Singhu: The Unwritten
by Simona Sawhney
This piece was originally published on Dalit Camera: Through Un-Touchable Eyes— a platform for narratives, public meetings, songs, talks, discussion on dalits.
The response of the mainstream media to the protesting farmers at Singhu and Tikri, like that of the government, oscillates between pity and indignation. On the one hand, there are voices of concern—a concern aimed mostly at the elderly and at times, strikingly, at women. Go home, they are told, please go home and take care of yourselves. Meaning, of course, that you are not able bodied enough to assume the burdens of citizenship–to be full citizens, in the necessarily masculinized sense of the term. For the full citizen must be able-bodied and male–but within limits. He cannot be too strong either, and certainly not if this strength has not been publicly pledged to submission. As soon as the strength of the citizen questions, dissents, raises demands and makes claims, it becomes a threat. Then state and public discourse puts its predictable slotting machine to work: every question is a threat to nationalism, to national unity and the state. Every protest against a policy, an idea, or a law becomes a threat to the state itself. It is as though the very being of the state is perpetually at stake; it feels the slightest disagreement as a stab to its heart. Is it possible for even a glimmer of democracy to survive in such a frame?
The farmers’ protest has shown us, once again, in stark relief, the rickety and fragile infrastructure of Indian democracy. Behind all the bluster about Maoists and Khalistanis lies a more troubling governmental decision: the decision NOT to take seriously the concerns of the farmers, or even to imagine a farmer who may be able to argue for her own rights. It is as though political parties have treated ordinary people as pawns for so long that they have become incapable of imagining them as anything other than pawns. The state simply cannot hear the farmers. In order to block out what they are saying, it has two mutually contradictory strategies: first, to turn the words of the farmers into childish prattle, the nonsense of those who do not understand the world of adults, and second, to turn them into lies, masked words that hide an altogether different agenda–the code language of a sinister conspiracy.
The protestors understand very well that it is one of the strategies of the government to treat them as ignorant, and in fact, to constantly treat all dissenters, first as ignorant, and then as criminal. One poster at Singhu makes this point concisely, “To Muslims they say: You do not understand CAA. To traders they say: you do not understand GST. To Kashmiris they say: you do not understand the benefits of removing 370. To the public they say: you do not understand the benefits of demonetization. To the farmers they say: you do not understand the benefits of the farm laws. From which planet have BJP followers come—no one except them can understand this!”
It is no accident that one sees posters of Bhagat Singh everywhere at the protest site. Infantilized by the Congress, militarized by the British, Bhagat Singh is an apt symbol of the enfant terrible that the state sees in every dissenting citizen. Holding in his hand a symbolically huge copy of a Punjabi translation of Gorky’s monumental book Mother, Bhagat Singh looks piercingly at visitors from the walls of trucks, sheds, and tents at Singhu, exhorting them to “create new thoughts” on the foundation of critical reading and thinking. As if conscious of pervasive media distortions, he counsels people to read with open eyes, to question what they read and to form their own judgement. There is even a small Bhagat Singh Library set up by some students of JNU, Jamia, and Delhi University. It offers books on history and politics, as well as works of fiction and poetry. In fact there are several such libraries at Singhu, mostly run by students from Delhi or Punjab.
One such library is run by the Ambedkar Students Association of Punjab University. Ambedkar too is a noticeable presence on posters at the site, along with heroes from Sikh history and peasant leaders. While the protest opposes the farm laws themselves, it also strongly condemns the way these laws were passed. The appeal to Ambedkar at Singhu is hence also an appeal to democratic spirit and procedural integrity. Moreover, it is perhaps an appeal to one who, even as a legislator, remained an outsider—waiting, like the farmers, for a visa to enter the land of entitlement. The student from Punjab who stands at the counter of this library tells me that he and his friends have been taking turns coming to Singhu. He says some Punjabi writers have generously donated copies of their books, and when the library has several copies of a book or a magazine issue, the students just give them away to interested readers. While it is clear that people do borrow, read, and sometimes buy books, and while I did see some people reading in their tents, the libraries did not seem terribly busy on the day I visited Singhu.
