Hybridity, hope & highway

Narratives of the 2020-21 farmers’ stir demand a larger conversation on agriculture, democracy & future of rural India

- HARSH WARDHAN

THE 2020-21 FARMERS' protest against three farm laws has already been widely discussed in public and academic circles, but book-length studies are still few. Sudhir Kumar Suthat’s Farmer Power and Virinder Singh Kalra’s Hope for Everyone, published within months of each other, are among the earliest comprehensive accounts of this landmark movement.

Both focus on the encampments at Delhi’s borders and read the agitation as far more than a dispute over farm laws, approaching it from distinct disciplinary standpoint. Together, they offer a rich and complementary understanding of the protest, while also revealing gaps that invite further economic and policy analysis.

Both books begin with the premise that the 2020-21 protest was one of the most significant mass mobilisations in contemporary India and must be placed at the centre of discussions on democracy, state-society relations, and agrarian change. Suthar, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, frames the movement as ‘farmer power’, built over a decade-long buildup of resistance that culminated in a yearlong encirclement of Delhi by approximately 300,000 farmers. In doing so, he challenges established views of Indian peasants as politically passive and questions post-1991 market-led reform thinking. Kalra, a sociologist known for his work on Punjabi culture, views the protest as a collective experiment in hope, dignity, and solidarity, in which farmers, labourers, women, and Dalits opened up ‘a space of hope’ against authoritarian capitalism at the very borders of the national capital.