The 1980s mark the beginning of a new trend in the farmers’ movements in India. A spate of new movements, from Shetkari Sangathana (SS) in Maharashtra to Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) in Karnataka and Bharatiya Kisan Union in Uttar Pradesh, began challenging the wider exploitative relations between the agrarian society/system, on the one hand, and industrial/international/western capital on the other. Over the past decade two issues have been in focus in the discourse of the farmers’ movement in India: globalisation and the Indian state. I am trying to trace the reasons for the farmers’ movement’s formulation of its own perspectives on globalisation and the state. The effect raises two kinds of politics, Politics of Apologia and Politics of Placing, on the farmers’ movement in India. In the present context of post-colonialism, globalisation has become a fuzzy word for two important reasons: The first is the difficulties involved in locating the actual process and the subsequent semantic confusion. The second reason is the larger myths/euphoria and the notions that globalisation has created and perpetuated over the years. The myths are that it is a western liberal project to modernise the Third World, overlooking the fact that the western agenda of modernisation has historically failed to solve a host of problems afflicting the Third World . The other myths are that it would introduce uniform social relations based on homogeneous interests and tastes, bring in new cultural practices (Thomson 1999), introduce ‘borderless situation’ (Hilton 1998), and bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. It is in this context that globalisation has been viewed vividly (Dibaja 1998): ‘dissemination of the economy, polity, and culture of one sphere to another’; ‘increasing homogenisation of world culture’; ‘a society without borders’; ‘a loose combination of free trade agreements, the internet and the integration of financial .

Markets that is erasing borders and uniting the world into a single lucrative but brutally competitive market place;’ ‘compression of the entire world on the one hand and a rapid increase in consciousness of the world.’ All these arguments recognise that globalisation is a new phenomenon, a new phase, a process, a situation. Thereby, the 1990s have been called the decade of ‘Globalisation.’ Two important issues have become controversial in the discourse of the new farmers’ movement in recent years: globalisation and the Indian state. The new farmers’ movement which is seen as a part of the larger new social movements, emerged much before the debate on globalisation took root. It all began in the eighties when farmers of Karnataka, under Karnataka Rajya Raitha (KRRS), of Maharashtra under Shetkari Sangathana (SS), of Uttar Pradesh under Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), and of Tamil Nadu under Tamiliga Vyavasaigal Sangam, began agitating in various parts of the country on a number of issues. These farmers’ movements were called ‘new’ for various reasons: first, unlike the earlier struggles, which were about land, market and prices became the most important issues. Second, the struggle was directed against external agencies such as the state, and industrial capital/international capital. Third, unlike the earlier farmers’ movements, the ‘new’ movements ‘bring together entire rural populations, past and present, irrespective of the economic, ethnic, caste, religious, and political differences.’ Fourth, they believed in discoursing on a large number of issues. Thereby, they placed emphasis on creating a rational farmer within the larger framework. Finally, they believed in retrieving the communitarian life in the context of capitalism, both western and indigenous, threatening the identities, communitarian life and cultural practices. One can discern two phases in the discourse on farmers’ movements vis- à-vis globalisation and the state. In the first phase, spanning 1980–90, although globalisation never became an important issue, the issues of western capitalism, strategy of western world/imperialist countries, colonialism/neo-colonialism, and the Western paradigm of development did come up for discussion quite often, and were mediated through the internally linked issues. Generally, the farmers’ discourse during this decade centred on the issues of ‘urban vs rural,’ ‘Bharat vs India’, remunerative prices, writing off of loans, agrarian backwardness, industry-oriented policies, etc. It was during the 1980s that the movements largely retained their ideological cohesion. Broadly, the farmers’ movement during the 1980s believed that India’s prevailing structural backwardness was mainly due to external linkages, i.e., capitulation of India to western capitalism. It was a deliberate ploy and a larger strategy to perpetuate subjugation of the Third World countries, including India . It is in this context that Third World countries have not been able to escape or delink themselves from the western world. This legacy continues even in the post-colonial present in various forms, which have given space for ‘neo-colonialism’ or ‘internal colonialism’ to operate. The latter, internal colonialism, is ensured through ‘procurement levies’ in periods of scarcity at prices well below open market prices, dumping in domestic markets of products imported at prices exceeding the internal market prices, restricting the movements of goods, etc.’

