Infallible Farm Laws?

The central government’s total reluctance or conditional willingness to discuss the controversial farm laws with the farmers raises more questions than it provides answers as to the stand-off between the two. As the media reports suggests, the government’s attitude involving reluctance to ­deliberation and its strong will to adopt repressive measures and tactics to deal with the protesting farmers do not suggest that the former will go on the back foot and examine the limits of such laws, particularly from the point of view of the farmers’ ­collective interests.

The government has been relentlessly asserting that the three laws are absolutely beneficial to the farmers while the farmers refute this claim made by the government. The question that we need to address is, whose claim carries conclusive weightage: the government or the farmers? The government spokesperson and the pro-big business economists have been accusing the opposition for misleading the farmers on the good intent of the laws. These supporters of the laws, thus, suggest that the farmers lack both independent moral capacity to decide for themselves what is good and what is bad for them, and such accusations also suggest that farmers lack historical knowledge about the private business that is interested in drawing the maximum profit from the market transaction. Historically, a market-oriented economy does follow skewed patterns predominantly working out well for the private interests, even petering out the stamina of socialist alternatives.