Fatehgarh Sahib: Amandeep Kaur Dholewal rose from a traditional Indian cot and began speaking to a small gathering of men and women who sat cross-legged in a park opposite a white-domed gurdwara, a place of worship for Sikhs.
The 37-year-old doctor was flanked by a dozen of supporters, mainly drawn from the protesters who last year hunkered on the edges of the Indian capital and demonstrated against farm laws pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which they feared would decimate their income.
“We have already defeated Modi once. Let’s defeat him again.” Her voice bellowed from a loudspeaker attached to an auto rickshaw, displaying none of the flamboyance of a seasoned politician but drawing bursting applause from the audience.
The scene underscored the changing electoral landscape in India’s Punjab state, where more than 21 million voters cast ballots on Sunday in polls that are seen as a barometer of Modi and his party’s popularity ahead of general elections in 2024. The polls will indicate whether riding the crest of the yearlong protests that forced Modi to make a rare retreat and repel the farm laws could be enough to prevent his party from making inroads in a state considered the “grain bowl” of India.
Political newbies like Dholewal are pinning their hopes on this very formula. They are vying to convert the farmers’ anger into votes, arguing that a new party is the only path to change.
“People are asking me, ‘Why are you late? We were waiting for you,’” said Dholewal, who ran a medical camp at one of the protest sites last year. She is now a candidate for Sanyukt Samaj Morcha, a newly minted political party that includes some of the farm unions that organized the protests.
“People know their rights now,” she said.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party rammed the farm laws through Parliament without consultation in September 2020, using its executive powers. His administration billed them as necessary reforms, but farmers feared the laws signaled the government was moving away from a system in which they sold their harvest only in government-sanctioned marketplaces. They worried this would leave them poorer and at the mercy of private corporations.
The laws triggered a year of protests as farmers — most of them Sikhs from Punjab state — camped on the outskirts of New Delhi through a harsh winter and devastating coronavirus surge. Modi withdrew the laws in November, just three months ahead of the crucial polls in Punjab and four other states. The election results will be announced on March 10.
Modi’s BJP has a relatively small footprint in Punjab but hopes to form a government there with a regional ally and strengthen its fledgling voter base among farmers, one of the largest voting blocs in India. Punjab, where people are deeply proud of their state’s religious syncretism, also represents a test for his party’s Hindu nationalist reach, which has flourished in most of northern India since 2014.
Meanwhile, the BJP is running its campaign by trying to frame the incumbent Congress party state government as corrupt. It is also making grand promises to create more jobs, provide farm subsidies and free electricity for farmers, and eradicate the drug menace that has ailed the state for years. AP
