NEW DELHI: Mounting trouble for the NDA government, the farmers’ wing of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has threatened a nationwide protest to press for an assurance on procurement of foodgrains on Minimum Support Price. In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the organisation stressed that “lives of small and marginal farmers are becoming hellish and miserable in the country”.
Dinesh Kulkarni, organisational secretary of Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), told this daily that all farmers in the country aren’t getting the benefits of MSP and there needs to be a mechanism within the APMC (Agriculture Produce Marketing Cooperatives) or outside to ensure that the assured prices are given to cultivators for their produces. The letter to the PM stated that “the claims of increased MSP by the government are just eyewash, and poor farmers shouldn’t be left to the regimes of the private players”.
The BKS move comes in the backdrop of the government facing farmers’ protests on the outskirts of the national capital, while farmer unions are taking their agitations to all parts of Punjab, Haryana and western UP. In a hard-hitting letter to the PM, BKS claimed that “in times of prevalent employments” farmers are thinking of suicide with their family members. Fearing that such cases could go up, the BKS chief INS Baswegowda and general secretary Badrinarayan Choudhary wrote to the PM.
“We’ve demanded from the government that procurement by traders of foodgrains below the MSP be declared a criminal offence,” Kulkarni said, adding that claims of increased MSPs shouldn’t just be announcements since all farmers aren’t getting the stated prices. The BKS has also written that farmers must be assured of the remunerative prices, which should be calculated on the basis of input costs and genuine profits.
The planned nationwide protest of the RSS affiliate flies in the face of the claims of the NDA government that it has accorded top priority to small and marginal farmers in policy making, and also the claims of having substantially increased the MSP in the past seven years of its rule at the Centre. This is likely to be a shot in the arms for the agitating farmers who have been unrelenting against the three farm laws.