If only for a day, there was a moment when it felt like the streets and Parliament were in unison on the farmers’ issues. While farmers on the ground are demanding a legal guarantee for MSP (Minimum Support Price), the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture, for the first time, has recommended legalising MSP.

Yet, despite this apparent harmony, the government remains apathetic: a new policy document is replaying the same rhetoric it had to abandon while repealing the three farm laws. It’s as if government policy were a dog’s tail—forever crooked. Meanwhile, the protesting farmer on the street is looking askance at the government and in forlorn hope at Parliament. The farmers’ agitation is gaining momentum again. At the Khanauri border between Punjab and Haryana, farmers under the banner of the apolitical Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) are staging another sit-in protest.

Their demands are the same, unresolved even after the Delhi protests— legal MSP guarantees, debt relief for farmers, and the fulfilment of promises made at the time by the central government. But the government will not let the farmers march to Delhi. At the time of writing, farmer leader Sardar Jagjit Singh Dallewal was on the 23rd day of a hunger strike, yet no representative from the........

© National Herald