The Rise of Farmers’ Movements in Contemporary India: A Study of the BKU and SS

India is home to one of the world’s largest farming populations, yet for much of the post-independence era, the farmer’s voice was conspicuously absent from national policy discussions. That changed dramatically from the late 1970s onwards, when a new wave of rural agitation swept across the country – not led by the landless poor, as earlier peasant movements had been, but by middle and rich farmers who had benefited from the Green Revolution yet felt increasingly squeezed between rising input costs and falling or unfair output prices. Two organizations at the heart of this transformation were the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) in Uttar Pradesh and the Shetkari Sanghatana (SS) in Maharashtra. Their rise reshaped the politics of Indian agriculture and forced the state to reckon with the demands of the rural rich in ways it had never done before.

The historical backdrop: why farmers mobilized 🔗

To understand why these movements emerged when they did, it is important to look at the contradictions unleashed by the Green Revolution. From the mid-1960s, high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilizers, and mechanized farming dramatically increased food production in states like Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh. Yet the gains were uneven. As scholars have documented, while a thin layer of rich farmers captured the surplus, the large section of middle farmers found that sizeable investment in new agricultural technology eroded their profitability, even as productivity rose. Input costs climbed steeply – seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, electricity, water – while output prices remained controlled and often below the real cost of production.

The farmers’ movement that emerged in the 1970s and gained momentum in the 1980s represented a distinct phase in the history of agrarian unrest in India. Unlike earlier mobilizations of landless labourers and marginal peasants against landlords and zamindars, this new wave was driven by propertied, market-oriented cultivators whose primary grievances were against the state’s pricing regime and subsidy structures. The central contradiction had shifted: it was no longer farmer versus landlord, but farmer versus state.

This also explains why scholars have described these as movements of the “rural rich” – a term that captures both the social profile of their participants and the nature of their demands. Their agenda focused on remunerative prices, lower input tariffs, and loan waivers, not on land redistribution or protection of agricultural workers. As researchers have noted, the age-old peasant movement demands – land reform implementation, protection of tenants, raising minimum wages for farm labourers – were largely absent from the agenda of organizations like the BKU and SS.

The Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU): the voice of the Jat farmer 🔗

The Bharatiya Kisan Union traces its organizational roots to the Punjab Khetibari Union formed in 1972, which was reorganized into the BKU in 1978 with the aim of creating a national platform for farmers. However, it was under the leadership of Mahendra Singh Tikait, a Hindu Jat farmer from Sisauli in Muzaffarnagar, that the BKU became a mass force in the 1980s. Formed to provide a platform to big and middle farmers across different castes and religions, the BKU mobilized primarily under the banner of a shared “kisan” (farmer) identity, uniting Hindu and Muslim Jats alongside other communities in western Uttar Pradesh.

Key demands and mobilization strategies 🔗

The BKU’s core demands were practical and direct: higher government floor prices for sugarcane and wheat, cheaper electricity and water, loan waivers, and protection from market fluctuations. These demands were not abstract policy positions – they were the everyday survival concerns of farmers whose cost of production often exceeded what the market would pay them.

What made the BKU remarkable was not just what it demanded, but how it organized. The organization modeled itself on grassroots village panchayats, with meetings described as informal, rustic, and egalitarian, making use of traditional khap panchayat institutions. This gave the movement deep local legitimacy and enabled mass mobilization on an extraordinary scale.

Two episodes in 1988 cemented the BKU’s place in Indian political history. In January 1988, thousands of farmers picketed the District Commissioner’s office in Meerut for over three weeks, demanding the waiving of power and water bills, loan write-offs, and higher prices for sugarcane. This “Meerut siege” was followed by the landmark Boat Club Rally in Delhi in October of the same year, when hundreds of thousands of farmers with tractors and trolleys descended on the capital and paralyzed the city centre for more than a week. The crowd stretched for three kilometres from India Gate to Vijay Chowk – a visual demonstration of rural power that no government could ignore.

The BKU also maintained a deliberate distance from electoral politics. It positioned itself as a non-partisan pressure group operating outside the establishment of electoral politics, providing issue-based support to candidates across party lines rather than aligning with any single party. This strategic non-partisanship helped sustain a broad cross-caste coalition, though it also limited the BKU’s ability to translate agitational success into durable legislative change.

