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REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS
Networks, Solidarities and Emerging Alternatives
Farmers Movement in Karnataka
Niloshree Bhattacharya
How a farmers movement, in its declining phase and
amidst agrarian distress, is building new alliances,
incorporating new frameworks and attempting to
create alternatives is explored. The Karnataka Rajya
Raitha Sangha, one among the farmers movements of
the 1980s, became a member of a transnational agrarian
movement, La Via Campesina in 1996 to confront issues
that were global in nature. Based on ethnography
during 201112 and focusing on the linkages of the KRRS
with LVC, the simultaneity of different processes at play
within the KRRS are explored to shed light upon how
shared understandings are intertwined with the
perception and practice of politics, the multiple
meanings attached to the terms local and global, and
the discourses and practices of alternative agriculture.
Niloshree Bhattacharya (niloshreeb@gmail.com) is a postdoctoral
research fellow at the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata.
Published on Saturday, JUNE 24, 2017 vol lII nos 25 & 26 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
T
he new farmers movements in the 1980s arose as a con-
sequence of the green revolution, capturing our atten-
tion with their massive rallies, critical involvement in
regional and national politics, and their ability to block roads
and immobilise cities. Now, when the agrarian sector is reel-
ing under acute distress, marked by an alarming rise in
farmer suicides, a steady decline of the relative share of agri-
culture in the national economy, and a propensity of the agrarian
population to withdraw from agriculture, it is a paradox that
we do not see farmers movements mobilise the way they did
in the 1980s. However, it is interesting to note that we have
been witnessing farmers agitations in the past few months
that have erupted in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and
Rajasthan demanding loan waiver and minimum support
prices. Only time will tell if these agitations are only sporadic
reactions to the recent demonetisation policy of the ruling gov-
ernment or whether are they indicative of a more consolidated
movement. The weakening of farmers movements is associ-
ated with the stagnation of the agrarian sector and the chang-
ing nature of the state (Jodhka 2006). The agrarian sector,
agrarian movements, and agrarian studies, all seem to be now
on a steady path of decline, despair and disinterest. I locate
my study of an agrarian movement at this particular juncture
and look at how a farmers movement, in its declining phase
and amidst such agrarian distress, is struggling to reinvent
and reorient itself, by building new alliances, incorporating
new frameworks and attempting to create alternatives.
The farmers movements of the 1980s comprised the land-
holding agrarian elite, usually from a dominant caste. In the
initial years, they demanded subsidies on farm inputs and a
higher price for their produce. Their demands were addressed
to the state, which they perceived to be biased towards the
urban population. Since the mid-1990s, agrarian restructuring
entailed introduction of genetically modified organisms
(GMOs) in agriculture, land acquisition, and free trade in agri-
culture. Even while negotiating with the state, some of these
movements felt the need to engage in transnational networks,
especially to confront the issues that were global in nature.
This need was felt not only because of agrarian restructuring,
but also because of other interrelated factors.
Borras (2016) explains how, during globalisation, nation states
have been squeezed off their erstwhile responsibilities. With
the state being partially transformed, some farmers movements
have stepped beyond the national boundaries to forge alliances
with similar movements and build transnational networks.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW Published on Saturday, JUNE 24, 2017
The growth of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has
resulted in the [funnelling of] vast amounts of logistical and
financial resources to the formation of agrarian movements
who did not want or could no longer tap such resources from
political parties (Borras 2016: 4). This has led to the emergence
of transnational agrarian movements, such as La Via Campesina
(LVC), which has become a key actor in the international arena
with its critique of the neo-liberal model of agriculture. This has
had a clear reflection on academia, giving rise to a group of
scholaractivists1 worldwide, deeply involved and interested in
transnational agrarian movements. Also, Borras (2016) points to
the financial crisis of 200708, which explicated interlinkages
between economies that were earlier considered to be separate
and distinct. The convergences of the crisis in financial markets
and the crises in food, fuel, and energy were evident during
the financial crisis. As a result, the climate change discourse,
politics of food, and agrarian justice have all got intertwined.
Amidst deepening agrarian distress and a concurrent emer-
gence of transnational agrarian movements, I look at the
experiences of a farmers movement that engages with trans-
national agrarian movements. In this paper, I focus on three
issues: perception and practice of politics, networks and soli-
darities, and emerging alternatives. A movement that is more
than three decades old is rich in histories and shared mean-
ings. First, I look at how narratives of the past exist as shared
histories, which are associated with how politics is perceived
today and continues to influence the practices of engaging
with politics. Second, engaging with a transnational agrarian
movement involves the encounter of the local and the global
with regard to issues, identities, and discourses. In an effort to
move beyond the binaries of the local and the global, I explore
the multiple meanings that these terms may acquire for different
actors within the movement. I particularly focus on the recon-
figurations in the experience of space and distance and the
consequent re-imaginations of relations with political actors
in spatial terms. Do the transnational and national spheres of
networking overlap? And, if so, how does that reconstitute
political identities and solidarities at the national level? Third,
I attempt to look at local and global discourses not as separate
entities encountering each other resulting in contradictions,
but rather how their interplay may shape struggles located in
different places and create alternative practices.
This paper is based on the ethnography of the Karnataka
Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), a farmers movement in Karna-
taka. The movement emerged in 1980 under the leadership of
M D Nanjundaswamy. Its primary concerns in the initial stages
were prices, loans, electricity and water charges. Consisting of
farmers from two dominant castes, Lingayats and Vokkaligas,
who are also landholders, belonging to middle and rich farmer
groups, the ideological foundations of the movement are based
on Gandhian and Lohiaite ideals. The KRRS started engaging
in transnational networks, such as the Peoples Global Action
(PGA) and LVC, in the 1990s. In this study, the profile of
respondents (a total of 73) includes members and leaders of
the KRRS, located in different districts of Karnataka, and rep-
resentatives of other member movements of LVC. This paper
vol lII nos 25 & 26 49
REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS
captures a time frame (201112) that is significant because it
was a time when the movement was attempting to reinvent
and revive itself, and its close links with LVC for the past two
decades played a role in its attempts at recovery.
