As farmers from Punjab continue to press on with their call for a legal guarantee for the Minimum Support Price (MSP) of crops, among other demands, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), the farmers' wing of the RSS, has said the farmers are “suffering because of agricultural experts”. The BKS has also asked the Central government, which has engaged in four rounds of talks with the agitating farmers so far, not to “engage with the protesting farmers because of the violent nature of the protests”. The BKS has made these comments in a resolution passed during the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS) meeting held at Kishanganj in Rajasthan between February 23 and 25. “The farmer already has too many problems of his own. But because of adopting the ways promoted by so-called agriculture experts, their input cost has been increasing disproportionately and they are not getting remunerative prices (for their crops),” the BKS resolution says. BKS Akhil Bharatiya Mahamantri Mohini Mohan Mishra told The Indian Express that these “so-called experts” included everyone from eminent agricultural scientist and Bharat Ratna awardee MS Swaminathan to “present-day experts who stress on technology-driven farming”. “They have all given too much stress on technology. This has hiked the farmers’ input costs. However, food prices have not risen in the same manner. Tractors guzzle fuel. Farmers used to use bullocks and the ecosystem had cows which gave milk and dung,” he said. In its resolution, the BKS also said that almost everyone associated with education, research, business and even advertisements based on agriculture had become millionaires barring farmers. Reiterating its opposition to the ongoing farmers’ protests, the BKS resolution has called for “zero tolerance” towards violent protests. “A violent movement is never in the interest of the nation…When governments engage with such violent agitators, the movement gets inspiration to be more violent,” it stated. It also demanded that farmers be given remunerative prices for their crops based on input cost, abolition of GST on farm inputs, increase in Kisan Samman Nidhi, rejection of Genetically Modified (GM) crops, which the Narendra Modi-led BJP government has been pushing for, ensuring rights of farmers on seeds, and ending of exploitation of farmers in the market. The BKS passed another resolution on millets, which it said has been traditionally grown in India because of suitable climate. However, it has flagged issues related to marketing of the crop. “Given the benefits of millets, farmers are increasingly attracted towards its farming. However, there are some fundamental drawbacks in the system. The key issue is that there is no stable system of supply. Despite there being a demand among people and the market, there is no coordination between demand and supply. In absence of this, the farmer may be disappointed with crop diversification and go back to rice and wheat farming,” the resolution said.
