The New Farmers’ Movements of the 1980s: A Struggle for Agricultural Justice

For decades after independence, the Indian farmer was talked about endlessly but rarely heard from directly. That changed in the 1980s, when a powerful wave of rural agitation swept across states like Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Karnataka. This phase came to be known as the New Farmers’ Movements. Unlike the older peasant struggles fought over land rights and tenancy, this new wave was led by farmers who had benefited from the Green Revolution yet found themselves squeezed between rising costs and unfair prices. Their core demand was simple but radical: a fair price for what they grew. This post unpacks why these movements emerged, who led them, how they worked, and why their legacy remains contested.

Why a new wave of farmer agitation emerged 🔗

The roots of these movements lie in a paradox created by the Green Revolution. From the mid-1960s, new seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation dramatically increased crop yields in regions like Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh, and parts of Maharashtra. But higher production did not translate into higher incomes. By the late 1970s and 1980s, farmers found that the economics of farming had quietly turned against them.

Several pressures came together at once. The terms of trade between agriculture and industry had tilted heavily in favour of industry, meaning farmers paid more for manufactured inputs than they earned from selling their produce. The cost of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, electricity, and water climbed steeply, while the prices farmers received for their crops stayed controlled and often fell below the actual cost of production. Per capita income from agriculture was declining, and many cultivators were drifting away from farming altogether.

This is the crucial difference from earlier struggles. Unlike the older fights against high land rents and unfavourable tenancy, the central demand now became remunerative crop prices. The farmer of the 1980s was no longer a subsistence peasant fighting a landlord. He was a market-oriented producer fighting the state and the market itself.

The farmer versus the peasant 🔗

This distinction matters for understanding the whole movement. A peasant is broadly defined as someone who lives at subsistence level and stays away from market competition. A farmer, by contrast, actively engages in market competition and tries to operate autonomously in decisions about production, cropping patterns, and selling. The Green Revolution, new technology, and government subsidies created exactly this category of commercially oriented cultivator. Because the struggles of the 1980s were waged by these market-facing farmers, scholars labelled the phenomenon the “New Farmers’ Movement.”

The organizations that led the charge 🔗

The New Farmers’ Movements were not a single unified body. They operated through several regional organizations, each with its own leader, style, and emphasis. Two stand out as the most influential.

Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra 🔗

The Shetkari Sanghatana was founded in 1979 by Sharad Joshi, a trained economist who had worked with the Indian Postal Service and later spent nearly a decade at an international body in Switzerland before returning to farm in Maharashtra. This background gave the movement a distinct intellectual edge. Joshi argued that the real problem was not moneylenders or landlords but the government’s interventionist policies, which distorted market signals and effectively imposed “negative subsidies” on farmers by keeping their prices artificially low.

The organization first rose to national prominence in 1980 through its agitation against crashing onion prices in the Nashik region. More than a million farmers took to the state highways of Maharashtra during this period. Joshi’s most famous contribution was the slogan of the “Bharat versus India” divide, which captured the widening gulf between the rural, agrarian world of “Bharat” and the urban, industrial world of “India.” Its principal demands were “remunerative agricultural prices” and “freedom of access to markets and technology.”

Bharatiya Kisan Union in the north 🔗

The Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) took root in western Uttar Pradesh and became a mass force in the mid-1980s under Mahendra Singh Tikait, a Jat farmer from the village of Sisauli in Muzaffarnagar. Compared to the economist-led Shetkari Sanghatana, the BKU had a far more grassroots character, organizing massive rallies and drawing directly on rural social networks and a shared “kisan” (farmer) identity that united Hindu and Muslim Jats and other communities.

The BKU’s demands centred on higher prices for sugarcane, the main crop of the region, along with the cancellation of loans and cheaper electricity. It attained popularity by leading the “Meerut siege” of January-February 1988, a 25-day picketing of the commissioner’s office that drew hundreds of thousands of farmers into the city.

The wider network 🔗

Beyond these two, the movement had a genuinely national footprint. The BKU built alliances with the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh in Gujarat, the Tamil Nadu Agriculturalists’ Association, and the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) led by M.D. Nanjundaswamy. Many of these groups coordinated under the umbrella of the Kisan Coordination Committee, which could mobilize crowds ranging from one to five lakh farmers on successive occasions.

The Gandhian thread in their methods 🔗

One of the most striking features of these movements was how closely their methods echoed Gandhian techniques of non-violent protest. The strategies, methodologies, and politics they adopted brought them closer to the Gandhian movements of earlier decades than to the armed peasant uprisings of the Marxist tradition.

The signature tactic was the rasta roko (block the roads) and rail roko agitation. In November 1980, tens of thousands of farmers blocked the main railway line and brought highway traffic to a standstill across the Nasik district. Road blockades and demonstrations continued for weeks, and thousands courted arrest, with nine thousand people detained in Nasik alone. This deliberate, mass courting of arrest is a direct descendant of the satyagraha tradition, where filling the jails was itself a form of moral pressure.

