The new farmers' movements are the agitations that appeared in the Indian countryside from the mid-1970s onward, organised around the terms of trade for agriculture rather than around rights in land. Their characteristic demands were remunerative prices for produce, cheaper inputs, subsidised or free electricity and irrigation water, and the writing off of institutional debt; their characteristic methods were the road and rail blockade, the rasta roko and rail roko, the withholding of produce from market, and the mass encampment in district and state capitals. They are called new because they differ in base, demand, idiom and organisational form from the peasant movements that preceded them.
The earlier movements — Champaran and Kheda, the Bardoli satyagraha, the Kisan Sabhas, Tebhaga, Telangana, and later Naxalbari — were largely movements of tenants, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers directed against landlords and the state as revenue collector, and their demands concerned rent, tenurial security, occupancy right, land redistribution and wages. D. N. Dhanagare's study of the 1920–1950 period established this pattern of agrarian conflict organised around the appropriation of the surplus within the village. The new movements inverted the axis: their antagonist was the market and the state's price policy, not the landlord, and their unit of grievance was the farm as a commercial enterprise.
The social base
The movements arose in the regions transformed by the green revolution — Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh, western Maharashtra, Gujarat, coastal Andhra, Tamil Nadu and southern Karnataka — and drew their strength from middle and rich cultivators who produced a substantial marketed surplus and had become dependent on purchased inputs: high-yielding seed, fertiliser, pesticide, diesel, tubewell power and institutional credit. This was the class that the new technology had created. Once a cultivator's costs are monetised and his output sold, the ratio between input prices and output prices determines his income, and a movement over that ratio becomes rational in a way that it never was for a subsistence producer.
The agricultural labourers and the landless were not the constituency, and on the question of wages the movements were either silent or on the other side. T. J. Byres had anticipated this, arguing that the new technology would generate a class of capitalist farmers whose collective action would be directed outward at the state rather than downward at labour. The point is central to any evaluation: these were movements of producers, and the rural poor appeared in their rhetoric as part of an undifferentiated countryside rather than as a distinct interest.
Bharat versus India
The most influential ideological formulation came from Sharad Joshi, founder of the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, which began with agitations over onion and sugarcane prices. Joshi argued that the fundamental division in the country was not between classes within the village but between Bharat, the agricultural and rural economy, and India, the urban industrial economy that had systematically underpriced agricultural produce in order to subsidise its own growth. On this account the village was internally united and externally exploited, and the single demand that mattered was the remunerative price — everything else, including poverty and rural unemployment, would follow from correcting the terms of trade.
Parallel organisations arose elsewhere. Mahendra Singh Tikait's Bharatiya Kisan Union mobilised the Jat cultivators of western Uttar Pradesh, most memorably in the long occupations at Meerut and Delhi, around electricity tariffs, canal water, cane arrears and procurement prices, using a strongly rural and community idiom of khap and panchayat. In Gujarat the Khedut Samaj organised the Patidar farmers of the cotton and groundnut tracts. In Karnataka the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha combined price demands with a wider anti-urban and later anti-globalisation politics, including well-publicised actions against multinational seed and food companies. In Tamil Nadu Narayanaswamy Naidu's agriculturists' association pressed comparable demands.
Class movement, interest group, or new social movement?
Three readings compete. The class reading, associated with Marxist critics, treats the movements as the collective action of a rich and middle peasantry — a rural bourgeoisie pursuing better terms within capitalism while suppressing the question of wages. On this view the Bharat-versus-India frame is ideology: it conceals class differentiation inside Bharat behind a territorial metaphor.
The interest-group reading treats them as sectional pressure politics in a democracy — a farm lobby comparable to those of other countries, disciplined, issue-specific, willing to bargain, and effective precisely because it was numerically large and geographically concentrated in electorally sensitive states. Their capacity to extract concessions on tariffs, procurement and loan waivers supports this reading.
The new social movement reading, advanced most fully by Gail Omvedt, holds that the movements cannot be reduced to either. They were non-party, mobilised on a territorial and identity basis rather than through class organisations, framed their claim as one of a whole region or way of life against a centralising developmental state, and overlapped in personnel and repertoire with the environmental, anti-dam, women's and anti-caste movements of the same decades. Omvedt also documented the women's wings and campaigns within the Shetkari Sanghatana — including efforts to have land recorded in women's names and to contest at the local level — which sit awkwardly with a purely economistic account. Ghanshyam Shah's survey of the literature treats the classificatory dispute itself as revealing: the movements mixed features, and the labels chosen by scholars often followed their theoretical commitments.
Two further criticisms recur. The caste composition of the leadership and base was strikingly narrow — Marathas and Kunbis in Maharashtra, Jats in western Uttar Pradesh, Patidars in Gujarat, Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka — that is, the locally dominant landowning castes, which raises the question whether the movements were peasant movements or the political assertion of those castes in economic language. And on gender, the ordinary structure of the movements reproduced the patriarchal farm household: land, credit and voice belonged to men, even where women supplied much of the labour.
Continuity with 2020–21
The protest against the three farm laws in 2020–21 replayed much of this pattern — its core base in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh; its demand for a legal guarantee of minimum support prices; its blockade and encampment repertoire; its coordination of many unions under a single front — while differing in the presence of significant women's participation and of visible, if contested, engagement with questions of labour. It is best read as the same social formation acting in a liberalised policy environment, where the antagonist is no longer only the state's price policy but the prospect of its withdrawal.
For the UPSC answer
Draw the contrast first: earlier peasant movements were movements of tenants and labourers over land, rent and wages, while the new farmers' movements are movements of surplus-producing cultivators over prices, inputs and debt, and the green revolution explains the shift. Name the organisations with their regions and lead figures, and use Sharad Joshi's Bharat-versus-India formulation as the ideological centre. Then set out the three interpretations — rich-peasant class movement, sectional interest group, new social movement — attaching Byres, the pressure-group reading and Omvedt to each, and add the caste and gender criticisms. Close with the 2020–21 protests as continuity with a changed antagonist.
References & further reading
- Dhanagare, D. N. (1983). Peasant Movements in India 1920–1950. Oxford University Press.
- Nadkarni, M. V. (1987). Farmers' Movements in India. Allied Publishers.
- Omvedt, G. (1993). Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India. M. E. Sharpe.
- Brass, T. (ed.) (1995). New Farmers' Movements in India. Frank Cass.
- Shah, G. (2004). Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature. Sage.
- Byres, T. J. (1981). The New Technology, Class Formation and Class Action in the Indian Countryside. Journal of Peasant Studies, 8(4).