Every second Jat farmer you meet in Baghpat tells you of his “majboori”, or compulsion. In Katha village, Satendra Singh, a landowning sug...
Every second Jat farmer you meet in Baghpat tells you of his “majboori”, or compulsion.
In Katha village, Satendra Singh, a landowning sugarcane farmer in his 30s, was upset about the delay in the payment of his dues from the sugar mill he had sold his produce to. He was disappointed that the Bharatiya Janata Party government, which governs Uttar Pradesh, hadn’t substantially hiked the minimum price that sugar mills are supposed to pay farmers like him. He was disheartened that the government had not built a cow shed in the village to house the stray cattle that has routinely plundered his crops after a new law passed in 2017 made cattle trade virtually impossible.
“But what to do,” Singh told me on Sunday morning. “We have to be with the BJP only – majboori hai.”
Why, you ask – what was the compulsion?
“Because who else will save us Hindus from the wrath of these Muslims who are all around us here,” he said.
Some 50 km north in Daha village, 39-year-old Ashok Rana, too, spoke about majboori. Unlike Singh, though, Rana said the time had come to change his loyalties, even though he was a “kattar Hindu” – a Hindu radical.
“I know that if the other side...
