Populism and Power by Dhanagare D. N.;

Author:Dhanagare, D. N.; [D. N. Dhanagare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317330332
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

There were also other demands which included the following: improved educational facilities and reservation of seats in government jobs for children of farmers, pension for farmers above 55 years of age, a CBI inquiry into the killing of Rajkumar Ballian – an advocate turned BKU worker – by the UP police and an urgent completion of the canal construction work under the Krishna–Hiddan Doab project as well as its immediate linking to Kallarpur through the Deobandh branch of the Ganga canal (Singh 1988: 84–6). 4

Some of these demands were highly local, but very genuine for the agitating farmers. However, most of the demands, particularly those pertaining to remunerative prices for sugarcane, reduction in electricity/canal water charges and the like were the same as had been raised by the Punjab BKU, the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra or by the KRRS since the mid-1970s. Whether the major demands were of an all-India nature, or the minor ones which ventilated local grievances of farmers in UP, they all drew attention to the urgency of narrowing the yawning gap between standards of living and civic amenities in cities and towns and in the villages (or between ‘India and Bharat’, to use Sharad Joshi’s metaphor).

The treatment meted out to needy farmers by officials of the UP state government was yet another source of resentment and anguish among farmers supporting the BKU agitation. This is even doubly true of farmers in western UP, where ‘they have often ended up paying more in bribes to corrupt officials of the U.P. Electricity Board, State Irrigation Department and other similar agencies than they did in legitimate government dues’ (Saksena 1988: 8). In fact, the BKU leader, Tikait himself complained about political graft and corruption in UP since ‘on an average a farmer had to pay anything from 5000 rupees to 8000 rupees to get his son a job in the police and about 15,000 rupees for a job in the army’ (Singh 1988: 86)

It is evident, then, that most of the BKU’s demands and grievances centred on issues such as ‘power supply, irregularities in electricity bills and the electricity department’s failure to ensure and restore a steady power supply to farmers’, besides, of course, the common demand of remunerative prices for sugarcane, wheat and so on. These issues had not cropped up overnight. The BKU movement had, in a way, gathered momentum in UP with its 18-month-long protest agitation staged at Karmo Kheri village near Shamli in Muzaffarnagar district since 1986. It was here that attention was first focused on ‘electricity issues’ by over one lakh farmers of the BKU, who offered satyagraha and courted arrest in March 1987 – when BKU supporters had clashed with the police and three villagers were killed in the firing that followed.

When the gravity of the situation dawned on the UP state administration, three state ministers were sent to the venue of the agitation to hold parleys with farmers’ representatives, but the latter kept their pressure on by refusing to cremate the bodies of the three martyrs until the government conceded to their demands.

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