The title of this presentation, and of the book chapter it is based on, is borrowed from an interview conducted during the Kisan Andolan, with a protesting farmer, who shared with me how he felt: ‘There is a lot of peace at this protest site, which makes me believe that it is Baba Nanak who is running this protest. When we came here, we offered ourselves to the Gurus and took their shelter’(Tikri Border, Nov. 2021).
I therefore start this presentation with an apparent paradox, namely the religious terminology and framework used by a farmer settled at the Tikri Border, that was considered as the stronghold of the leftist farmers unions- those same unions, which throughout the movement emphatically insisted that the protest had nothing to do with religion, but was only concerned about the repeal of 3 agricultural laws imposed by the BJP government in Sept. 2020.
However, anyone who has visited the protest sites could not fail to notice how ubiquitous were Sikh symbols, rituals & institutions.
Indeed, if we recollect the many challenges faced by the Andolan, such as the failure of several rounds of negotiations with the union government in the initial stages of the movement, the palpable demoralisation following the Republic Day march to the Red Fort on 26 January 2021 and the persistent attempts by the state at dividing, suppressing and defaming the movement, the farmer leaders were faced with the following challenge: how to sustain the movement?
Scholarship about the Andolan has highlighted the role of collective identities and solidarities based on caste and class, as well as the broad-based alliances with non-agrarian, secular and democratic struggles, which account in part for the success of the movement. I argue in this presentation that Sikhi proved a very powerful force, motivating the famers, legitimising their personal and collective sacrifice and broadening the scope of their struggle, by rooting it in the long history of the fight for survival of the Sikhs as a minority community. I will also briefly discuss the unique -at times conflictual- blend of the Sikh repertoire and leftist ideology, and the culture of the protest, addressing the rich corpus of protest songs written by Punjabi singers in support of the movement. These socio-cultural and religious resources allowed the protest to become a broader resistance movement against neoliberalism, authoritarian populism and Hindu majoritarianism.
As far as my methodology is concerned, I conducted interviews with various participants of the protest (farmers, youth activists, union leaders and journalists) at two protest sites, the Singhu border (in December 2020 and March 2021) and the Tikri border (in November 2021), and after the protest ended, in rural Punjab and Haryana, between December 2021 and March 2022.
Based on a book chapter recently published, this presentation will focus on the role played by religion as a force of social change in the contemporary world, discussing how Sikhi has been a major source of inspiration and a tool of mobilisation during the Kisan Andolan (the Indian farmers protest of 2020-21). Sikh ethos has indeed provided potent values and heroic figures drawn from past struggles as well as religious institutions and practices, such as langar, that have been instrumental in sustaining the over-one-year-long struggle.
Based on interviews conducted at two of the protest sites at Delhi borders, my research provides an insight into the broad array of religious resources that were mobilised during the largest and longest rural struggle of post-colonial India, and their uneasy alliance with other ideologies, particularly the secular left, dominant among the farmers unions.