When neoliberalism came to the Indian farm

Two images have dominated popular representations of agrarian India. The first is of the over 350,000 farmers who have died by suicide over the last three decades, after being buried in debt and facing successive crop failures. More recently, a rather different image has acquired global prominence: thousands of farmers camped out on roads around India's national capital, fists raised in the air, determined in their defiance of proposed agricultural marketing laws which were believed to facilitate the expansion of corporate agri-business.

These images seem to be radically different, framing the contemporary Indian farmer as a suffering victim on the one hand and an agent of resistance on the other. Yet, the thread that unites these distinct moments – mass death and mass movement – is the same agrarian crisis that pervades the Indian countryside. As a widely circulated social and political category, "farmer suicides" can be read as the tragic culmination of this grave situation. The vociferous – and successful – protests by farmers between 2020 and 2021 were similarly a response to emerging threats to their livelihoods from big capital. While not an immediately apparent manifestation of distress, these protests revealed the continued significance and fragility of rural livelihoods.