Democracy at the Barricades: The Farmer’s Movement in India

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March 25, 3:30pm. Navkiran Natt (student activist and co-editor of Trolley Times), “Democracy at the Barricades: The Farmer’s Movement in India”

RECORDING

Abstract: The Indian farmers’ protest 2020 is being hailed as ‘the biggest ever people’s protest in the history of the country.’ The protest has created a worldwide audience and rekindled the hope for a mass movement to bring about progressive change in the agrarian sector in India. Now the farmers went back home victorious in last December after protesting the three farm laws, passed by the Indian government in 2020, at the borders of the national capital for more than a year. Apart from the grandeur, the aesthetic that this movement had was unique as compared to the traditional farmer-worker-trade union protest aesthetics which not just captured the attention of media nationally but also globally. Mobile trolley homes, free medical camps, 24-hour langars (a Sikh tradition to provide free meals to everyone), libraries at every kilometre, film screenings, musical evenings, open discussion sessions; we believe there was hardly anyone who had witnessed all this in one protest ever before. People across caste, class, gender, region and religion boundaries participated in this movement and Indian diaspora played an important role in making this movement global.

Navkiran Natt is a student-youth activist and film/media researcher who works between Panjab and Delhi, India. She is trained as a dentist and later completed her Masters in Film Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She works on transnational Panjabi migration and its reflections in Panjabi popular culture and media. Her primary areas of interest are media and politics, visual culture of new media, transnational migration, popular culture, caste and gender. She did a podcast series on the Green Revolution’s health implications in Panjab with the Goethe Institut, New Delhi. Currently, she is co-editor of Trolley Times, a newsletter that started from India’s ongoing farmers’ movement.

March 25, 2022

Presenter: Navkiran Natt

View Recording