Elections trumped the urgency for agricultural reform in
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's surprise decision on Friday to repeal new
farm laws, economists and political analysts said.
اضافة اعلان
Although far from perfect, the three laws passed in
September 2020 which Modi now plans to scrap would have made a start at
liberalizing India's enormous but hugely inefficient farming sector.
"The government has made an electoral
calculation," Professor Harsh V Pant, an Indian author and analyst, told
AFP.
Modi "instinctively, intuitively" felt the
political costs of his reforms were higher than their economic benefit, he
added — making the subject "untouchable" going forward.
"If even Modi, with his electoral mandate, is
struggling, then I don't think anyone in the near future will be able to get
the same mandate or tackle these issues," he said.
India's agriculture sector is vast, with two-thirds of the
1.3 billion population relying on farming for their livelihood. But it is a
mess.
Several hundred thousand Indian farmers have been driven to
suicide in the past three decades by crippling poverty, debt, and ever more
erratic weather patterns caused by climate change.
Huge volumes of produce rot before they reach consumers and
experts say that in many areas farmers are growing unsuitable crops, guzzling
up groundwater at unsustainable rates.
In northern India, farmers burn the residue from rice paddy
across huge areas, blanketing the capital New Delhi and other towns and cities
in a sickly cloud of toxic pollution every year.
The new laws aimed to allow farmers to sell their produce
directly to private companies at mutually agreed prices, and anywhere they
could find a buyer.
The government said it would open up competition and
encourage farmers to not just rely on subsidies, but to become more competitive
by adopting more efficient farming methods.
But that meant breaking up the decades-old monopoly of
state-controlled agricultural markets that buy at set minimum prices.
And the prospect struck fear into the hearts of many
farmers, who saw the reforms as leaving them at the mercy of big agribusiness
corporations who would squeeze them for every last rupee.
Election fight
Last November tens of thousands of them, egged on by
opposition parties, headed for Delhi and — after ugly clashes with police —
camped out on the outskirts of the capital where they remain today.
In January they gatecrashed Indian Republic Day
celebrations, running riot in Delhi on their tractors and raising a flag at the
historic Red Fort. Hundreds of police officers were injured.
Suddenly Modi — voted in on a platform of supporting
ordinary people but also as a reformer — was facing his biggest political
challenge since his Hindu nationalist government came to power in 2014.
After taking a beating in May elections in the eastern state
of West Bengal, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) started to worry about
votes due in five more states early next year.
They include Punjab, governed by the Congress party of the
Gandhi dynasty, and the currently BJP-run bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh.
Both are home to enormous numbers of farmers.
And analysts say that Modi's move was unashamedly driven by
his party's political interests.
"Obviously, this decision puts electoral politics front
and center," Nistula Hebbar, political editor with The Hindu, told AFP.
"The BJP under Modi is willing to be very pragmatic for its electoral
success."
"If they lose UP everything will be bad for them going
forward — from the morale of the party supporters, the opposition's morale, the
election of next Indian president and Modi's 2024 reelection bid," she
added.
It is only the second major U-turn the firebrand Modi has
carried out since his election, after he dropped plans to reform rural land
titles in 2015, also following huge protests by farmers and other
countryside-dwellers.
Satish Nambardar, an official with one of the farmers'
unions behind the current demonstrations, said: "He took a one-man
decision to introduce the laws and now he's taken a one-man decision to take
them back."
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