As I write this piece, I am, frankly, a little hesitant. With the Indian state’s violent crackdown on any form of dissent and the systematic attacks on journalism, how far is India from the dystopian state in which a frivolous essay like this might stop me while I cross the border? Perhaps I am being too self aggrandizing — and I really do hope I am — but the Modi government has proven time and again that anything can and will, be misconstrued as seditious. But if one has to be seditious to talk of a movement that has laid siege to Delhi and has put 250 million people out on the streets — farmers, workers, students, artists, educators — and struck the hearts of the Indian people, then let one run the risk of being seditious.

For almost four months now, as many as 250 million Indian citizens — predominantly farmers and workers from the states of Punjab, Haryana and Delhi — have taken to the streets, protesting a triad of new farm laws that are premised on Prime Minister Modi’s neoliberal romanticization of India’s agricultural landscape. The farmers’ movement has quickly garnered immense grassroots support and has become the largest in recorded human history. While the Indian state continues its traditional violent crackdown on dissidence, Delhi is under siege and both parties — the farmers’ movement’s leaders and Narendra Modi’s right-wing authoritarian government — have arrived at an explosive impasse.

These reforms mark the complete decimation of the existing agricultural framework and the livelihood of millions of small farmers along with it. But in order to sufficiently understand the new farm laws and their far-reaching implications, it is essential to historically contextualize them.

Post-independence, a major policy concern for the Indian government was to build an agricultural framework that protected farmers’ interests by providing them reasonable compensation for their agricultural produce as well as access to fair, organized agricultural markets, with government oversight in order to minimize exploitation. This was fulfilled by the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Acts of the 1960s, also known as the APMC Acts, which regulated agricultural trade within states through organized, government-regulated markets called Mandis.

The state, in an effort to maintain food reserves, ensure food security and protect small farmers from market volatility, was legally mandated to buy over 20 essential crops at the minimum support price, also known as MSP. Furthermore, the Essential Commodities Act of 1953 regulated and put a check on hoarding of essential commodities by unscrupulous traders and middlemen. In this way, a robust agricultural market was developed that — though it had its fair share of shortcomings — in theory, worked to protect the interests of small farmers while at the same time making India a food-secure nation.

In September 2020, the Modi government circumvented conventional parliamentary measures to drive through three farm laws that deregulate India’s agricultural market and allow large multinational corporations to dominate a market that is the basis of subsistence for three-fourths of the nation’s population; this effectively dismantles the community-led, small-farmer-centric — 86 percent of India’s farms are less than 2-3 hectares and are cultivated by subsistence farmers — agrarian model and does away entirely with the post-independence securities and safeguards that were provided to small farmers.

The three bills: Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill and The Farm Services and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill all work in tandem with each other to dismantle the existing agricultural framework and undo the safeguards that come attached with it. The first bill effectively bypasses the APMC Acts and allows agricultural trading to occur outside Mandis. This effectively privatizes the market and will likely do away with MSP as general market prices are projected to fall.

The second bill allows big businesses and multinational corporations to enter the agrarian sector; the third bill and the final straw, severely limits the central government’s authority to regulate the food supply of essential agricultural commodities during emergency circumstances such as war, famine, over 100 percent price hikes or natural disasters.

These reforms will destroy not only the small-farmer-centric agrarian model but also the livelihoods of millions of farmers, only to give rise to exploitative corporate monopolies that would coerce farmers into unprofitable contracts and leave consumers with no alternatives. The combination of a power asymmetry between large corporations and smaller farmers and the sheer lack of legal remedies will make exploitation an inevitability. Then again, one may amusingly argue that, in the recent past, the courts in this nation are the last institution one would expect to turn back tides of fascism.

Enter the volatile forces of the free market and the Mandis will go obsolete and the farmers will be left with no choice but to enter into coercive and arbitrary contracts with large corporations. In theory, the laws should be a cause of immense joy: they unshackle the Indian farmer, lead to a pro-development prosperous “one nation, one market” vision of India, a final nail in the coffin of socialism after the introduction of the New Economic Policy of 1991 which liberalized large sections of India’s economy.

But reality manifests in a different form: there’s no dispute resolution mechanism and no guarantees that Mandis and the MSP would be maintained by the state. This would certainly lead to the collapse of the public distribution system that feeds 900 million people.

Furthermore, corporate consolidation of agriculture will force farmers off the lands they have cultivated for decades, and the industrial model of production will undoubtedly lead to the creation of destructive monocultures — deeply damaging the underlying environmental systems and advancing a corporatist, ecologically unjust and narrow-minded vision of development of the yesteryears.

