US anti-PRC project.
BJP have been losing footing ever since the pandemic began. It is truly a testament to the ineptitude of the other bourgeois parties that BJP are still in contention for the next general election though it won’t be smooth sailing like the last two.
I am not sure how other parties like Congress would place itself on the China-USA spectrum because of my limited knowledge but hopefully it’s nothing like the shameless bootlicking that we have seen from BJP.