Scindia, Hardik stopped from entering Mandsaur – the epicentre of farmers' protests
Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia and Gujarat's Patel quota agitation leader Hardik Patel — along with a large number of their supporters — were arrested when they tried to enter Mandsaur, the epicentre of Madhya Pradesh's farm protest, amid reports of three allegedly debt-ridden farmers committing suicide in the state.
The police in the BJP-ruled state also lodged an FIR against local Congress MLA Shakuntala Khatik for inciting party workers to violence on June 6 during protests at Mandsaur where a police firing killed six farmers.
But trouble mounted for Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan with three suicide deaths in the past 24 hours, taking the number of farmer suicides in the state in the past one week to five. This is despite a slew of measures announced by the state government to contain acute agrarian distress and anger.
Two farmers committed suicide in Chouhan's Sehore and Hoshangabad districts. A farmer from Vidisha also died during treatment in Bhopal where he was admitted after consuming poisonous pills on Monday. Contrary to the claims of the family members, state Home Minister Bhupendra Singh said the three committed suicide because of personal reasons.
The Congress leaders wanted to meet the families of those killed in the police firing during protests for debt relief and better crop prices, but were arrested because of the prohibitory orders in place there.
Patel and his supporters were also detained while on their way to Mandsaur scorched by violence with several vehicles burnt and buildings torched. Protests in Madhya Pradesh — ravaged by drought and farm suicides — began on June 1.
Guna MP Scindia and Jhabua-Ratlam MP Kantilal Bhuria led their supporters to stage a sit-in at a toll booth outside Mandsaur. They also burnt an effigy of the Chief Minister in Guna. Last week, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was briefly arrested when he tried to enter Mandsaur.
The Congress is planning to hold conventions on agrarian issues, and condolence meetings for farmers who have died, in each district in states such Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana and Karnataka.
The immediate focus, however, will be on Madhya Pradesh where Scindia has announced a three-day "Satyagraha" in Bhopal from Wednesday to expose Chouhan's "sham of a fast" that ended on Sunday.
At every meeting in rural areas, the Congress will distribute a leaflet on the BJP's 2014 poll promise to ensure minimum 50 per cent profit to farmers over and above their input costs, asking the people to tell every BJP leader or worker coming to them to first fulfil the promise and then seek their votes.
The violence does not auger well for the BJP, which swept to power in Madhya Pradesh 14 years ago and faces elections next year.
After the BJP governments in UP and Maharashtra decided to waive off farmers' loans, the Narendra Modi government at the Centre appears in a bind to pick up the tab of a nationwide farmloan waiver demand in the face of spiralling protests.
Political analysts believe the trigger for the agitations came from the ruling BJP's own promises on loan waiver ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. The Yogi Adityanath government had to fulfil this promise, prompting farmers in other states to start agitations. The BJP-led Maharashtra government also caved in, leaving other state governments to face the heat.
The Centre has resisted any national scheme of loan waiver since it would cost a whopping Rs 3 lakh crore, much more than Rs 52,000 crore spent by the UPA in 2008.
The BJP and Congress are expected to compete in the coming weeks and months to establish who is pro-farmer, an issue which could become a major plank in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Congress leaders feel that this is the right time to cash in on the rural distress and put the blame on the Modi government's "wrong" policies.
In Maharashtra, where the Devendra Fadnavis-led government on Sunday announced a farm loan waiver, the details have not yet been worked out. The unpaid debt is to the tune of Rs 31,000 crore, or almost four times the loans that the Maharashtra farmers had got waived in the 2008 scheme.
The other big challenge before the Fadnavis government is to raise the resources to fund the loan waiver, in the wake of the Centre refusing to come to the rescue of states, announcing loan waivers. The states' consolidated debt already stands at Rs 4.13 lakh crore.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has made it clear that the states would have to bear the burden of farmers' loan waiver.
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