Wanted, a credible interlocutor to speak to farmers

From Amit Shah and Nitin Gadkari to Anurag Thakur, almost half of the BJP’s MPs describe themselves as croppers in their Lok Sabha bios. Did none of them convince the Centre to amend its obdurate stance against the farmers?

For some, it may be hard to comprehend why the dialogue between the Centre and the farmers hit a wall, after a glimmer of hope when the government offered to put the disputed laws on hold for 18 months to mollify the protestors. The farmers, however, rejected the proposal, settling for nothing less than the abrogation of the statutes and a legal guarantee that their life-line- the Minimum Support Price (MSP)- will not be tampered with. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the BJP represents a chunk of India’s agrarian economy in its ranks, at every level, big, medium and small. About 44. 37 percent- or 134 of its 302 elected MPs- call themselves farmers and agriculturists in the bios put up on the Lok Sabha website. That’s close to half the number which holds up the Narendra Modi government and forms a bulwark of strength between him and the Opposition.
A proviso. It’s hard to ascertain how many of them actually own land, sow, plough, till and grow crops. It’s certainly inadvisable to lie to or mislead Parliament, and if an MP does so and is discovered, he/she faces the sort of treatment that was meted out to top Congress and BJP leaders who faked their education qualifications. Disgrace and an order to immediately amend their bios with the right facts. Therefore, to call oneself a farmer only to sound kosher is not feasible. Among the names which feature in the BJP’s huge “agrarian population” are Amit Shah, Nitin Gadkari, Narendra Singh Tomar, G Kishan Reddy and Anurag Thakur. Surprisingly, Rajnath Singh, portrayed as an archetypal “kisan neta” from the heartland, calls himself a teacher in his CV. A majority of the BJP’s peasantry comes from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana and Rajasthan (it didn’t win a seat in Punjab in 2019) with a smattering from Maharashtra and Gujarat. At times, an MP’s professional antecedent makes for a curious combine as that of Alwar’s Balak Nath, who is an “agriculturist-cum-religious missionary”, while the Dindori law-maker Bharati Pawar refers to herself as a “doctor-farmer”.
shimmer

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