It is here that one can locate the discourse on conflict between Bharath and India operating—the native and traditional nomenclature of the country. This discourse /argument came largely from Maharashtra, which does not mean that other movements were hesitant to use the language of Maharashtra. For example, the Karnataka movement used the concepts halli and pattana, representing rural India and urban India respectively. Nonetheless, the argument of ‘Bharath vs India’ is obvious in the following argument3 : ‘India corresponds to that notional entity that has inherited from the British the mantle of economic, social, cultural and educational exploitation while Bharath is that notional entity which is subject to exploitation for the second time ever since the termination of the external colonial regime. In brief, the Black Britishers have replaced the white ones to the benefit of Bombay rather than that of Manchester.’ (Joshi 1981).

Here lies the radicalism of the movement, especially in the construction of an idea about linkages and subsequent exploitative relations. This radicalism, however, became very ambiguous when the farmers’ movement combined several ideological streams such as Gandhism, Nehruvian command economy, Marxism, and dependency theory. The ambiguity became a fact as globalisation took centre stage during the 1990s. This decade also saw a vertical split in the farmers’ movement in India. This division has made the movement refashion its tools and strategies to address the issues emerging from globalisation; it also made the farmers’ movement defend opposite ideological streams — liberalism/capitalism on the one side and Gandhism/dependency theory on the other; third, it made the farmers’ movement form larger collectives at the international level and thereby helped them to address the issues; finally it helped them to construct new discourses/debates about the identity, paradigm of development, cultural practices, etc. However, it had one adverse effect: it diluted the militancy of the farmers’ movement at the all-India level. 44 Journal of Social and Economic Development Jan. - June 2002 Globalisation, the State and the Farmers’ Movement At the outset, the concern of the farmers’ movement stemmed from the larger implications of globalisation on the agricultural/agrarian economy, including different categories. Two perspectives are quite evident from within the farmers’ movement. One perspective saw in globalisation the larger threat and strategy of western world/western capitalism to trap the Third World, including India in ‘neocolonialism’. The second perspective saw in globalisation ‘the birth of the Indian village into an integrated world where the Indian farmer will have a fighting chance despite longstanding suppression by the State’ (Joshi, n.d). Three important issues in agriculture became a major concern of the farmers’ movement, especially during the GATT negotiations, as the latter was conceived as part of the larger strategies of western capitalism/globalisation: the market-oriented agricultural trading system, which means opening up Indian agriculture to the larger market; substantial progressive reductions in agricultural support, which is nothing but rolling back the state; and the agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary issues. The latter issue combined other issues such as intellectual property rights, burden of proof, and patent rights. Here, questions were raised from within: what would happen to community rights of the peasants/farmers? Who would hold the IPR? What would happen when ‘imperial jurisprudence’ under the garb of ‘burden of proof’ was introduced? How should the farmers react when globalisation introduces ‘aggressive capitalism’ in different forms such as technical, biotechnological (terminator seed, golden rice, etc)? Finally, how are the farmers’ suicides in recent years to be understood—as a consequence of globalisation or related to personal issues / land issues of the farmers concerned4?

