Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Monday alleged that the Narendra Modi government was anti-farmer and treating farmers as enemies for demanding their rights. His remarks come a day after farmer leaders Sarwan Singh Pandher and Jagjit Singh Dallewal gave a call to farmers across the nation to reach Delhi on March 6 for a protest.
They also gave a four-hour countrywide rail roko call for March 10 in support of their various demands, including a legal guarantee for minimum support price (MSP) for crops and farm debt waiver. They have emphasized that the ongoing farmers' agitation will be escalated at the current protest sites and will persist until the government addresses their demands.
In a post in Hindi on X, Kharge alleged that in order to benefit its “select crony capitalist friends”, the Modi government has consistently sacrificed the interests of farmers.
When the farmer who provides food to the country wants to produce a bumper crop and export it, then the Modi government bans the export of wheat, rice, sugar, onion, pulses etc. The BJP has done the same throughout its tenure, Kharge said and added that the result of this is that agricultural exports which increased by 153 per cent during the Congress-UPA rule increased only by 64 per cent during BJP’s rule, he tweeted.
Not only did the Modi government’s guarantee of MSP and doubling income turn out to be fake, but the anti-farmer BJP left no stone unturned to break the backs of our 62 crore farmers, he alleged. Now when farmers are demanding their rights, the Modi government is treating them like enemies, Kharge said.