Lessons for Localists: The Great Indian Farm Revolt of 2020-2021

Part 1: The importance of pre-liberal institutions

Editor’s note: We are taking a little break from our Action Oriented series to run this article. We welcome submissions like this that take a kind of Doomer Optimist perspective on an issue or story. In this case, Prasan takes a look at the Indian Farm Revolt through the lens of localism. Enjoy!

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Lessons for Localists: The Great Indian Farm Revolt of 2020-2021

Part 1: The importance of pre-liberal institutions

Author: Prasan (dhanuraashi@)

Starting in September 2020, farmers in India took on a powerful and popular central government in order to force the repeal of three agricultural liberalization laws that they saw as a threat to their livelihood, land, and culture. After 14 months of continuous resistance, the government was ultimately forced to concede. Western advocates of localism can learn a great deal from the protests: particularly how a society far less-atomized than the modern West can successfully act aggressively in its own self-preservation. Through this essay, we ask the question: What can post-liberals learn from a pre-liberal society?

A tractor rally at the Singhu border that separates the agricultural heavyweight state of Haryana, and the national capital, Delhi.

The protests were provoked by the passing of three farm laws that aimed to liberalize India’s agriculture market. Broadly, the laws expanded where farmers could sell their produce (which were previously restricted only to state-regulated mandis, or market yards), with whom they could enter into contracts, and the amount of food that could be stockpiled, or hoarded. This was a true market liberalization in the sense that it “freed” farmers from government regulation. 

But farmers, being aware of the Faustian economics of the free market, strongly opposed these laws, preferring the existing system which involved heavy state regulation and protection from exploitative pricing. While Shapirocons and other right libertarians would call that pre-existing system “socialism”, advocates of localism would clearly recognize elements of “distributism” in the system, including hard ceilings on land ownership (preventing consolidation and capture by big capital), a guaranteed minimum price for several cereal grains (preventing price exploitation), and laws preventing hoarding. These prohibitions are what the writer Wendell Berry calls the technologies of limits, or technologies of domesticity.

On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. 

Wendell Berry, Faustian economics, Harpers magazine 2008

On recognizing the threat to their livelihood, land, and culture, farmers began their protests shortly after the laws were passed in September 2020. Initially, farmers protested locally, primarily in the state of Punjab (one of the top three food producing states in the country). Within two months, protests had spread to Haryana, and major farm unions had mobilized to march on the capital city of Delhi.

Map of India, with major North Indian states highlighted.

Unlike the leaderless protests so glamorized in the atomized West, these protests were carefully coordinated, planned, and had a clear goal (total repeal of the laws passed in September 2020). It is because of this careful coordination and presence of intermediary institutions that they were able to mobilize in such large numbers, and mount a sustained yearlong protest against a very popular central government (even today, Prime Minister Modi’s approval ratings are at over 70%). As writers Anmol Waraich and G.S. Goraya state in their article:

The role of Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) – the umbrella body of hundreds of regional and national farm unions – as the prime representative of the farmers and chief negotiator between them and the government shows the continuing importance of the decades-old left wing Kisan Unions and their emerging synergy with Tikait’s younger Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU).

Because the farmer unions are deeply rooted in the places in which they represent, they have legitimacy. Because they have legitimacy, they can mobilize people en masse, and even make demands on rural society that would seem incredible to even self-described conservatives or localists in the West. Towards the end of November 2020, a staggering 200,000 people marched on the nation’s capital in an incredible show of strength.

The farmers march on the nation’s capital, December 2020.

It is important to note here that participation in the protest was not, for many people, entirely voluntary. Village panchayats are an ancient form of local government in villages across India, and in several farming villages panchayats made demands that each family send at least one individual to attend the protest, or make a donation towards the protest if they are unable to do so. Failure to comply with the edict would mean a social boycott. Any localist movement must be accepting of this kind of localized coercion, regardless of how offensive it may seem to liberal sensibilities. If the town or village is to act in self-preservation, it must be able to exact a penalty from those who abstain from their responsibilities. Note that in most of the world, this power to coerce is already granted, but exclusively to the state. This is, as author Patrick Deneen describes, a result of liberalism, and not representative of the natural development of human society:

Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy such as that first imagined by theorists of the state of nature, except that the anarchy that threatens to develop from that purportedly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. With man liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

Patrick Deneen, Unsustainable Liberalism, First Things Magazine 2012

That is, the endless expansion of individual autonomy is conditioned on the endless growth of the state. Heaven is necessarily ordered, as Berry says, but “hell hath no limit”. The Rothbardian or Misesian view of human society as consisting of free associating individuals with no pre-existing social or cultural ties is as much an imaginative fantasy as the Stalinist view of the benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, the two poles merely work to strengthen each other in the long run, by eroding the local institutions that act as a check on top-down power. Patrick Deneen explains this as follows:

Liberty, so defined, requires in the first instance liberation from all forms of associations and relationships—from the family, church, and schools to the village and neighborhood and the community broadly defined—that exerted strong control over behavior largely through informal and habituated expectations and norms.