All these led to different discourses/arguments, strategies and perspectives, which have had an effect on the farmers’ movement in India. The Maharashtra movement advanced the most important argument on globalisation and liberalisation. While countering the argument that liberalisation / globalisation is a new phenomenon, the Maharashtra movement argues that liberalisation largely belongs to the swadeshi tradition of India: ‘Liberalisation/ globalisation is not an iniquitous import from the west. Liberalisation is in fact a worldview of Vedanta.’ This argument was advanced on the premise that ‘in ancient times, the Vedanta tradition of Indian philosophy articulated essentially a liberal worldview based on the identity between the unitary and the holistic and, consequently, on the rejection of the possibility of a superior and wiser intermediary’. Further, this trend ‘holds that an individual fulfilling his own personal rights is in harmony with his surroundings and with the world’ (Joshi 1994a). What is noteworthy is the simile that the Maharashtra movement advanced for liberalisation/ liberalism: ‘Liberalism is as swadeshi as the saree and curry.’ Here lies the attempt to disregard liberalisation/globalisation as alien concepts. Meanwhile, the Maharashtra Globalisation and the State movement is not averse to the notion of liberalisation/globalisation coming from the western world. It was during the debate on GATT/Dunkel draft that its arguments in favour of liberalisation became very clear. The reasons why the Maharashtra movement supported the GATT/Dunkel Draft are that it stresses the importance of rural-urban balance as a structural precondition for free trade; its market economy benefits everybody — in other words, the trickle-down argument is reinforced; ‘the withdrawal of the state from all economic activities would automatically translate into autonomy (swayatta) for peasants’; it prepares the peasants for global competition and can help transform India from ‘weak capitalism’ to ‘competitive capitalism’; the proposal to lift all the levy and compulsory procurement from the farmers will help the latter; reduction of the surplus labour in agriculture, removal of all restrictions on export of farm produce, reduction of subsidy, etc, will benefit the farmers. Towards this end, the Maharashtra movement supported the patent regimes or rights on food, chemicals, biotechnology, etc, as this would benefit the Indian farmers. The strategy that the Maharashtra movement employed was different: undertaking rallies in support of globalisation or becoming part of the Indian state . However, there are spaces for contestation too:

The issue of extending support prices for agricultural produce, or what is called Aggregate Measurement of Support, which was contested on logical and empirical grounds. In the latter case the movement claimed that the In other words, in the present context capitalism has no meaning, nor its larger agendas. It is here that the Maharashtra movement becomes an apologist of capitalism/globalisation. This politics can be conceptualised as the ‘politics of apologia.’ The second important issue in the farmers’ movement during this decade was the Indian state. Unlike their Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh counterparts, the Maharashtra movement clearly differentiated the state from other organs of government. The latter is one of the machineries of the state. The state is a larger whole, covering structures, and is controlled by a set of classes, basically the industrialists and capitalists. The Maharashtra movement criticised the state as being anti-farmer/anti-agriculture by arguing that the ‘state has sought to put at the disposal of the industrialists inexpensive raw materials, labour force which can be hired at very cheap rates on account of the vast hordes of the unemployed moving from villages to the cities and of the cheapness of wage goods (Sharad Joshi, n.d)’. Further, the movement argues that the state adopts such strategies as ‘procurement levies at uneconomic price during the period of shortages, grossly inadequate price support operations during the period of relative abundance, unjustified imports of key agricultural products at inordinately high prices prevailing in the international markets, reckless dumping of domestic markets with produce secured abroad (PL 480, food grains, milk product/powder, butter, oil palm, etc), severe restrictions coupled with unpredictable vacillation as regards exports of even surplus farm produce. Artificial devaluation of the rupee is amongst the major weapons used for denying the farmers legitimate compensation.’ Despite these criticisms, the Maharashtra movement never repudiated the existence of the state. Meanwhile, two tactics of the movement vis-à-vis the state are visible: tactics to become a part of the state apparatus and attacking the state from outside

