Rise and Fall of the Bharatiya Kisan Union: The Farmers’ Protests of 2020–2021 in the Making of New Rural Politics

Abstract

In the 1980s, India's farmers' protests including the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) emerged as a strong political force that played an important role in the overthrow of the Congress government in the1989 elections. However, in the 1990s introduction of the neoliberal economic policies shifted the agrarian economy to non-farm occupations and deepened the ongoing agrarian crisis. By focusing on the BKU and its politics, this paper examines the ways in which agrarian change and crisis coupled with the rise of Hindutva politics weakened the agrarian polity in western Uttar Pradesh over the last three decades. Drawing on ethnographic research in Muzaffarnagar, however, I argue that the farmers' protests (of 2020 -2021) have revived farmers' identity and have renewed the agrarian polity. These protests not only created unprecedented alliances across caste, class, gender, and religion but also brought together farm unions, left, and progressive civil society organizations.