Farmer leader Rakesh Tikait’s “I will commit suicide if the farm laws are not repealed” spiel in the face of Uttar Pradesh police’s bid late on Thursday evening to evacuate the Ghazipur protest site was the moment when the farmers’ two-month-long protest became part of the political mainstream.

Thinning crowds at Ghazipur had surged by evening with farmers reinforcements arriving in tractors with food and water as electricity and water supply had been cut off to this protest site on Thursday evening.

Tikait’s plaintive cry invited almost all opposition party leaders — Sukhbir Singh Badal of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Ajit Singh of Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party (SP) — to reach out and extend solidarity at one level and galvanised farmers of all political hues in western UP to organise a massive “Mahapanchayat” at Muzaffarnagar.

‘A long fight’

“Hitting Rakesh Tikait is a challenge to our society. This is an anti-farmer government which has systematically brought down farmers’ income and is now bringing big corporates to destroy what we are left with. In UP, the government has not yet announced the State Advised Price (SAP) for sugarcane for this year. We have not been paid our arrears for last year where the state statute says we should be paid within 15 days. We will fight for our rights and dignity. It is a long fight but we accepted the challenge today,” said Chowdhary Jitender Hooda of the Hooda khap .

While Ghazipur on the UP border became the political hotspot, the protesters at Singhu and Tikri borders were met with hordes of masked young men, who said they were “locals” and barged into the protest site, asking them to evacuate the area. After minor clashes, the tension subsided at the two sites with the elders in the protest urging the crowds not to be “provoked by the BJP’s bhade ke tattoo (hired help)”.

Show of solidarity

Simultaneously, the SAD leader and former Chief Minister of Punjab Sukhbir Singh Badal and his senior colleague Bikram Singh Majithia gave a call to the party cadre to rush to the three dharna sites. “The Central Government is making attempts to crush the Kisan Andolan in league with the BJP Government in Haryana. We must ensure that this nefarious design to silence the farmers is defeated,” said Majithia in an emotional appeal to his party cadre to “reach the protest sites in large numbers to give a boost to the peacefully agitating peasantry”.

Rakesh Tikait’s brother Naresh Tikait had given a call to farmers across western UP to reach Muzaffarnagar to study and strategise against the UP police action at Ghazipur on Thursday night. By afternoon on Friday, hundreds of leaders from the powerful Gathwala, Balyan, Deshwal, Hooda khaps as well as representatives of the Saini, Gujjar and other communities gathered in Muzaffarnagar to protest against the “anti-farmer” policies of the BJP.

Jayant Chowdhary, former MP and Vice President of RLD, met Rakesh Tikait in the morning and then rushed to Muzaffarnagar. “The farmers have come here for a solution. They don’t want violence, they have families and their own affairs to look after. But this government does not want to give solutions. They think anyone asking questions is an enemy. I have come here in solidarity. I will go to Badaut from here where the police opened lathicharge against farmers, a whole lot of whom have been injured. My final destination is Muzaffarnagar where the community has given a call against the challenge posed by the BJP government to our society,” said Jayant Chowdhary.

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