NEW DELHI: Chief Minister and AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday termed the new agriculture laws “death warrant” to farmers. He made the statement while interacting with farmer leaders from western UP.
The meeting comes ahead of a ‘Kisan Mahapanchayat’ that Kejriwal is scheduled to address on February 28 in Meerut.
The Delhi CM’s move assumes significance as Uttar Pradesh is likely to go for Zilla Panchayat polls next month and the AAP will be contesting in the polls in the state for the first time. The AAP has also announced that it would be contesting the Assembly polls in UP in 2022.
“These anti-farmer laws are death warrants to the farmers. With the implementation of these laws the crops will go to the hands of a few industrialists and the farmers of India will become labourers in their own land. The central government should immediately withdraw all the three black laws and extend legal guarantee of MSP on all the 23 crops following the recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission,” Kejriwal said at the meeting.
The government should talk to the farmers. If the government does not listen to the farmers then who will, he asked. No representative of Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), which is leading the protest against farm laws, was present in the meeting. The outfit has already declared its agitation as non-political one.
The BJP is continuously saying that these laws will benefit the farmers but its leaders have yet not clarified how, Kejriwal firther said. Besides farmer representatives, the meeting was attended by Delhi Assembly speaker Ram Niwas Goel, senior party leader Sanjay Singh and Cabinet minister Kailash Gahlot.