New Delhi: It is a humid and sweaty morning. The nearby drain, overflowing with overnight monsoon rains, stinks. A few metres away, pigs rummage through the rubbish.
But the weather or stink does not dissuade Bapu Nishtar Singh, who has been protesting for nearly 10 months against a set of agricultural laws passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in September last year.
The 85-year-old from Punjab state’s Ludhiana district is among thousands of farmers from across India camping at Singhu outside capital New Delhi, the epicentre of nationwide protests that have posed the biggest challenge for Modi since he came to power seven years ago.
Last September, Modi’s right-wing government passed three laws aimed at “modernising” the country’s agricultural system. The government said the laws will benefit the farmers by increasing their income and give them additional choices to sell their produce.
But farmers like Bapu Nishtar Singh say the laws are an attempt to erode a longstanding minimum support price (MSP) for their crops assured by the government and will enable a few corporations to control the vast agriculture sector.
The protesting farmers at Singhu border on the outskirts of New Delhi [Bilal Kuchay/Al Jazeera]
Bapu Nishtar Singh fears the new laws will put his 1.5 acres (0.6 hectares) of agricultural land, on which he mainly grows rice and wheat, at the mercy of corporations – a common view shared by other farmers as well.
“We don’t understand why they are enforcing these laws on us. We never demanded them. The government didn’t talk to us before they brought these legislations,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The government says the laws are for the betterment of farmers but we know they are hand-in-glove with the corporates and the laws are meant to benefit them [corporates], not the farmers.”
Two months after the laws were passed, hundreds of thousands of farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states marched on their tractors, motorbikes and on foot to New Delhi to put pressure on the government to repeal them.
When they were stopped from entering the capital, they decided to camp outside New Delhi, braving the region’s biting cold, extreme heat and monsoon rains for months now. Al Jazeera