Patrick Deneen, Unsustainable Liberalism, First Things Magazine 2012

Writers GS Goraya and Anmol Waraich note that it is precisely these pre-liberal institutions that enables farmers to mobilize, organize, and sustain the protest. In the early stages of revolt this mobilization and organization was provided both by farmers’ unions and by Sikh religious institutions (as the protests began in the Sikh majority state of Punjab). Even after the protests spread outward from Punjab, the Sikh ethos that initially powered the protests continued to provide for the protest’s sustenance, as they state:

Many observers are struggling to find an idiom through which to understand and frame the rise and victory of the Kisan Movement. We believe this idiom can be found in the Sikh praxis of ‘Deg Teg Fateh’. ‘Deg’ (literally, cauldron) represents the institutional capacity for resource mobilisation essential for leading mass scale, self-sustained peoples’ movements. ‘Teg’ (literally, sword) represents the organisational capacity to cohesively and strategically act towards justice-driven goals. Together, these two elements will result in victory (‘Fateh’).

A protestor confronts a policeman, January 2021.

This ethos, like most other pre-liberal institutions, also has a physical manifestation, in the Sikh institution of langar. Throughout the world, Sikh places of worship, or Gurdwaras, routinely participate in the centuries long tradition of communally cooking, serving, and eating food as a part of their sacramental duty (the langar is as fundamental a part of Sikh worship as the Mass is to Catholics - no Gurdwara will be seen as having legitimacy without offering langar). In large Gurdwaras, such as Sri Bangla Sahib in Delhi, approximately 30,000 people are fed every weekday and a significantly larger number are fed on weekends. And this institution has been exercised on a daily basis since its construction in 1664. This requires a form of organization and collective action that has long since been delegated to be the exclusive domain of the state in most of the developed world.

Farmers deployed this capacity for community organization and action to initiate langar throughout protest sites from the outset. This became an important symbol of protest in itself, apart from being logistically necessary for the protesters’ sustenance. As importantly, the skills of self-organization and action developed through the routine collective preparation of food were deployed consistently over the course of the year-long protests in order to ultimately force the government to repeal the laws.

Langar being prepared at the protests, 2020.

The marked difference of these system of ethics from the “nobody is the boss of me” style “conservatism” that dominates the modern West cannot be overstated. First, these systems exist in order to impose a bottom up order, not to maximize individual freedom. This means, necessarily, that individuals must submit themselves to predefined social limits. Langar must be eaten while sitting on the grounds, with rare exceptions made for those who are unable to do so (and even those who are unable to do so by themselves will frequently request assistance for doing so anyway, feeling a sense of shame for not being able to observe the society’s own self-imposed limits). Note that this obligation extends beyond the faithful, or even beyond the allied. Even the Prime Minister, who was the political opponent of farmers through the agitation, understands that he must comply with the social obligation to seat himself on the floor when attending a langar.

Every knee shall bow: In a functioning society of self-imposed limits, exceptions are not made for political leaders. The Prime Minister partakes of langar above.

The writer Richard Manning describes this difference in his fantastic essay, A Conservatism that Once Conserved:

My grandfather may not have been as churched as the neighbors, but he was every bit as conservative, and then some. Beyond conservative, he was obstreperous and tough. Nonetheless, he still cared what the neighbors thought of him. These are not separate matters. Respect for local opinion was what enforced rural America’s conservatism a generation ago.

…

This is not a small matter. A misguided notion of freedom lies at the heart of the suburban cancer on the landscape. My neighbors will tell you they moved because in rural America you are free to do as you please. Where did they get this idea? Rural America, at least when there was a functioning rural America, never advertised any such freedom. Just the opposite.

Richard Manning, A conservatism that once conserved. Counterpunch magazine 2003.

This is not to suggest that the panchayat system in India, or the long gone rural conservatism of the Americas cannot fail. Caste-based “khap panchayats” often used tools of social boycott for inter-caste relationships until they were banned from doing so by the state. Similarly, rural conservatism in the Americas enforced segregation, conducted lynchings, and made life very difficult for a host of immigrant groups, especially the Catholic Irish and Italians. At their worst, these groups are enemies of our common humanity and of God’s natural order. But at their best, as writers Goraya and Waraich state, they provide a check on the otherwise unstoppable march of increasing central authority combined with individual atomization.

Interestingly, this bottom-up check on power is recognised by political theorists such as Francis Fukuyama as the natural operation of rule of law in Indian society, cultivated during early Vedic times. The farmers’ movement should thus also be given credit for upholding the civilisational ethos of the land and guarding it from its self-proclaimed guardians.

GS Goraya and Anmol Waraich, How The Farmers' Protest Affirmed The Potential Of India's Grassroots Democracy , The Wire, 2022

As the failures of liberalism accelerate, as environmental degradation and social alienation continue to increase without an end in sight, it is imperative that we study how the few remaining provincial and religious institutions that are not entirely deracinated exercise power to preserve their way of life. Finding functioning examples of these types of institutions in the modern world is hard. In the farmers revolt of 2020-2021, we see a vision of the past, but also a hint of a possible future - one where the concerns of the village, the town, and the parish - can seek to find a balance with the concerns of the state.