We have been reporting since mid-November on the protests of hundreds of thousands of farmers in India, in response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push for deregulation laws that farmers fear will sink them deep into poverty.
They contend the new farm laws, passed in September in secrecy, strip them of earning potential, allowing major conglomerates to come in and crush their businesses.
Now critics say Prime Minister Modi has taken actions that affront basic freedoms by shutting down social media platforms, banning free speech, and doing what he can to stop the protests.
On Saturday, thousands of farmers again blocked highways. In response, Modi’s government sent security forces. The three-hour “chakka jam” of some 10,000 protest sites fanned out across the country. Authorities in New Delhi erected barricades and barbed-wire fences to seal out further protests in the city.
“This kind of barricading—this is not the Pakistani border,” Mahender Singh Dhanger, 65, told The New York Times.
“We will keep fighting till our last breath,” Jhjjan Singh, 80, told the Associated Press. Singh was at a protest site in Ghazipur. He said Modi should know that “either he will remain or we will.”
Two weeks ago, farmers held a massive truck rally that turned violent when some farmers drove their tractors away from the major movement and confronted police. Leaders representing the farmers blamed the violence, on India’s Republic Day, a “dirty conspiracy” by infiltrators to destabilize the peaceful movement.
Silenced
In response to the ongoing protests, Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party cut off electricity and water near some of the camps, blocked internet access in some parts of the country, and erected barbed wire and planting spikes in the streets to keep the tractors from coming into New Delhi.
Last week, at the “valid legal request” from the Modi government, Twitter froze some accounts deemed problematic.
Gyan Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton, told the NYT that the only time in recent memory that can be compared to the crisis unfolding in India is in the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi, the prime minister at the time, imprisoned political adversaries.
India, like most countries around the globe, has been dealing with adverse effects from the draconian COVID War lockdowns, which will contract the country’s economy by a record 7.7 percent, according to government projections.
On Friday, Narendra Singh Tomar, India’s agriculture minister, defended the new laws, which seemed to indicate that Modi’s government is in no hurry to strike a deal with the protesters. With more than half of India’s 1.4 billion people employed in agriculture, accounting for 15 percent of the country’s $2.9-trillion economy, the farmers are not backing down.
TREND FORECAST: Despite government actions to quell the protests, we forecast they will continue and increase until farmers’ demands are satisfied.
As economic conditions continue to decline in India as the “Greatest Depression” worsens, other demonstrations that were halted during the COVID War lockdowns will continue to escalate.
India’s military/police forces will violently clamp down on protesters. The government will try to stop the demonstrations, but with hundreds of millions of Indians losing everything and with nothing left to lose, they will not back down until the government meets some of their demands.
As Gerald Celente notes, “When all else fails, they take you to war.” Be it escalating skirmishes with neighboring Pakistan or China over ongoing border disputes or a wild-card event… the farmers’ protests will be instantly shut down should war break out.
