July 20th, 2020 / Leave Feedback / nezuppal

A lot of people may not be too familiar with the Punjab region of India. A relatively small region in the North of India and Pakistan it has always had ill-defined borders and been a hot spot for violence. The two main religious populations of the region are Sikhs (famously violent when provoked) and Hindus who massively outnumber the Sikhs who comprise just 1.7% of the Indian population.

With the entirety of my father’s side of the family originating from Punjab I must admit that I am slightly embarrassed that I did not see this mad sequence of events coming; my ignorance about my own heritage, also, does embarrass me.

So, what is happening in India?

Right now, as you’re reading this, millions of Indian farmers are marching from Punjab to Delhi to protest 3 new Indian farming laws that would effectively starve these farmers to death. Delhi is a fairly northern capital city, but the march is still at least 357km – to give some perspective if I were to march to Leeds it would 65 hours and would still be 50km fewer than the Punjabi protestors.

Someone (apologies but I cannot remember who) gave a great analogy of the situation in India currently. Imagine people in Newcastle start protesting and marching because new laws have been introduced by this government. These laws will damage local farmers and only help large corporations. They have very little food – that’s how desperate they are. Unable to reach a resolution with Parliament imagine the government then deployed riot police and paramilitary officers with assault weapons to try and halt the march. In India this is exactly what happened. The Modi government has already used tear gas and water cannons. (It goes without saying that women and children were there too).

One positive from this march is that the Indian community, as they so often do, have actually banded together with the protestors. Citizens are supporting farmers with food and shelter and water and that is definitely a silver lining. For these Punjabi farmers this really is a case of life or death – the support of local citizens could make all the difference.

Why are they even protesting? The Indian government, under Modi, fairly recently updated three of their farmer-related laws. Most importantly, he eliminated the Minimum Support Price for grain, making it a lot easier for large corporations to exploit farmers. Essentially the farmers want to keep their MSP and basically want better representation and support from the government.

With everyone looking at COVID-19, the vaccine and Christmas it can be easy to forget that a pandemic is global and whilst we may all be struggling – it’s all relative.