India's true democrat: Joginder Singh

Joginder Singh Ugrahan. Pic/Ajaz Ashraf

Farmer leader Joginder Singh Ugrahan has emerged as the most visible patriotic foil to the Hindu nationalists, who demonise their ideological opponents as anti-national, hound and silence them. Ugrahan's emergence was on account of the members of his outfit, the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Ugrahan), one of the 35 farm unions protesting outside Delhi, choosing to observe the United Nations Human Rights Day, December 10, by displaying pictures of intellectuals and activists imprisoned for allegedly fomenting violence in Bhima Koregaon in 2018 and in Delhi in 2020.

Their choice of day to protest subliminally labelled the incarcerated activists as prisoners of conscience, and rebutted the Modi government's depiction of them as Urban Naxals and Islamic jihadists. It required chutzpah to challenge the Hindu nationalists' narrative in their lair. Even the other farmer unions demurred: They passed a resolution to say their movement was for the sole purpose to have the three new farm laws repealed.

Criticism has not had Ugrahan to equivocate on his position. Last week, in a telephonic chat with me, he lavished praise on Gautam Navlakha, lodged in jail as an accused in the Bhima Koregaon case, for siding with farmers, for consistently opposing the appropriation of their land. Ugrahan said, "If I do not speak for Gautam Navlakha, who do I then speak for?"

It would seem Ugrahan believes that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere", including in Punjab. Here is the man who did not go to a liberal university to learn about democratic rights and empathy. Here is the leader who discovered these virtues through his many years of participation in the farmers' struggle.

A matriculate, he joined the Indian army in 1973, and on his discharge four years later, returned to his village Ugrahan, in Sangrur district, Punjab, to till the family land. A voracious reader of newspapers and books, Ugrahan became convinced of the need for a farmers' movement for improving their condition. He joined the BKU in 1982, but left it in 2002, because of the growing tendency of its leaders to flirt with politicians and represent the interest of big farmers. Thus was born BKU (Ekta Ugrahan), whose leader, a Jat by caste, sought to bridge the class-caste divide in rural Punjab.

Ugrahan created a buzz when he supported a protest by agricultural labourers in Ludhiana in 2005, serving them tea and washing their utensils. This was a revolutionary step for a Jat to take, as agriculture labourers largely comprise Dalits. Since then, they never fell out of his focus. Ugrahan wants the maximum area a person can hold under the Land Ceiling Act to be revised downward, and the surplus land to be distributed to the landless and marginal farmers. His union ensured monetary compensation was paid to agricultural labourers when land was acquired to build a power plant in Gobindpura village, Mansa district, earlier this decade. They also had the power company return 186 acres of land to farmers.

In 2004, they took on the state machinery deployed to confiscate the land of a farmer in Chathewala village, Bathinda district, after he defaulted on a loan. Their protracted struggle secured for farmers a compensation amount that was around 70 per cent more than the rate the Punjab government had fixed for the land a private company acquired near Barnala city. They have compelled the government to agree, in principle, to provide monetary relief to the families of those who commit suicide.

In Ekta Ugrahan's agitations, women have been participants, their presence not merely token. For instance, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the Ekta Ugrahan ordered the older leaders to stay indoors, and handed over the reins to the young, with Harinder Bindu appointed as ad hoc general secretary. Union ministers who had the temerity to tag the Ekta Ugrahan as Khalistani should be told that Bindu's father died fighting against militants in a village where he had organised a cultural programme.

Punjab's democratic ethos has undoubtedly shaped Ugrahan's personality. Punjab was the state where roads were blocked to protest against the reading down of Article 370, and almost all farmer unions agitated against the exclusion of Muslims from the ambit of the Citizenship Amendment Act. That revolutionary nationalist Bhagat Singh and his Naujawan Bharat Sabha, which was revived in the 1970s, should still mesmerise Punjabis, including Ugrahan, speaks of their inherent idealism and radicalism.

Perhaps resistance to power has been culturally imbibed in them because Sikhism evolved in the crucible of the struggle involving the Sikh Gurus against the centralising power of the Mughals. The ninth Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur, before he was beheaded on Aurangzeb's order, elegantly articulated the spirit behind that resistance: "The truly enlightened ones/Are those who neither incite fear in others/Nor fear anyone themselves."

This tradition of fearless resistance is what perhaps had Ugrahan tell me during our conversation: "Are we under Hitler's rule? Why can't the Prime Minister repeal the farm laws? He thinks only he is right and all others wrong. This attitude is terrible for democracy." Indeed, a true democrat fears none, even as he wages a battle for the benefit of others.

The writer is a senior journalist. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper

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