The protest site sprawls over several kilometres. There is slush on the ground from recent rains. If you consider that hundreds of people have been camping there for over forty days, the place is relatively clean. It has incrementally grown into a small town. There are pavement shops that sell everything from shoes to vegetables to toys alongside stores run by non-profit organizations and Gurudwaras that provide free medicines, blankets, and emergency supplies. There is a small hospital in a tent. There are large tents that supply free food (langar) all day long, to both residents and visitors. We saw numerous small processions through the day, as well as larger, organized gatherings with a stage and scheduled speakers. The mood shifts constantly as one moves from one part of the site to another, from the defiant elation and energy of committed protest, to stoic determination. By and large, people want to talk. They are eager for visitors. Who wants their protest to remain unseen? Everyone I spoke to wanted their story to be heard. One man, serving tea at a small stall by the road, introduced himself as a poet: Punjab Singh Kahlon. He had come with his brothers from Jalandhar to join the protest. Tall, lean and bespectacled, he said, we are doing all we can. It is now up to you—meaning, the rest of India, people in urban areas. It is up to you to take this further. An older farmer, perhaps around sixty, brushed aside my questions about any difficulties he might face at the camp. “We are from Punjab,” he said. “It is much colder there. We hardly feel the cold here. This is nothing. We will stay till the black laws are repealed. There is no question of our going back. The laws will have to go back first.” His young companion, managing a bookstall that sold, among other things, copies of the Indian Constitution in Punjabi, chimed in. “We love it here,” he said. “We have never seen such friendship and support, even in our own village. No one wants to go back.” I spoke to an elderly farmer from Haryana. “Till the Sardars are here, we are here,” he said. “Look at them, they have come from far away. Our homes are close by. But we will stay as long as they stay. The government has made fools of us for years. No more. They can’t fool the people forever. They have to take back the laws.” At the place where we ate Langar, a kitchen run by Bangla Sahib Gurudwara in Delhi, I spoke briefly to a middle-aged woman behind the counter. She smiled warmly at everyone in line, and kept chanting, “Waheguru, Waheguru” as she handed out leaf plates. I asked her whether she lived in the camp or had come from elsewhere. “I’m from Shalimar Bagh in Delhi,” she said. “I come here everyday.” “How do you come?” I asked. “I take a bus. I can’t afford anything else. But I come every morning.”
It is these people who have kept the protest going. They are not wealthy; they have limited resources. They carry the conviction that they are doing something right for those who matter to them. Those who disparagingly say that the protesters are mostly rich farmers obviously haven’t visited the site. The truth is that the rich rarely join such protests. They have neither the patience nor the endurance; they are not used to being anonymous, simply one in a mass movement. Of course the protest has drawn support from many wealthy people across the world, especially Punjabis and Sikhs. While that is extremely encouraging, it also raises some troubling questions. Like most protests in India, this one too has become linked to regional and religious identities, even though the central issues have nothing to do with such identities. I am uncomfortably certain that had farmers in Orissa or Tamil Nadu raised similar questions and demands, few ordinary Punjabis—that is to say, those not already part of political groups– would have supported the movement in any substantial way. On the one hand the attachment to language, land, and culture is real; it must neither be denied nor attacked and it is certainly not to be despised. On the other hand, those who dream of political communities strong enough to resist neo-liberal regimes must also think of fostering and deepening other attachments—attachments formed on grounds other than those of familiarity and identity.
Such attachments are formed when what is shared is not necessarily one particular language or another (say Punjabi or Tamil), but instead a certain conceptual language—a way of understanding and naming phenomena. This protest has placed such a language before us. It has forcefully re-written the distress and misery that arises from poverty and cycles of debt in the idiom of exploitation. To say “exploitation” is to make a theoretical claim—it is to understand that one’s misery is produced, it benefits someone else. The protest passionately calls out the capitalist betrayal of freedom as exploitation. What capitalism calls the “freedom” of the producer (to sell her produce ostensibly where she wishes) is in fact a cover for the withdrawal of state regulation, protection and support, and hence it will function, on the contrary, as the freedom of the corporate buyer to set the terms of exchange. Hence the farmers are insistent: we want nothing less than the repeal of these laws. We do not want to work within the frame of this language of betrayal, of sleights of hand and evasions of guarantee.
The feeling that the laws must be repealed is very strong at the protest site. The conviction that the Adanis and Ambanis benefit from the laws is also widespread. What is less perceptible is a sense of what might be an alternative vision. After all, there has been long-standing dissatisfaction with the Mandi system too. It is true that the farmers are demanding the implementation of the Swaminathan report, in letter and in spirit. But at the site I saw few mentions of the report, or of the vision it enables. The energy there was largely reactive, focused on negating, repealing, denouncing, protecting, rather than creating, producing, conceptualizing anew what may be possible. Perhaps it is too early to look for that? The farmers are aware that what they are doing is unprecedented. Will something unprecedented arise from this? Will it take an enduring shape? It is hard to say yet. Nevertheless, in some scattered words and images at Singhu, one may see signs that the protesting farmers are searching for new ways of relating to themselves and to the land they till; for a path that has not yet been forged.
A poster of the Pakistani poet Sabir Ali Sabir hangs on a wall, next to one of Safdar Hashmi. It carries his famous poem, “Tote” (Parrots):
When I say something
They hasten to ask:
Where is it written?
If they believe only what is written,
Well, I will write it,
But they still won’t believe it.
This, what you have written!
Where is it written?
No one should do
That which has not been done before.
No one should write
That which has not been written before.
Where is THIS written?
Simona Sawhney teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Sawhney has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and has taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota. For the past few years Sawhney has been engaged in studying the work of Bhagat Singh and his comrades.
Suggested citation: Sawhney, S. 19 January 2021. “Singhu: The Unwritten.” Dalit Camera. https://www.dalitcamera.com/singhu-the-unwritten/