Irfan Jafri is itching to get back to Delhi. On November 26, when hundreds of farmers marched towards national capital in protest against ...
Irfan Jafri is itching to get back to Delhi.
On November 26, when hundreds of farmers marched towards national capital in protest against three new agriculture laws, 50-year-old Jafri was among them. When the Delhi police shut down the city’s borders, he spent 17 days camping at the Singhu border between Haryana and Delhi with 200 other farmers from his village in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district.
“During that time, locals opened up their homes to us, Sikh groups gave us free langar food, and we had a chance to meet farmers from all over India,” said Jafri, a wheat, rice and soyabean farmer who heads a local agricultural organisation – Kisan Jagruti Sangathan – in his district.
Farmers from Punjab and Haryana have been on the frontlines of this unprecedented uprising. The media attention they have received has created a misleading impression that the opposition to the laws is restricted mainly to those two states.
But protests by farmers from a range of other states – Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and others – have intensified in the past few weeks. While some like Jafri have joined or attempted to join the protesters at the borders of Delhi, others – like farmers in Bihar or Kerala –...
