Three Lessons From the World’s Biggest Worker Uprising

By Aayaan Singh Jamwal

The Kisan Ekta Morcha (Farmers United Front) is a mass movement of 100,000+ farmers, youth, workers and allies from India and the diaspora. For the past 27 days, Satyagrahis have occupied all but one highway leading into Delhi, the capital of India. 1.5 million union members in Canada have declared solidarity with KAM. Protestors say that people of the country and world are with them. They are determined and equipped to occupy Delhi’s border roads until the government repeals three farm bills that were made into law in September 2020. The significance of this ultimatum by the country’s working-class peasantry is twofold: first, they are mounting an uncompromising opposition which is salient in an age of police violence forcefully suppressing anti-capitalism protests worldwide. Second, the farmers are publicly renouncing their faith in an elected ruling class whose actions do not display any care for their wellbeing.

The world’s largest general strike

On November 26, 2020 Indian workers organized the world’s largest general strike.(1)  Why did 250 million workers strike? Members of national trade unions struck from work to protest a number of the central government’s policies, such as the “dismantling [of] protective labour laws, refusal to negotiate an increase in minimum wages, [and] selling off several public sector units to private entities'' (Varma 2020). This government promises “empowerment” and keeps unilaterally passing laws to make extraction and exploitation easier for wealth-hoarding billionaires. How is the Kisan Ekta Morcha peasant uprising connected to the general strike? Peasant-farmers (at the time largely from neighboring states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh) called for a march to Delhi to show their solidarity with striking workers. As farmers approached, the police sealed border roads to try to prevent them from entering Delhi. The farmers overturned barricades and continued to march. They were injured by cops who assaulted them with tear gas and water cannons. It’s important to note that tear gas is internationally classified as a chemical weapon that is illegal to use in war as per Geneva Protocol 1925, yet nation-states continue to use tear gas domestically to harm and deter popular revolutions.

Farmers have strong precedent to believe that laws deregulating agricultural markets will create yet another profiteering mechanism for Modi’s capitalist friends.(1)(2) Narendra Modi has been the Prime Minister of India since 2014 and his party (BJP) currently has a majority in the Parliament. Despite the fact that the BJP’s dubious leadership has been sinking India into insecurity for the last 6 years, the party’s politics still have sympathetic right-wing, “anti-communist” supporters. However, KAM has also ignited many people across the world who were previously indecisive to BJP’s regime to proactively oppose its blend of economic incompetence, fascism, nationalism, and caste supremacy politics. What began as a kisan-mazdoor ekta (farmer-worker solidarity) day march on that day is now an ongoing occupation and mass movement challenging the legitimacy of harmful governance.

Down with capitalist monopolies

Modi’s collaborative relationships with India’s richest person Mukesh Ambani and with coal mining billionaire Adani are well known. Organizing unions say  The Bharatiya Janata Party says that replacing regulatory laws with “free markets” based on “freedom” and “choice” are the “revolutionary reforms” that will make “a new India”. Certainly, the claim that capitalism is the best/only structure for growth or “development” is propagated widely, and not just by the BJP, but largely by the very capitalists funding the political campaigns of all major parties. In reality, sympathizers of capitalist governance find it hard to explain why a single corporate overlord should be free to hoard billions of dollars. The middle classes say, “It’s his wealth, he earned it”-- forgetting that no wealth in the world can be created without laboring workers, farmers, and unpaid care-workers. Protestors say that increasing private monopolies instead of improving existing local structures (1) (2) is not only the opposite of balanced governance but so unethical that they will not stand it. There is now also an international campaign to boycott all products sold by Ambani and Adani’s companies (1) (2) in India and internationally. You can go to asovereignworld.com to find a developing list of their products, businesses, and investors.

The ethics this revolution works on

Even as climate change is accelerating, political elites continue to use public institutions to strengthen empires of capitalists. 2020 is the time for an ethics of care, a politics of support. However, since the prime minister’s government has refused to consider repealing the laws, despite a number of experts pointing out its flawed assumptions and the farmers’ case for its potential to harm. Farmers and youth are done watching modern empires try to pass off their destructive extraction [from People and Planet] as “goodness,” “growth” or “empowerment.” The farmers’ uprising is a non-partisan issue: the farmers are frustrated with slimy political elites writ large: they have prohibited any party’s politicians from taking the stage at their protests. Since a lot has been written and propagated about the farm laws, here I want to focus on the working-class politics of unity that are at the heart of the Kisan Ekta Morcha. Here are three key lessons about the ethics behind revolutionary actions that are fueling one of modernity’s most well sustained mass uprisings. I pay special attention to present practices of care and the power of working-class led collectives in bringing revolutionary theories to life.

1. Our love for all beings terrifies fascist mindsets.

“Love is the weapon of the oppressed. Revolution is carried through our embrace.”

