Vijoo Krishnan, General Secretary of India’s 15-million strong Kisan Sabha, speaks to Cailean Gallagher about the biggest farmers’ strike in history and the issue-based unity that underpins the movement.
There may be just a few people his age who have crisscrossed more of India and spoken with more of its people than Dr Vijoo Krishnan, central committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and General Secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the All India Peasants’ Union. Its fifteen million members work the land across the subcontinent, and its meetings, marches and rallies take its General Secretary everywhere as he plays his part in implementing collective decisions in the struggle.
When he’s not travelling, Vijoo works from a small white office, where his desk faces a cluster of plaques above a tiled-off fireplace. ‘With you in our hearts, Comrade Lenin, we build, we think, we breath, we live, and we fight! Revolutionary Greetings’. That one is from the Student Federation of India, AIKS’s sister organisation, whose headquarters are ten steps away through a room packed with communists’ collected works and portraits.
Vijoo left his work as a political economist and Department Head of Political Science at a prestigious college, to dedicate himself to the cause of the working masses and the Kisan Sabha. These last ten years the peasants’ movement has rocked Indian society with marches, stoppages, and a general strike in 2020 that has been described as the biggest in history. The unity that this hartal (strike) created across the rural and urban working class bridged the divide between land and industry that Marxists have always grappled to connect in their struggle to build mass class power.
The Kisan Sabha started in 1936 as an all-India organisation. ‘Initially it had all shades within the Indian National Congress, with Centrists, Socialists, and Communists: it represented the entire peasantry.’ Gradually, it took up the radical slogan ‘land to the tiller’ and set about demanding land ownership for landless cultivators. Some initial leaders distanced themselves from AIKS, but despite various splits it kept its left edge sharp and remains the biggest organisation of farmers in India with a membership today of 15 million. An affiliated body, a federation of units, it reflects class differences that exist on the land. Some affiliates, for instance, are tenant farmer associations representing cultivators renting land from others. Vijoo explains the theory:
There was an argument that we shouldn’t divide the peasantry; but people on the left fought against that, because there are class differences. Kisan Sabha has landless peasantry, small marginal peasantry, middle farmers, and also sections of the rich. Having only one organisation would be disadvantageous to the agricultural labourers. But there should be coordination, and unity of the working class and peasantry. That is what we have tried to build. That experience has helped us in our entire struggle.
When the 2020 struggle erupted, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the charge that it was a Punjab-centric movement. But Kisan Sabha’s all-India organisation and strong links with fraternal organisations like the All India Agricultural Workers’ Union and Centre of Indian Trade Unions made sure the strike was country wide. Its federal constitution enables it to cohere into a unit with national direction and strategy. Every state has different issues which the political line must encompass. ‘It cannot be only on the plane of ideas that you fight against corporate control, monopoly houses, and so on’, Vijoo explains. ‘The farmers will link with us only if we organically address the issues’. Kerala predominantly produces commercial crops – rubber, spices, coconut, cashew – whereas a state like Punjab produces mostly food grains. Interstate issues are inevitable, and so the council and central committee look at each case and reach resolutions through democratic discussion.
Peasant struggle takes place in the context of historic development, and Vijoo condensed a long history of so-called land reform that even now has left the concentration of land in few hands.
In certain states like Jammu Kashmir, Kerala, Bengal, and Tripura, land reforms took place through which feudal remnants could to a certain extent be overcome. But in many states, the ruling classes themselves subverted land reforms. When legislation to formally abolish feudal landlordism was brought, our organisation demanded that there should be confiscation of ceiling surplus land without any compensation, and redistribution to the landless, the tillers. But the ruling classes gave hefty compensation and left enough loopholes in the legislation so that land could be put under fake names. We call it Benami property. In some states, it is said that land was held in the name of landlords’ pet buffaloes. That is how people were still able to own thousands of acres of land.
The most revolutionary assault against this reactionary wall was in the state of Telangana, where an armed peasants’ struggle first against the feudal landlords and then against the Nizam’s state managed to liberate thousands of acres. Is there still a debate, I asked, about the use of violence in land struggles? The violence in recent decades, Vijoo replied, has largely been against the farmers, and in states like Bihar feudal landlords have killed many who were fighting for land rights. ‘Resistance has to be strengthened to counter such barbarity.’
So is the state the main target of the Kisan Sabha, or are landlords?
Both struggles are required. In many places you are unable to point and say, this is your oppressor. The erstwhile feudal landlords, who were the visible oppressors in villages before, today have diversified into different economic activities and divided their land among their extended family members. They have diversified into community convention centres, or into supermarkets, cinema halls, or petrol pumps. To pinpoint the oppressor is not easy; in States where the feudal landlords still hold sway, militant struggles are going on for land rights. In the last three decades, most of the struggles are for government surplus land, against land-grab by corporate companies, against land alienation by the big bourgeoisie of the land of tribals and traditional forest dwellers. The policies of the Indian ruling class are subverting even minimal land reforms, promoting indiscriminate land-grab and reversing the redistributive agenda.
Vijoo tells me that the AIKS is about to embark on a series of conventions to expose and identify landlords owning huge tracts of ceiling surplus land illegally, understand the main issues, and build the next phase of struggle. The details of this initiative, and of the priorities and demands that underpin it, are described in detail in the online version of this interview. It builds on the unprecedented success of the strike of 2020.