The BKU’s ideological character 🔗

In the 1980s, India’s farmers’ protests including the BKU emerged as a strong political force that played an important role in the overthrow of the Congress government in the 1989 elections. The organization was vocal in opposing the WTO as a regime that served corporate interests at the expense of Indian farmers, and it pushed back against genetically modified crops and economic liberalization policies that reduced agricultural subsidies. Tikait himself strongly articulated a sense of rural dignity and identity, framing the movement not only in economic terms but as a defence of the honour and self-respect of farmers against a state and urban elite that had consistently ignored them.

The Shetkari Sanghatana (SS): Maharashtra’s market-oriented farmers’ movement 🔗

While the BKU was rooted in the agrarian heartland of northern India, Maharashtra gave rise to a distinct but equally significant movement under Sharad Joshi. Joshi set up the Shetkari Sanghatana in 1979 to demand higher output prices and access to markets and technology. His background was unusual for a farmers’ leader: he was a former Indian Postal Service officer who had spent years at the International Bureau of the Universal Postal Union in Bern, Switzerland, before giving it all up to return to India and take up the farmers’ cause.

The SS was founded as a non-political, non-communal union of peasants with a single-point programme – securing remunerative prices for agricultural produce. This deceptively simple demand was, in Joshi’s framing, the master key to India’s economic development. He argued that the systemic underpayment of farmers for their produce amounted to a form of internal colonialism – what he famously termed the “Bharat vs India” divide, capturing the gulf between an exploited agricultural rural India (“Bharat”) and a privileged, urban, industrial India.

Ideology and demands 🔗

The SS’s demands and ideology differed significantly from the BKU’s statist approach. Joshi gave up a lucrative international career to return to India in 1977 to take up the farmers’ cause, and he brought with him an economic liberal worldview that set the SS apart from most other farmers’ organizations. Where the BKU sought more state intervention – better price support, cheaper subsidized inputs, government-backed debt relief – the SS pushed for less state control over agricultural markets. Joshi believed that price controls, Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) regulations, and state-managed procurement systems were the primary instruments of farmers’ exploitation.

While the Shetkari Sanghatana widely welcomed economic liberalization, privatization, and the hallmarks of globalization under Sharad Joshi’s leadership, the SS argued that trade liberalization would reduce state control over agriculture and thereby increase farmers’ freedom. This put it at odds with other major farmers’ organizations like the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, which saw the same globalization forces as a threat. The SS also advocated for farmer-owned joint stock companies to capture value in the agro-processing chain, a seamless national agricultural market, and access to global export markets.

Among its earliest agitations, the 1980 agitation against crashing onion prices saw more than a million farmers take to Maharashtra’s state highways, a remarkable demonstration of the SS’s capacity for mass mobilization. The SS was also among the first farmers’ organizations to actively include women in its network, founding the Shetkari Mahila Aghadi – a women’s arm that became celebrated for its work on women’s property rights, including the Lakshmi Mukti programme that conferred land titles on rural housewives across Maharashtra.

Organizational structure and strategies 🔗

The SS adopted what scholars have described as a deliberately “post-modern” or anarchic organizational form – building structures around actions rather than routine organization, with no fixed membership, no strict tiers between local and top levels, and no fixed rules of organization. Participation was fluid: anyone who wore the badge and joined the agitation was part of the movement. This loose structure gave the SS extraordinary flexibility and a non-bureaucratic character that resonated with ordinary farmers.

In terms of strategy, the SS combined mass agitations – road blockades, rasta rokos, and large rallies – with lobbying, media campaigns, and political negotiations. The Maharashtra Government agreed to negotiate with representatives of the Shetkari Sanghatana, including Sharad Joshi, on their demands for remunerative prices for agricultural produce, demonstrating that the SS’s combination of pressure and dialogue could yield tangible results.

Comparing the BKU and SS: distinct paths, shared goals 🔗

Although both the BKU and the SS shared the fundamental goal of securing better economic conditions for farmers, their ideological orientations and strategic choices diverged considerably. These differences were partly a product of the distinct agrarian realities they emerged from.

The BKU was rooted in the wheat-and-sugarcane belt of northern India, where farmers had a relatively strong tradition of state-supported procurement through Minimum Support Prices (MSP) and the public distribution system. Its demands were therefore framed around making the state do more – pay higher prices, offer more subsidies, waive loans. The SS, operating in Maharashtra’s diversified agricultural economy of sugarcane, onions, cotton, and fruits, and shaped by Joshi’s economic liberalism, pushed instead for market freedom and the removal of state-imposed distortions.