- Nisha Sethi

Hand in hand with an ignorance of the structural barriers that prevent the working-poor from accessing capital and ownership of land/resources, pro-government stooges also steadfastly believe that some lives are of more value than others. On the other hand, the Sikh and Punjabi organizers of this agitation can be repeatedly heard leading with chants such as, “Nanak naam chardi kala, tere bhane sarbat da bhala!” This prayer approximately translates to “Nanak, with your name we stay in high spirits, with your blessings may all beings be well!” The first Guru (divine guide) of Sikhism was Guru Nanak Dev Ji, a legendary figure loved by Indians. At the age of 14, he repudiated his caste-privileged birth and refused to be marked as a Hindu Brahmin. Instead, he created a framework that is the 4th most-followed in the world today, a faith that tells its followers to eliminate social hierarchies. While forms of hierarchy still exist within Sikh communities, like all others, they also continue to collectivize radical protest practices like serving langar and creating free, open schools. Nobody at or near the border sites is going hungry. Since the occupation began, thousands of farmers have arrived with rations and cooking utensils. Volunteers doing langar seva (service) have been serving vegetarian food to everyone. You can eat as much as you like, and payment is not part of the equation. Langar is the Sikh practice of sitting down on the floor to eat in community. What makes KAM langars even more radical is that unhoused people and working-poor children who live nearby are regularly joining langar with protestors.

On the matter of schooling and education for all, protestors Navjot Kaur and Kawaljit Kaur were the first to initiate ‘Phulwari’ (lit: flower garden) when they noticed that young children at Singhu Border were not attending school. Navjot Kaur has a Bachelor’s in Education and believes that awareness is the cornerstone of revolution, so they began teaching them with the help of volunteers. Activists have also created libraries on-site with revolutionary texts in Punjabi and Hindi, two of the languages most spoken among protestors. Everyone is welcome to take books to read, and contribute books they want others to have. The ecosystems I’ve described that people power has created resemble what anarchist Murray Bookchin described as a free municipality. A comrade told me that the Delhi Government refused to respond to their appeals for more portable toilets, so they reached out to their own networks, and a friend’s family contributed suction trucks. Their capacity to safely manage the waste on-site has now increased. Despite the chilling cold and an uncaring regime, farmers and their comrades are well-prepared to eat, debate, sleep, dance, pray, sing, and read on these streets until their demand is respected.

2. Creating communities based on care, not hierarchy, is an ancestral commitment.

 I’m a community organizer who experiences life at the intersection of systematic advantages I was accorded through no goodness of my own and multiple systemic disadvantages. So when I began actively creating an ethic of care to bring into the spaces I was helping to build, I started to notice that it is not as an individual that you unlearn patriarchal, colonial, or capitalist tendencies. The process of taking responsibility for change around you happens in community with people who’ve cared for you, and those you care for. Revolutionizing social relations requires seeing those dominating ways that have lived within your community as house guests for so long that unless you look closely, you would not be able to tell where the hierarchies end and the furniture begins. The farmers uprising has reaffirmed something for me about creating post-capitalist visions for a life where we get respect and support instead of violations and terror. It’s that capitalist mindsets can’t swallow the realities of these protestors being friends, families. Singhu and Tikri Border are places of ancestral reverence, where protestors as young as 4 and as old as 90 reify their commitment to sharing love and building futures that prioritize well-being.

Predominant portrayals of modern protests in which working people occupy the streets to demand more life-affirming material conditions most often depict able-bodied men as the orchestrators of action. When farmers first reached borders and news of their agitation began circulating, women were said to be largely absent from the ranks of protestors. Hearing this, some organizers acted with a class and gender consciousness uncritically and began centering testimonies from women. Shergill writes that “according to Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch (MAKAAM) [Women’s Farmers Rights Forum], 75 percent of all farm work is conducted by women yet they own only 12 percent of the land.” This land ownership statistic will prove even more harmful for women if these laws are not repealed. The only “choice” they will be left with to earn a living, will be contracting out their bodies to Ambani Agro and Adani Agri Logistics.

3. Opposing one unjust hierarchization means discarding all in/visible forms of hierarchy.

Punjab is the place of my birth and ancestry. Our communities are large-hearted, and they are also rife with caste, patriarchal, and land-based degradation. Radical love is less a theory to be explained and more the undeniable bond we form in fleeting moments, and shared connections with our comrades who persist, despite the despair of our times. Radical love can look like accompanying uncomfortable exchanges, such as when a young protestor shared an image she took of two men: a Hindu priest and a Sikh elder who were engaged in conducting a ritual together, despite being from different religious backgrounds. Her caption said, “I wonder if they know the kid watching them and taking this photo is bisexual.” People who create revolutions and uprisings from the ground up have not forgone all prejudices within themselves. But they have taken a monumental risk; the risk to arrive within a public where they may be faced with forms of difference that they cannot immediately resolve. It is by intimately and carefully accompanying the tendency to distance ourselves from our own prejudices that we begin to circulate an ethic of care, a more considerate way of relating than one’s will to harm or hurt.

Author’s notes:

If you’d like to track on-ground updates, I recommend the following:

1. Trolley Times Official (IG: @trolley_times_official) - the protest’s own newspaper!

2. Instagram: Sikh Expo

   To hear more testimonies from the agitation:

1. Youtube: Scoopwhoop Unscripted (English subtitles available)

2. Videos: Aljazeera English’s coverage on the basics, including Shergill’s piece.

3. Web reportage: Newsclick.in, especially this (half-satirical but fact based) piece.

4. Kisan Ekta Morcha: the unions’ official handle on all social media platforms.

For thoughtful analyses of the farm laws:

1. P. Sainath, agricultural expert, for the Tribune, Newsclick, and the Wire.

2. Dr. Sudha Narayanan for the India Forum.