Farmers’ protests in India: introduction to the JPS Forum

Since the summer of 2020, Indian farmers have been protesting three laws that aim to liberalize agricultural markets and encourage contract farming. In doing so, they also mounted largest challenge an authoritarian Hindu nationalist government date. The contributions this JPS Forum provide deep diverse insights into these farmer protests, including their social composition political character, as well roots in long-term transformations markets, ecology, agrarian—and non-agrarian—political economy. introduction, we put dialogue with older debates over India’s ‘new farmers’ movements,’ which reached zenith 1980s, order throw relief what has changed rural India agrarian studies subsequent decades. We argue polarized terms earlier debates—between Marxists populists—are no longer adequate for transformed milieu twenty-first century, is increasingly defined by distress, ecological crisis, semi-proletarianization diversification occupations amidst jobless exclusionary growth. This new reality, combined significance protests challenging regime, helps explain not only broad coalition behind current but far more sympathetic treatment scholars.