Revision summary
Early movements still carried land-to-the-tiller and tenancy demands. After the Green Revolution, price, power, and credit dominated. Leadership often came from commercially strong, dominant-caste farmers. Labour and women were weakly represented in the agenda. The state market, not the village landlord alone, became the opponent.
Model answer
Introduction
Farmers’ movements in independent India have been regionally uneven, often led by proprietary cultivators, and aimed at prices, credit, and subsidy more than at land-to-the-tiller after the first reform wave.
Body
Early features
- Telangana’s end and Tebhaga’s memory sat beside official land reform. A. R. Desai read incomplete reform as the soil of later conflict.
- Left peasant unions still spoke of landlord and labour. That language thinned in many Green Revolution belts.
New farmers’ movements
- Sharad Joshi, Tikait, and Punjab unions featured commercially oriented farmers, tractor capital, and Bharat versus India talk.
- Demands centred on output prices, power, and loan waiver, not on redistributing the dominant caste’s land that Srinivas mapped.
- Methods were roadblocks, rallies, and party bargaining, more than armed struggle.
Inclusions and exclusions
- Landless Dalit labour and women were often foot soldiers, not the demand-setters.
- 2020–21 farm laws protests showed federal marketing as a new feature, still with a proprietary core.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD LR[Land reform era] --> TN[Tenancy landlord] GR[Green Revolution] --> PR[Price subsidy] PR --> UN[Proprietary unions]
Conclusion
Independent India’s farmer movements shifted from tenancy-land struggles toward price-and-state bargaining by a thickened rich-peasant class. Labour remains the missing subject in much of this politics.
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