Division Bells

How the Centre's draft National Policy Framework on Agricultural Marketing and Dallewal's fast unto death for an MSP guarantee are pushing farmer leaders to put their house in order and come together

- Sandeep singh

IT'S simple and to the point. A lucid exhortation to unite for self-protection—“kalle-kalle maar na khao, kathe hoke age ayo (alone we’re thrashed, each of us; let’s be one and step ahead)”—seems to have become the rallying cry of farmer unions in Punjab whose unprecedented unity during the year-long agitation in 2020-21 had forced the National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre to accept their main demand: the repeal of three farm laws it had introduced that faced stiff opposition for allegedly aiming to facilitate big-business domination of agriculture in the name of hiking farmers’ incomes. This unity had lasted until the formation of the Samyukta Samaj Morcha by Balbir Singh Rajewal, a leader of the coalition spearheading the agitation, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), in order to contest the 2022 assembly election in Punjab.

It was in opposition to this move that the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Sidhupur) led by the 70-year-old Jagjit Singh Dallewal broke away from the SKM and later formed the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (Non-Political). Now the veteran farmer leader’s ongoing hunger strike at Khanauri on the Punjab-Haryana border since November 26, 2024, demanding a legal guarantee for a Minimum Support Price (MSP) in grain procurement, is pushing the estranged farmer unions to get closer again. On January 16, the SKM (Non-Political) and the Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM)—under whose banners the protesting farmers have been camping at Khanauri and Shambhu on the Punjab-Haryana border since February 13 last year when their march to Delhi was stopped by the Haryana police—decided that a “