Growing Restiveness of the Peasantry in Contemporary India: Context and Challenges

The global rise of neoliberalism has drastically altered the economic landscape of the peasantry and deepened the agrarian crisis of the countries of the Global South, including India. The roots of India’s agrarian crisis can be traced to a very significant transition from dirigiste to a neoliberal macroeconomic policy regime, in 1991, which has continued till date. Its most gruesome manifestation has been high and ever-rising farmers’ suicides. Factors such as substantial compression of rural development expenditures, increasing input prices, vulnerability to world market price fluctuations due to greater openness, inadequate crop insurance and substantial weakening of the provisioning for credit, along with the governments’ apathy to the demand for remunerative prices for farm produce, are among the obvious causal correlates of the contemporary agrarian crisis in the country. An important consequence has been a steady building up of peasant resistance, particularly over the last decade, leading up to the recent mass protests. Given their scale, intensity, and tenacity, they have been widely hailed as among the most significant resistance movements within the country and across the world against the machinations of corporate power and the interests of big business. This article addresses some of the primary features of the farmers’ movement in India, and the contradictions and challenges with which it has been contending.