What Today’s Farm Protests Share with Vallabhbhai Patel’s Bardoli Satyagraha Ramachandra Guha https://janataweekly.org/what-todays-farm-protests-share-with-vallabhbhai-patels-bardoli-satyagraha/
October 17, 2021
The Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928, which was led and organised by Vallabhbhai Patel, emphatically demonstrated the power and potential of non-violence in the cause of peasant self-respect. In this struggle, kisans in rural Gujarat mobilised against the oppressive agrarian policies of the colonial state.
Almost a hundred years separate the peasant struggle that Patel led in Bardoli with the kisan andolan of today. Yet the parallels are hard to miss. On the one side, the role of women in sustaining the movement, and the quiet heroism of the satyagrahis, who have braved winter, summer, monsoon and a pandemic and kept their struggle going. On the other side, the attempt by the state to stall and delay, to divide the movement, and to spread falsehoods about its leaders.
Back in the 1920s, the collaborators with the raj included Brahmin revenue officials and hired goons brought in from outside Gujarat. Now, in the 2020s, it is the police and the godi media that aid the postcolonial state, the first in suppressing the peasants, the second in distorting their message and defaming their leaders.
Indeed, in the range of repressive methods used against the farmers – water cannons, the installation of metal spikes on roads, internet shutdowns, hate-filled propaganda – the Modi-Shah regime has exceeded even the White Man’s raj.
“it is a fact beyond challenge that India has given a singular proof to the world that mass non-violence is no longer the idle dream of a visionary or a mere human longing. It is a solid fact capable of infinite possibilities for a humanity which is groaning, for want of faith, beneath the weight of violence of which it has become almost a fetish. The greatest proof that our movement was non-violent lies in the fact that the peasants falsified the fears of our worst sceptics. They were described as very difficult to organise for non-violent action and it is they who stood the test with a bravery and an endurance that was beyond all expectations. Women and children too contributed their great share in the fight. They responded to the call by instinct and played a part which we are too near the event adequately to measure. And I think it would be not at all wrong to give them the bulk of the credit for preservation of non-violence and the consequent success of the movement.” - Sardar Patel, 1931