And these are precisely the reasons the government has incurred the wrath of over 250 million Indian citizens and have led them to construct a movement of insurmountable scale. The movement is unlike others we have seen in the past few years — it’s precisely orchestrated, resembling well-oiled machinery: sprawling protest camps have been in set up in the outskirts of Delhi, which itself is fortified in a war-like manner, makeshift homes from tarpaulin tents have been erected, while some prefer to pragmatically sleep in their tractors, and community kitchens, shops, libraries and bathrooms have been set up.

A mini town of sorts, a microcosm of the nation, has emerged, and the movement has truly become a jan andolan, a mass movement of the people. The farmers are led by a coalition of over 40 well-organized unions and the coalition is anticipated to only expand across the nation over the coming few weeks.

And at every step of the way, quite unsurprisingly, the authoritarian Modi government has tried to infiltrate the movement, silence dissent through brute force and distract and deceive the general public. The compromised media either casts farmers and protestors either as dumb loyalists that have been misled and don’t know better or as anti-national seccessionts that threaten India’s sovereignty. Not only is this a convenient political ploy, but it is also reminiscent of all too well-known upper-caste privilege and rhetoric employed by the British Raj.

This government’s policy is to discredit every movement. And when that fails, it resorts to internet shutdowns, unwarranted arrests and sedition cases, water cannons and tear gas. The government is terrified of dissent and this movement has brought the Modi government to its metaphoric knees (read: negotiating table).

There are two clear factors, aside from sheer scale, that make the movement particularly distinctive. Firstly, the strong cultural undertones that are driving the protests. Whether it’s the aroma of the freshly brewed tea in the makeshift kitchens of Tikri, the makeshift cinema screening of Peepli Live, a dark comedy on farmer suicides, or the Trolley Times, a Punjabi and Hindi newspaper born in the heart of the protest with one sole goal: “to truthfully narrate the reality of the farmers’ protest,” the protest is driven by cultural forces that give it a remarkably cohesive and communitarian quality. The newspaper draws on regional art and literature, inviting local activists and leaders to write for them, and is entirely a collaborative project.

The dissonance between Trolley Times’s quality reporting and the fact that the nation’s major media houses either lack moral clarity or are severely compromised is truly representative of what these protests stand for: it’s not just about three farm laws and deregulation, instead, it’s a larger struggle against the government’s systematic methods of silencing dissent, against internet shutdowns, arbitrary sedition laws, propaganda, authoritarianism and the poisonous Hindu nationalism that has laid siege over the nation.

The second factor that makes this movement distinctive is its intersectional nature. The movement is not just about the farmers. It has become a wider movement that involves workers and labor unions, activists and NGOs, students, educators, local artists and journalists. It involves groups that have been historically marginalized and underrepresented: women and Dalits. The social cohesion underlying the movement seems to have momentarily and almost magically — in a particular space and time — undone the divisive rifts created by the Hindu-nationalist government.

This social cohesion, along with the cultural undertones and the remarkable degree of self reliance, gives the movement a force and notable intrinsic sustainability. This is what true defiance looks like and it seems to have laid siege not just on the capital, but also on the hearts of a quarter million anti-national “Khalistani” citizens. And that’s what makes this movement so powerful, so distinctive. Even after as many as a dozen rounds of talks with the central government, there’s been a stalemate that has held the breath of the nation.

This fascist government prides itself on its reputation of not backing down and ramming law after law — rewind back to the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, or the unconstitutional revocation of Article 370 — through the parliament, but the farmers’ movement has demonstrated itself to be a threatening and uncompromising force.

This stalemate — an explosive impasse — is a defining moment in post-independence Indian history. India is in a state of undeclared emergency and Arundhati Roy, a renowned Indian author puts it rather eloquently: It’s “a battle for love. It must be militantly waged and beautifully won.” It’s an open challenge to fascism, to right-wing authoritarianism, to blind capitalism and farm reform that serves the vested corporate interests of the Ambanis and the Adanis. To have the audacity to argue that farmers have been misled or are secessionists is not only arrogantly seditious but also lacking moral courage and intellectual clarity.

It is true that the Indian agricultural landscape is in dire need of reform but to systematically exclude and silence farmers and bypass local governments is an authoritarian overreach of the highest order. These reforms are lessons of humility and accountability for Modi’s government. A reminder, or warning perhaps, that there are limits to even Modi’s authoritarian shenanigans and that there’s intrinsic value in humility, consensus and constitutional procedure. Instead of the same old barking — labeling dissidents as secessionists, Khalistanis or anti-nationals — it is time the dog learns a new trick: paying heed to what the street has to say.