RSS affiliate BKS has reservations on farm bills, calls for amendments

One of RSS’s strongest affiliates, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), has said that the new farm bills introduced by the BJP government need amendment and cannot ignore the minimum support price (MSP) issue, which is critical to farmers’ concerns.

"If the MSP cannot be included in these Acts, then bring in another law that prioritises MSP,” BKS Organising Secretary, Dinesh Dattatraya Kulkarni, said.

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"The farmers’ anguish is understandable. Most farmers support a free market, and laws need to be legislated keeping that in mind,” he told this writer in an interview.

Criticising the use of force on protesting farmers from Punjab and Haryana, the RSS affiliate said the Modi government should go after those `who are provoking and misleading’ them. Kulkarni believes that this "protest has become a political game and it is the farmer who is caught in the middle.”

At the same time, the government needs to ensure that MSP is applicable for farmers in the open market, besides mandi, too, he stated.

While supporting amendments to the new farm bills, Kulkarni ruled out scrapping them, saying that it made no sense. Some farmer agitators, who have descended on the national capital, have demanded that the new law be done away with.

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The major demands of the BKS include reforms in the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, setting up of agriculture courts and placing restrictions on traders.

“The first is to introduce a legal provision that no one should be paid less than the minimum support price. The second demand is that all traders should get themselves registered with both the central and state governments and put in place a security deposit. We have several examples where the traders buy and don’t make payment to the farmer and the third demand is to establish agriculture courts in each district so that all the matters may be dealt in these courts in the farmer’s district,” Kulkarni pointed out.

Like some farmers agitating in the capital, BKS too has objections over contract farming. “Under these bills even corporates are qualified as farmers on account of contract farming. The definition should include only those individuals as farmers who are completely dependent on agriculture,” he stated.

According to Kulkarni, at least two state governments, Haryana and Maharashtra, are working to set up special agriculture courts, which are more than welcome.

The BKS is in touch with the central government to incorporate amendments to the new farm legislation. They understand that while no changes can be made in the Acts itself, certain changes can be introduced in the rules of the Acts, which is purely an administrative function and does not call for parliamentary approval.

The BKS came into existence in 1979. Its foundation was laid down by one of the RSS’s most trusted pracharaks and principle ideologue, Dattopant Thengadi. Despite being a Sangh family affiliate, the BKS is known to go on protests and strikes against BJP state governments and even against their party’s central government.

It has, in the past, publicly opposed the Modi government’s land and labour reforms and multinational companies backing genetically modified crops, pressing at the same time for minimum support prices. Their clout can be gauged from the fact that the Modi government’s six amendments to the national land ordinance, later presented as legislation to the Parliament in 2015, had come from the BKS!

While maintaining a low profile in public, the BKS has been opposing the new farm bills in their present form and have said as much in their backroom consultations with leading government interlocutors who are dealing with the subject.

On August 19 this year, BKS general secretary Badri Narayan Choudhary had written a letter to the Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, raising objections to the three bills.

“BKS has always been in favour of ensuring better price for farmer’s produce and they should be free to sell their products as per their wish,” said the letter. “We have serious doubts whether the current bills will serve any purpose to the farmers and it appears more of a tool for the buyers rather than the farmers,” it said.

Earlier this year, when details of the farm bills were known for the first time, the BKS had arranged for 12,000 letters to be sent by farmers across the country to the PM and the Union Agriculture Minister demanding changes in the current bills. “We also met around 350 Parliament members and requested them to raise this issue in the current session then,” Kulkarni pointed out.

In addition, 50,000 BKS-inspired farmers from across the country wrote letters to the PM saying that they did not want this law in its present form. Several BKS units at the village level have passed resolutions to oppose it. Their feelings have been conveyed to their colleagues in other RSS affiliates, senior leadership of the BJP and the government. Well, that is the last thing that can be expected from a member of the extended family.