. In the first case of being in the state apparatus, especially when the protagonist became part of the state, he advanced a series of suggestions, including debureaucratisation, delicensing, reducing the direct/indirect taxes, liberalisation of import of capital and raw materials, withdrawal of subsidies, dismantling of the Nehruvian command economy, freeing agricultural trade from bureaucratic bottlenecks, abolition of all licences for agriculture-related industries, and abolition of restrictions on the export of agricultural goods. It is here that it sought the withdrawal of the state. In this argument one finds the notion of anarchism running. This is once again reinforced by the fact that the Maharashtra movement began to question the validity of the state in accentuating agrarian development/rural development or on issues such as subsidies. It is here that one finds the peculiarity of the Maharashtra movement — supportive of the western agenda of liberalisation as a programme for the future; but as an ideology — its origin— it is indigenous or swadeshi. This notion of swadeshi — locating it in Vedanta — is not vibrant, unlike the New Hindutva. If the latter is meant for establishing a gendered, masculine state and a strong economy vis-à-vis the western one, the Maharashtra movement, on the contrary, stood for a weak state and saw the state as ‘problematiques.’ At the same time it stood for a strong economy so as to be ‘competitive’ vis-à-vis western capitalism. Here lie the anarchist ideas and paradox of the movement, which incidentally came during the decade of globalisation. On the contrary, the farmers’ movement of Karnataka and partly of Uttar Pradesh developed a fairly clear-cut idea of the state only during the 1990s. Until the late 1980s it understood the state in terms of functions of the government, and treated the latter as an instrument of the industrial class and as ‘necessarily exploitative.’ Towards this end, it demanded the replacement of one government by another, mainly by farmers vis-à-vis the industrial class. However, a clear-cut conceptualisation emerged during the 1990s —that of ‘Mridu Rajya’ or ‘soft state.’ The latter has two designs within the discourse of the farmers’ movement: a) countering the neo-colonial design mediating through western capitalism/ globalisation, and b) countering the political inability of the state vis-à-vis western dictates.

This includes countering the specific issues mediating through the symbolism of cultural industry, fast-food chains, terminator seeds, etc. Nonetheless, the movement is implicitly suggesting that the state is very weak too. In this context is the demand for a strong state to be located. This strong state ultimately meant displacing the industrial /commercial capitalist class as a ruling class, opposing the entry of global capital, capacity to withdraw from the global negotiations or to uphold the national sovereignty, etc. What is most important is that the strong state ultimately meant retrieving the place of the peasantry in the state as a ruling class. This politics can be termed ‘politics of placing.’ However, there was vehement opposition to globalisation largely from two farmers’ movements in India — Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh — as globalisation carries the larger agenda of the western world including the trinity, World Bank, WTO, and the multinationals. The methods that the western world/trinity adopts vary: introducing the cultural industries, symbols, images, media, fast food companies, patenting, new seed technology (terminator technology), etc. This has had larger consequences on the Third World, particularly on India, where its impact Vol. IV, No.1 Assadi: Globalisation and the State 49 is very severe: increasing unemployment, elimination of indigenous knowledge/ culture, perpetual bondedness to the western world/capitalism, displacement of categories from their land, loss of lifestyles, superimposition of culture, and subsequently cultural alienation, violation of basic human rights, of freedom, and liberty, loss of individual dignity and conversion of India into a neo-colony. While making a case against globalisation, the movement tries to establish the nexus operating between the trinity and the larger agenda of globalisation. In fact, this kind of discourses have made the farmers’ movement critical of the western paradigm of development /globalisation. Meanwhile, the strategies that the movement employed to counter globalisation varied. Unlike the Maharashtra movement, the Karnataka (and to some extent Uttar Pradesh) movement largely believed in directly confronting the multinationals, either by undertaking huge rallies or satyagrahas. The latter has been termed ‘Bij or Seed Satyagraha’. Most important are the tactics of destroying the properties of the multinationals, conceptualising them as ‘Gandhian violence’, as Gandhi also justified the destruction of lifeless property during the nationalist movement. Most of the time it collaborated with the Karnataka movement, and its arguments were largely derived from the experience of the Karnataka movement. Yet, the Uttar Pradesh movement often tried to dominate the farmers’ movement in India on the basis of its proximity to Delhi or to the power centre. In the present context, the farmers’ movement of India, especially those opposing globalisation but not the state, have formed a broad coalition of social movements — National Fishermen’s Movement, Navadanya, Mukti Sangharsh, Timbuktu Collectives, Indian People’s Front, Rajasthan Kisan Sanghatana, Alternative Communication Mukti Sangarsh, etc. Meanwhile, their strategies and struggles have gone beyond national boundaries. They have become part of the larger collectives at the global level; these