Indrajit Roy writes: The farmers’ protests remind us that hope is not delusional. It is attentive to the difficulties of the present moment, but appreciates the possibility that something unexpected could arise
The triumph of the farmers’ movements against the unpopular farm laws holds important lessons for those hoping to politically defeat the BJP. After all, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s climbdown on the farm laws represents the most significant political retreat by his government in its two terms, despite its crushing dominance in Parliament. The success of the farmers’ movement is testimony to the audacity of hope.
Hope is, first and foremost, about not giving up. When the farmers’ unions first called for a Bharat bandh back in September 2020, few had expected the government to listen, much less repeal the farm laws at any point soon. But the farmers did not give up. Through the chilly north Indian winter, they persisted in their protests. Despite unfavourable media coverage and hostile state governments in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, they continued their agitation. Harbouring hope is no easy task. It involves struggle. Living in hope means taking the next step despite being confronted by oppression.
The farmers’ protests remind us that hope is not delusional. It is attentive to the difficulties of the present moment, but appreciates the possibility that something unexpected could arise from the wreckage of the present. When sections of the protesting farmers turned violent in Delhi on the eve of Republic Day earlier this year, the movement recognised the danger in which it was. They recognised that the government, supported by a pliant media, would use this opportunity to paint them all as anti-national, seditious and traitorous. Rakesh Tikait, the farmers’ leader, broke down on national television in anticipation of their forceful eviction from the protest sites by the central government. His tears taught us yet another lesson about hope: It accepts the reality of grief, loss and uncertainty.
As we now know, Tikait’s tears turned the tide. The farmers did not give up their agitation, but expanded their footprint to small towns and villages across the country. For example, September saw a massive mahapanchayat in Muzaffarnagar, Tikait’s home ground, in which almost 5,00,000 people participated.
The uncertainty that farmers faced did not prevent them from thinking through and taking action. As the feminist bell hooks reminds us, living in hope is linked with a basic trust in life that motivates the “next step”. It is about believing that our families, cultures and societies are important, and for whom it is worth living and dying. Far from being a hindrance to action, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt feared, hope is about confronting oppression and believing that there’s a way out. The farmers dispersed their protests across towns and villages, often at great peril to their own lives, as the ghastly incidents in Lakhimpur Kheri showed.
Living in hope demands that we carefully and sensitively craft novel alliances that could open new possibilities. Building and sustaining social coalitions was another lesson the farmers’ movement taught us. Without a doubt, the protests originated in the anxieties of the big Hindu and Sikh farmers of the Jat community, dominant castes in their respective villages. These narrow social origins have since diffused to include support from such diverse social groups as the Dalit Army, the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Samiti and the Khet Mazdoor Unions. Furthermore, the Hindu Jat farmers appear to be seeking reconciliation with their Muslim neighbours in western Uttar Pradesh, almost a decade after communal violence ripped the social fabric of that region.
The alliances demanded by the political practice of hope broadens people’s horizons. Writing in the shadows of Nazism, the historian Ernst Bloch makes exactly this point in his epic three-volume study The Principle of Hope. “The emotion of hope goes out of itself,” he writes, “makes people broad instead of confining them”. Like the protests against the CAA-NRC, the farmers’ movement teaches us the crucial importance of building solidarities across social divides to the politics of hope.
Our world is plagued by crisis, uncertainty and prospects of a catastrophe. Under such circumstances, it is tempting to fixate on collapse rather than focus on repair. A politics of hope is indispensable to confronting the social, economic and political troubles of our time. The farmers’ movement reminds us how we might practice it in trying times.
Source: Indian Express, 7/12/21
