Breaking down the question
The question asks for the main features of farmers' movements in Independent India — a descriptive-analytical task with a clear temporal frame. The word "Independent" is a signal: the examiner wants the post-1947, and especially the post-Green-Revolution, mobilisations of cultivators, not the colonial peasant revolts of Champaran, Bardoli or Telangana.
A strong answer therefore marks the shift from the older peasant movements — anti-feudal, anti-colonial, tenurial in character — to the new farmers' movements of the 1970s and 1980s, which were led by a market-oriented, surplus-producing peasantry and organised around the terms of trade between agriculture and the wider economy.
The note on peasant and farmers' movements develops this contrast.
How to approach it
Begin by distinguishing the two phases so that the answer has an organising axis. Then set out the defining features of the new farmers' movements as a cluster: their economic demands, their social base, their organisational form and their ideological self-image. Illustrate each with concrete instances — the Shetkari Sanghatana, the Bharatiya Kisan Union, the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha.
Close by noting the internal contradictions and the scholarly debate over whether these were genuinely new social movements or the politics of a rural rich.
Model answer
Farmers' movements in independent India fall into two broad phases, and the features asked for belong chiefly to the second.
From peasant movements to farmers' movements. The early post-independence decades saw the tail end of agrarian struggles inherited from the colonial period — anti-landlord, tenurial and often led by the Left, as in Telangana and later Naxalbari. These were peasant movements: their language was that of land to the tiller and the abolition of feudal rent. From the mid-1970s a distinct wave emerged, the product of the Green Revolution. As a class of commercially oriented, surplus-producing farmers took shape in the irrigated belts of Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, their grievances shifted from land ownership to the market.
Economic demands and the terms of trade. The central feature of the new farmers' movements was a demand for remunerative prices — higher minimum support prices, cheaper inputs, loan waivers and lower power and water tariffs. Sharad Joshi of the Shetkari Sanghatana framed this as a structural exploitation of Bharat, the agrarian countryside, by India, the urban-industrial economy, which kept agricultural prices artificially depressed. The battle was over the terms of trade between town and country rather than between landlord and tenant.
Social base. These movements drew their strength from the middle and rich peasantry — the dominant intermediate castes such as Jats, Patidars, Marathas and Vokkaligas — who had gained most from the new technology and had a marketable surplus to defend. This class character is crucial and often understated.
Organisational form. A striking feature was their non-party character. Organisations such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union under Mahendra Singh Tikait, the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and the Shetkari Sanghatana kept a studied distance from established parties, mobilising vast rallies, rail and road blockades and rasta roko agitations. They presented themselves as apolitical interest groups speaking for the cultivator as such.
Ideology and self-image. Ideologically they were single-issue and pragmatic rather than revolutionary, though they borrowed the rhetoric of exploitation. Some, notably the Shetkari Sanghatana, later embraced liberalisation and even genetic technology, seeing the open market as the farmer's friend against a predatory state.
Contradictions and critique. Scholars are divided. Gail Omvedt and others read them as authentic new social movements articulating a rural-urban cleavage; D. N. Dhanagare and Tom Brass are more sceptical, noting that the benefits of higher prices flowed to the surplus-producing rich while marginal farmers and landless labourers — often lower caste — gained little and were sometimes the employers' antagonists. The invisibility of women cultivators and of ecological questions is a further limitation, only partly addressed by later mobilisations.
Conclusion. The main features, then, are a market-centred agenda of remunerative prices, a base in the prosperous intermediate-caste peasantry, a non-party organisational style and a Bharat-versus-India ideology. Their strength lay in numbers and disruption; their weakness in a class composition that spoke for the farmer with a surplus more than for the rural poor.
Examiner's perspective
The answer that stands out draws the line clearly between colonial peasant movements and the post-Green-Revolution farmers' movements, because candidates who blur the two end up describing Champaran when the question wants Tikait and Sharad Joshi.
Examiners reward the identification of the class base — the surplus-producing intermediate-caste peasantry — and the Bharat-versus-India framing, together with named organisations. A concluding engagement with the critique, that these movements represented the rural rich more than the rural poor, lifts the script from description into analysis and secures the higher band.