In terms of political engagement, the BKU under Tikait was known for direct and often confrontational mobilization – massive rallies, road blockades, and high-visibility standoffs with authorities. The BKU under Tikait consciously maintained distance from institutional politics, much like new social movements in the West focused on peace, human rights, or environmental causes. The SS, by contrast, was more willing to enter political negotiations and form alliances with regional parties to push its legislative agenda forward.

Despite these differences, the two organizations collaborated at key moments. The BKU collaborated and developed alliances with Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh in Gujarat, the Tamil Nadu Agriculturalists’ Association, and the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, particularly during the 1980s when farmers’ movements across India attempted to build a unified national platform. Sharad Joshi also played a key role in this cross-state networking, later forming the Kisan Coordination Committee (KCC), which brought together sister organizations from 14 states.

Impact on agricultural policy and broader significance 🔗

The farmers’ movements of the 1980s and 1990s had a measurable impact on Indian agricultural policy, even if many of their core demands remained only partially addressed. BKU’s non-violent agitation, including massive rallies and road blockades, forced the government to engage in policy discussions around Minimum Support Prices, cheaper electricity, and loan waivers. Several state governments responded to farmers’ agitations with partial debt relief, revisions in electricity tariffs, and adjustments to sugarcane prices.

More broadly, these movements changed the terms of political debate around Indian agriculture. They forced a reckoning with what Joshi had called the “Bharat vs India” divide – the systematic disadvantage faced by rural agricultural India relative to urban industrial India. This framing became a powerful idiom in rural politics that resonated far beyond Maharashtra. Through the 1980s, Joshi also spearheaded many anti-globalisation agitations, and later, through association with other prominent leaders like Tikait and M.D. Nanjundaswamy, raised the “Bharat-India” divide as a new idiom of rural mobilisation.

The legacy of the BKU and SS also extends into the present. The organizational templates, mobilization strategies, and political idioms they developed provided the foundations for subsequent waves of agrarian protest. The farmers’ protests of 2020-2021 revived farmers’ identity and renewed the agrarian polity, with the BKU and its leadership able to bring together farmers and labourers across class, caste, and religion. The repeal of the three contested farm laws in 2021 showed that the tradition of mass farmer mobilization pioneered by organizations like the BKU remains a potent political force in contemporary India.

Farmers’ movements as “new social movements” 🔗

Sociologists have debated where to place these farmers’ movements in the broader landscape of social movements. Some argue they fit the template of “new social movements” – movements that, like environmental, peace, or women’s rights movements, are not simply about economic redistribution but about identity, recognition, and the assertion of dignity. The BKU’s emphasis on “kisan” identity and self-respect, and the SS’s invocation of “Bharat” against “India,” both suggest a dimension that goes beyond pure material demands.

At the same time, critics have pointed to important limitations. The farmers’ movement, concerned mostly with the demands of the upper stratum of rural society, poses interesting questions about the tradition of mobilization of the peasantry – particularly its relative silence on the concerns of landless agricultural workers, small and marginal farmers, and Dalit cultivators. The BKU’s explicitly patriarchal social base, its caste composition, and its failure to consistently take up the cause of farm labour all reflect the class character of movements that, despite their populist rhetoric, primarily served the interests of the rural propertied classes.

The significance of the BKU and SS, then, lies not only in what they achieved but in what they reveal about the complex social structure of Indian agriculture – a structure where the lines between the “rural rich” and the rural poor, between the farmer-as-exploited and the farmer-as-exploiter, are not always easy to draw.

What do you think? Given that the BKU and SS largely represented the interests of middle and rich farmers, do their movements truly speak for Indian agriculture as a whole – or do the concerns of landless labourers and small farmers remain structurally excluded from the mainstream farmers’ movement? And in an era of climate change and corporate consolidation in agriculture, can the ideological differences between market-oriented and state-interventionist farmers’ organizations be bridged?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp6/chapter/green-revolutionimplications-for-agrarian-structure-i/
2. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc14/chapter/farmers-movement-in-india/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatiya_Kisan_Union
4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380229221116996
5. https://swarajyamag.com/economy/remembering-sharad-joshi-the-jeans-clad-farmer
6. https://indianliberals.in/content/shetkari-sangathana-history-farmers-movement-india/
7. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/sharad-joshi-farmers-voice-news-296136
8. https://shetkarisanghatana.in/indias-largest-farmers-movement/
9. https://ignouanswer.com/bharatiya-kisan-union/