The Strike of 2020
Triggered by three laws that the government attempted to introduce in 2020, the strike followed years of government failure to uphold its own policies on land ceilings and surplus land rights in the face of corporate pressure to abandon minimum price guarantees. This WTO-backed slide towards liberalisation culminated in Modi’s three-fold bills, first, to do away with government-controlled agricultural produce markets; second, to allow hoarding by big traders; and third, to enable contract farming which would allow companies to compel poor farmers to produce certain crops under unequal conditions. In response, at the peak of the pandemic, peasants took to the streets.
In joining the struggle, land workers demonstrated their awareness of their real material priorities, in response to the government’s Machiavellian exploitation of the lockdown that it was enforcing.
Across the world there was a fear of the pandemic [Covid-19] virus, and yet, you see, these thousands and thousands of farmers sat on the street, not worried about death. Modi thought that with lockdown, people would remain indoors. Of course we faced many problems mobilising at this time. Some activists’ families would call and say my father is taking part in the protests – what if he contracts Covid? But the farmers realised that their entire future was at stake, their families’ future was at stake, if these acts were passed.
Many different groups came together, galvanised by social media, leaflets, and online webinars. Around the world people demonstrated a deep interest in the struggle. Noam Chomsky described it as a ‘beacon of light in dark times’. SNP MP Martin Day called a Westminster debate in which the Indian government’s response was roundly condemned. Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon both expressed their solidarity.
It became known as the greatest strike of the century so far. At its core, however, was a march to Delhi joined by thousands of farmers. Were the protesters thinking of it as a strike? Who besides them was on strike? Was it a solidarity strike? ‘Usually’, Vijoo admitted, ‘a strike is associated with the [industrial] working class, but here you had farmers and agricultural labourers also joining the working classes’.
What happened was that on November 26th, when we gave the call for the march to Delhi, the trade unions also gave a call for an all-India strike. And to those who were not marching, in the states not neighbouring Delhi, we gave the call for a rural strike. That is how it also became a grameen hartal – a rural strike.
The unions had an important issue too. The Modi government had taken the opportunity of the lockdown to attack all of the producing classes, workers and peasants. Along with the three [farm] laws, they brought forward four labour codes, against unionisation, promoting hire-and-fire, allowing 12 hour working days, and so on. Previously we would have engaged in kinds of solidarity action – maybe one of us would have given a solidarity speech – but it was difficult persuading farmers to take up working class issues. This movement changed everything and built a new worker-peasant paradigm of joint action.
The media claimed the march to Delhi was spontaneous, but AIKS and its sister organisations as well as different farmers’ organisations had been consistently on the struggle front since 2014, organising joint programmes, and building issue-based unity. When the Land Acquisition Ordinance was introduced in December 2014, AIKS and other organisations formed an issue-based unity called Bhumi Adhikar Andolan (Land Rights Movement). It launched a struggle against indiscriminate land grabs and a campaign for land rights. When six farmers were shot dead in June 2017 for demanding a proper price for their garlic crop, 250 organisations formed yet another issue-based initative, the All India Kisan Struggle Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), to demand fair prices that reflected production costs (remunerative pricing), and the waiving of farm loans (freedom from indebtedness).
There were tactical developments too: country-wide marches, including the Kisan Long March to Mumbai in 2018, as well as a Kisan Parliament, when, on the streets, two bits of legislation were drafted, one on remunerative pricing and the other on freedom from indebtedness. Drafts were discussed by the street assembly, before committees took new drafts across different states to incorporate regional changes. Parliamentarians then placed the agreed draft in parliament as a private members’ bill. The very process of assembly and debate reflects the fact that across the country there are diverging priorities. Are there tensions between whose issues prevail, and who organises whom?
Differences do crop up. That’s why we build issue-based unity, and in the course of continuous struggle, consensus builds on wider issues. For example, we have a phenomenon here where Dalit and Muslim dairy farmers, cattle traders and transporters are killed by Hindutva groups in the name of cow protection. When we first said we should raise our voice against that, a good number of organisations were not willing. But in the course of a year or so of struggle together, they were willing to take a stand against such attacks and killings in the name of the holy cow.
Some would like to see the movement as all-class unity against the corporates. I would describe it as a cross-class issue-based unity. The core of our organisation is the agricultural labourers, the landless tenants, the poor peasantry, and the marginal farmers. Some sections of the rich are part of it too, but the overwhelming numbers of our members are poorer. They are the core, but we focus on broadening unity, broadening consensus against the neoliberal economic policies and corporate loot.
So, I asked, where some argue for everyone against the corporates, you think the focus should be concentrated on the more marginal? ‘Both are required’, he corrected:
I’m not trying to pit one against the other. Over the last three decades of liberalisation, a section of the rural rich has benefitted. Another has lost out, so we are trying to wean them away. We will not get them on all issues, as they are a vacillating class, but if they are willing to come with us against the ruling class policies and the anti-people government, then I think that is positive. Previously, there was consensus only around issues of pricing, subsidies, loans, irrigation, and related issues affecting the population. Now we have been able to bring the movement to a situation where we are campaigning directly to punish the BJP.
The full interview will be published soon, which includes our discussion of the pay systems that peasants are demanding, the details of the martyrdom of the garlic growers, the defeats inflicted on Modi in 2014, AIKS’s international connections and sources of support, and the forms of solidarity in Scotland and across the West that resonate in India.
Cailean Gallagher is the editor of the Scottish Left Review and the co-ordinator of the Workers’ Observatory.