Jagtar Singh

Farmers should avoid getting trapped into brutalized polity unleashed by BJP Ground Zero Jagtar Singh The assault on Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Arun Narang Saturday in Malout town in the Malwa district of Muktsar by the protesting farmers is highly reprehensible. Every political party in Punjab and Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh have rightly condemned the incident that at one level reflects rising anger among the people who are battling for survival threatened by the three farm laws passed by the Narendra Modi government during Covid. The protests in Punjab started in June last year when ordinance was promulgated to give effect to these laws, the measure that is resorted to only due to urgency. There was no urgency and still the Modi government went ahead. Thousands of farmers have been sitting at three places on Delhi borders for the last four months. The attack by the BJP elements in the garb of the local residents on the farmers camping at Snghu border too was vicious. The poli...

  Punjab parties push election gear as farmers strive for survival Ground Zero Jagtar Singh The political discourse has its own logic. As the remote-controlled Congress government in Punjab headed by Capt Amarinder Singh enters the fifth and the last year, the political parties in this state whose farmers are spearheading the national fight for survival have pushed the election gear. The farmers organisations commanding the struggle against the three contentious laws have so far maintained respectable distance from these parties. Going by the present indications, it is going to be a prolonged fight. The Amarinder government has launched aggressive media campaign coinciding with its   four years in office while Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal having monopoly power over the party has taken the lead by dramatically announcing his own candidature at a rally in Jalalabad that was his first election mobilisation for February 2022. The Aam Aadmi Party that now provi...

  Farmers struggle starts dictating political discourse from Nandigram Ground Zero Jagtar Singh   Strong reaction to the introduction of the three laws is one first major issue in which the assessment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi miserably failed. Once this struggle got triggered in Punjab, Modi government could never make out that this battle for survival would assume such momentous dimension. This struggle is now expanding every day involving farmers from almost every state from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. And now it has started dictating political discourse and that too in the space that has been vacant in the absence of a political outfit at the national level with the Congress continuing to be on the downslide and the Left having been marginalised even in West Bengal. The intervention by this struggle to protect the very idea of inclusive India has started from Nandigram in West Bengal, the most prestigious seat in the elections in this state. It is in Bengal...