India’s Extrajudicial Farm Regime – OpEd
India operates extrajudicially in practically all aspects. Law has no legitimate worth. Natural rights aren’t recognized under the constitution, allowing a political structure that works against the will of the people.
Under the current authoritarian regime of Narendra Modi, the so-called “Government of India” has unleashed unlawful and tyrannical economic assaults against farmers of Indian states (destructive to Punjab and Haryana especially), abrogating their fundamental rights as farmers, creating extrajudicial private markets to operate outside the due process of the law. Under the new regime, a farmer selling grains through these unregulated markets will have no right to challenge the terms of payments in any courts, permitting blatant theft and exploitation by India’s most nefarious dynastic corporations who can seize farmers’ land on nonfulfillment of arbitrary terms.
Economic Annihilation
Modi’s unconscionable economic war is being given pseudo-rationality by one of his apologist and economist, Ashok Gulati, the policymaker of so-called “market reforms,” who advocates ramming the farmers with extrajudicial “market reforms” without the need for any consideration of their concerns.
Gulati wants to impose homogeneous agricultural model, followed in rest of the India, on both Punjab and Haryana, failing to understand that the two states have completely different agricultural dynamics from rest of the India. Gulati arguments for a demand based agriculture and supports diversified agriculture, disregarding the fact that a demand based agriculture is largely defined by emphasis on few crops and not diversification at all.
Contradicting further, Gulati blames the depletion of water table on current farming practices in Punjab but never questions why no government has hardly invested in Punjab’s deteriorating irrigation infrastructure which is forcing the farmers to water mining. Gulati then credits the same practices that are today depleting water table in Punjab for bringing the Green Revolution whilst not acknowledging the fact that Punjab farmers have been given no legitimate incentive to farm anything other than wheat and rice. Despite being aware about the water table situation in Punjab, Gulati fails to ask himself why “Government of India” has been too busy diverting Punjab’s own rivers to non-riparian regions of India, forcing the farmers to restore to excessive water mining. Punjab has already been ruined of its waters for decades now, yet Gulati lays the blame on Punjab farmers.
Regardless of how flawed it sounds; Gulati achieves heights of his malfunctioning reasoning in stating that ramming against farmers’ will is acting in farmers’ own benefit. This is exactly what we expect from the modern technocrats of the Modi regime who somehow feel the moral entitlement to annihilate the interests of others for their own self-righteous sense of altruistic delusion.
The propaganda is further driven under the false cover-up of “creating economies of scales.” How does extrajudicially usurping land creates economies of scale for Punjab and Haryana? If the regime can’t provide basic support infrastructure for Punjab farmers, what is really the need for such a government that only seeks to act against their interests?
The propaganda is callously promulgated by a handful of Indian journalists, working as press agents of the Modi regime- a ritual they have been doing for long now.
Farm Sovereignty
The Post British Colonial India is governed against the will of the people. The defective conception of economic policies in India are laid to fulfill ideological political objective of governing the subcontinent as a unitary homogeneous nation-state. History proves that it is flawed, it has failed; and it continues to fail. The “Government of India” is not founded upon self-determined political rights of people, but the annihilation of them. The people of Punjab and Haryana, therefore, have the legitimate right to defend against such brutal form of political monopolization derived from colonial British. It is time to break free from this totalitarian monopolization and make a governing system that advocates for natural rights of all people- not their political and economic annihilation.