These were not violent insurgencies. They relied on the disciplined, collective non-cooperation of large numbers of ordinary cultivators, the occupation of public spaces, and the moral force of the suffering rural majority. The dharna at Meerut, the highway blockades in Maharashtra, and the sit-ins in town squares all drew on a repertoire of peaceful civil disobedience that the freedom movement had made part of the political culture.

What the movements actually demanded 🔗

Despite their regional differences, the major organizations converged on a recognizable set of demands. Understanding these demands also reveals the movement’s limits.

The central demands included better prices for crops, meaning fair and remunerative prices that reflected the real cost of production along with a reasonable margin, often expressed through the Minimum Support Price mechanism. They wanted lower input costs through subsidies and reduced taxes on seeds, fertilizers, and electricity. They sought loan waivers and the cancellation of agricultural debts. And many, especially Sharad Joshi’s faction, pushed for reduced state interference, arguing that excessive controls and bureaucratic hurdles prevented farmers from getting fair prices and accessing markets freely.

A close look at this agenda shows a consistent thread: nearly every demand pointed toward raising the output prices farmers received. The defining feature of the movement was its focus on remunerative prices rather than the land question that had animated earlier peasant struggles.

The big internal divide on liberalization 🔗

The movements were never ideologically unified, and one fault line ran especially deep. The disagreement was over how to treat the market itself.

Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana broadly welcomed economic liberalization, privatization, and globalization. Joshi believed that trade liberalization would reduce state control over agriculture and thereby expand farmers’ freedom. He even advocated farmer-owned joint stock companies and access to global export markets. This pro-market stance put him directly at odds with other major organizations, most notably the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, which saw the very same globalization forces as a grave threat to farmers’ survival. These were not minor differences of tactics; they reflected fundamentally opposed visions of where Indian agriculture should head.

Criticisms and the class question 🔗

For all their scale and energy, the New Farmers’ Movements attracted sharp criticism, much of it centred on the question of class.

The most pointed charge is that the movements were biased toward market-oriented farmers and largely ignored the rural poor. Critics argued the movement was heavily slanted toward commercial farmers rather than those in the subsistence economy. Demands like loan write-offs, remunerative prices, declaring agriculture an industry, and abolishing tractor loans ultimately benefited the rich and middle peasantry far more than the poor or landless.

The historian Ramachandra Guha went further, dismissing the mobilization as an “old” kulak-rich peasant movement rather than a genuinely new social movement, since it was essentially a class-based assertion of prosperous landholders. Others, drawing on the work of scholars like D.N. Dhanagare, pushed back by emphasizing the significant role played by the middle peasantry, but few denied the underlying point that the agenda served the rural rich more than the rural poor.

There were further blind spots. The classic peasant demands of land reform, protection of tenants, and higher minimum wages for farm labourers were largely absent from the BKU and Shetkari Sanghatana agendas. The movements also concentrated on irrigated, commercially productive belts and paid scant attention to the problems of dryland and non-irrigated regions. This narrow social base is one reason the movement began to lose its vitality and appeal in the years that followed.

The lasting legacy 🔗

Even with these limitations, the New Farmers’ Movements left a deep imprint on Indian politics. For the first time, the farmer became an organized, visible, and electorally significant political actor. Those who had prospered during the Green Revolution gained a political voice and forced issues like input subsidies, remunerative pricing, and farm income-tax exemptions onto the national agenda. The BKU’s mobilization even contributed to the political churn that helped unseat the Congress government in the 1989 elections.

The movements permanently shifted the discourse on Indian agriculture. The vocabulary of remunerative prices, the cost-of-production debate, and the “Bharat versus India” framing all entered mainstream political language and remain central to farmer politics today. Yet they fell short of achieving comprehensive agrarian reform. By focusing on the price of produce rather than the structure of land ownership and rural inequality, they reshaped the conversation without transforming the underlying social order of the countryside.

What do you think? Were the New Farmers’ Movements genuinely “new,” or were they simply a more organized assertion of the interests of prosperous landholders dressed in the language of farmer solidarity? And can a movement that uses Gandhian non-violent methods still be called Gandhian in spirit if it leaves out the poorest and most vulnerable in the village?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc14/chapter/farmers-movement-in-india/
2. https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.14.2.0294
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/33950/1/Unit-8.pdf
4. https://swarajyamag.com/economy/remembering-sharad-joshi-the-jeans-clad-farmer
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatiya_Kisan_Union
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380229221116996
7. https://www.sabhlokcity.com/2018/09/cornelia-lennebergs-study-of-sharad-joshis-work-in-1988/
8. https://sociology.institute/india-democracy-development/rise-farmers-movements-contemporary-india-bku-ss/
9. https://iasgoogle.com/n/explain-the-dynamics-of-neo-farmers-movement-in-contemporary-india-upsc-cse-mains-2018-sociology-paper-2
10. https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-14-summer-2021/growing-democracy-india-farmer