collectives are Via Campensia and People’s Global Action. The former is a collective of farmers, small and medium peasants, agricultural labourers, rural women, and the indigenous community of Asia, Africa, America and Europe. It was formed in 1992 when peasants from North America and Central America met in Managua. The first conference was held in Belgium, where it was translated into a global organisation. Via Campensia, other than critiquing the consequence of globalisation on food security and national sovereignty, is also concerned about challenges that the respective continents are facing, including the brutal violations of human rights elsewhere at the global level — against Zapatista, against the Mexican army’s presence in the midst of the indigenous population. It is due to this kind of interaction with Via Campensia that the Indian farmers’ movement, chiefly Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and, to some extent, Punjab, could accommodate the issues of indigenous people, human rights violations, immigration, refugees, militarization of rural areas, non-democratisation of regimes, etc. The second important collective at the international level is the People’s Global Action, which is an ‘evolving co-ordination of groups of organisation of fishermen, greens, indigenous people, landless, human rights, environmentalists, black community, etc.’ PGA was formed in 1999 to ‘serve as a global instrument for communicating and co-ordination of those fighting against the destruction of humanity and the planet by the global market, building local alternatives, and people’s power.’ (People’s Global Action 1999). In fact, PGA believes in a ‘clear-cut rejection of the institutions — WTO, EU, NAFTA, etc — that multinationals and speculators have built to take power away from the people, believes in a confrontational attitude and a non-violent civil disobedience movement.’ Its ultimate agenda is essentially ‘to take back control of the means of production from the hands of both transnational and national capital in order to create free, sustainable and community-controlled livelihoods, based on solidarity and peoples’ needs and not on exploitation .

It is with the help of such collectives that the Indian farmers were able to protest against WTO/globalisation in Seattle, Geneva, Prague, Washington D.C., as also undertake a caravan in Europe during 1999 highlighting the consequences of globalisation. During the caravan they resorted to unconventional strategies such as critical participation in human chains, walking along with anti-nuclear groups, demonstrating before the headquarters of multinationals (Nestle, Cargil, etc), destroying genetically modified crops, staging sit-ins, etc. All these strategies or discourses were aimed at rejecting the western paradigm of development mediating through globalisation (Intercontinental Caravan 1999): ‘We do not want western money, technologies or experts to impose their developmental model on us. We also refuse to be used as political tools to ask the elites for reforms that we never demanded. We only want to organise our strength and combine it with the strength of other movements in the north and the south in order to regain control over our lives. We are not working for a place on the global table of negotiations nor for a bloody revolution; we are just making one more step in the long-term process of construction of a different world; a world which will come about from the local to the global, from a shift in the values and everybody’s choices of millions of persons.’ The above discourses / arguments show that globalisation has been addressed differently: one section of the farmers’ movement, while welcoming globalisation, tries to locate its roots in the Vedanta or Swadeshi tradition and, in the process, negates the argument that it is basically a western project. On the contrary, another set of farmers’ movements not only vehemently opposes globalisation, but in the process selectively attacked the MNCs and went on to join the anti-globalisation collectives elsewhere at the international level. Thus, two forms of politics are seen operating: Politics of Apologia and Politics of Placing. These politics have divided the farmers’ movement in recent years, and, in the process, failed to establish a strong anti-globalisation resistance in India. This is the paradox of the farmers’ movement and the civil society (Chandoke 1995) in India in recent years. . This is done on the basis of three factors — changing nature of the state, culture, and nature of capital . In Andhra Pradesh more than three hundred farmers have committed suicide. This has been repeated in Punjab, Maharashtra, and other parts of India. Most of the farmers who committed suicide were market-oriented farmers, producing cotton, tobacco, and tur dal, and those suicides were precipitated by a huge crop loss and subsequent loans. In recent times, one more dimension has been added, with weavers in Andhra Pradesh committing suicide. For instance, Shri Sharad Joshi has become Chairman of the Agricultural Task Force. He is appointed by the NDA government to advise it on agricultural issues. This was apparent in the Meerut struggle of the late eighties when the movement raised more than thirty demands. Its politics of vacillation have taken away a big chunk of its support bases.