As we have been reporting, for nearly three weeks, hundreds of thousands of farmers began protesting on the outskirts of Delhi in response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push for deregulations they fear will sink them deeper into poverty.
Yesterday, leaders of Indian farmers’ unions held a hunger strike in hopes of pressure on the Prime Minister to repeal the new farm laws recently passed.
Farmers have blocked major roads and burned their crops, contending that deregulation will lead to small farms becoming insolvent and eventually taken over by larger rivals.
More than half of India’s 1.4 billion people are employed in agriculture, which accounts for 15 percent of India’s $2.9-trillion economy.
Modi’s move is seen by supporters as a way to modernize the country’s agriculture and position New Delhi to be in a better position to compete with Beijing.
“They never expected farmers to come out in such large numbers to protest,” Vikram Singh, the joint secretary of the All India Agricultural Workers Union, told the Wall Street Journal. “We will not back off until our demands are met.”
Opposition leaders reportedly have been arrested for supporting the protests. There was one incident where officers barricaded the house of the chief minister of Delhi, who has been sympathetic to the farmers and was reportedly put under house arrest.
“The chief minister refused to allow farmers to be put in jails,” Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s deputy chief minister, told the paper. “They have turned the chief minister’s residence into a jail.”
TREND FORECAST: With their economy sinking for several consecutive quarters before the COVID War broke out, India’s GDP is estimated to have fallen 15.7 percent over the last six months through September.
To reiterate our forecast, as we reported in early January, with the Indian economy in its seventh consecutive quarter of contraction, protests against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi were escalating.
Also, in January, we reported on the demonstrations spreading throughout India as millions of citizens continued the two months-long protests against the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, spearheaded by Mr. Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, which grants citizenship to religious minorities – except Muslims – from neighboring countries.
In response, these demonstrations were halted when the Prime Minister suddenly locked down the entire nation in March in his fight to win the COVID War.
As economic conditions continue to decline, demonstrations will escalate and India’s military/police forces will violently clamp down on protesters.
The military will try to stop the protests, 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.