Locating Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha
The KRRS is one among farmers movements, such as the Bharatiya
Kisan Union (BKU) in the northern region, Tamizhaga Vivasayigal
Sangam (TVS) in Tamil Nadu, and Shetkari Sanghatana (SS)
in Maharashtra, which emerged during the late 1970s and early
1980s. Are these movements new like the new social move-
ments of the 1970s? Some have argued that they are indeed
new because of their non-political form and their anti-state,
anti-urban, and anti-capitalist ideological framework (Omvedt
1994; Lindberg 1994). But, others have pointed out that these
movements have entered into informal alliances with different
political parties, refuting the newness of these movements
(Assadi 1997; Gill 1994). In fact, the class character of these
movements should be the key to the debate on the newness of
farmers movements (Arora 2001). In terms of class composi-
tion, these movements comprise rich peasants (Assadi 1994;
Hasan 1994; Dhanagare 1994), but for Lindberg (1994) these
movements are basically middle peasant movements engaged
in conflict about the terms of trade between agriculture and
industry. But, there is no doubt that these movements consist of
a landholding market-oriented agrarian population as against a
subsistence-oriented peasantry (Arora 2001).
The rich literature on farmers movements has indeed
thrown much light upon their unique characteristics. One
such feature is the complex interrelationship of populism and
class; a denial of the existence of class differences within the
peasantry, a critique of the Nehruvian model of industrialisa-
tion, and an endorsement of Gandhian alternatives (such as
local self-sufficiency, decentralisation, and so on). Brass (1994)
points out that this populist ideology is a problematic one
because it is built on a common identity based on a notion of
classlessness, where the peasantry is constructed as a homoge-
neous cultural category. Sharad Joshis (leader of SS) slogan of
Bharat versus India is an extension of this populist ideology
within farmers movements, where the rural, which is con-
structed as a homogeneous category, has been neglected by
the state because of an urban bias.
The origins of the KRRS go back to the socialist youth activi-
ties in Mysore and other districts of Karnataka that gave birth
to leaders like M D Nanjundaswamy, writers like Poornachan-
dra Tejaswi, and Dalit intellectuals like Devanoora Mahadeva
(Gowda 2010). With a strong influence of Lohiaite ideas, the
KRRS characterised itself as a village movement in the initial
years (Assadi 1994) with its campaigns on monoculture of the
social forestry system, illegal granite mining in 1982, the anti-
liquor movement, and encouragement towards simple mar-
riages. The KRRS contested elections first in 1989, winning two
seats, then in 1994, winning one seat, and after almost a decade,
it won a seat in 2013. Assadi points out, Its political agenda
centred around seeking the dismissal of the party in power
and also preparing the peasantry for a peasant government in
50 Published on Saturday,
REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS
future and it emphasised that the peasants had reached the
stage of forming their own government (1997: 89). Beginning
as a non-political movement and then becoming a part of elec-
toral politics entailed internal transformations in the KRRS,
creating several factions.
In the early 1990s, under Nanjundaswamys leadership, the
KRRS participated in the anti-globalisation protests and
became a member of LVC. The 1990s marked a shift in agrarian
movements all over the world as they started voicing their pro-
test in global arenas. The KRRS from India, Confdration Pay-
sanne from France, and Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais
Sem Terra (MST, or the Landless Workers Movement) from Brazil
were at the forefront of these protests against globalisation that
manifested in uprooting the field trials of genetically modified
(GM) crops, ransacking outlets of McDonalds, and so on. At
that time, farmers and peasants organisations in Europe and
Asia were also realising the need to form a transnational strug-
gle to confront neo-liberal globalisation. These struggles in
Europe, Latin America, and Asia culminated in the formation
of LVC in 1993, with an aim to build movements against trans-
national corporationsthe International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank and the World Trade Organizationand to create
an alternative model of development.
In this context, a number of agrarian networks and move-
ments became visible in the international arena. These were
the Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), the Land
Research and Action Network (LRAN), the Genetic Resources
Action International (GRAIN), and so on. Alongside, there were
ideological and conceptual developments too. Food sovereignty
became the critical alternative. It brought in the questions of
farmers choice and livelihood, direct links between producers
and consumers, access to quality food, incorporation of local
knowledge, ecological sustainability, smaller farms, and biodi-
versity. LVC emerged as a significant international actor in food
and agriculture debates during the Global Assembly on Food
Security in Quebec in 1995 and its second congress in Tlaxcala,
Mexico. Since then, LVC has been negotiating their demands
with the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Currently, it has around
200 organisations from more than 70 countries as members
and is the most visible transnational agrarian movement.
Perception and Practice of Politics
The senior leaders of the KRRS have lived through various
phases of the movement, from being non-political and keeping
a distance from mainstream politics, to participation in elec-
tions and forming a political party. In that sense, the practice
of politics for KRRS members today is laden with memories and
layered with shared meanings. It is not unusual that a move-
ment more than three decades old will have innumerable sto-
ries, some of which have been kept alive through repeated nar-
rations and shared memories of the activists. Those are the
significant ones, indicating liminal zones in which the past,
the present, and the future overlap. I try to understand, how
the stories and memories of the past intertwine with the per-
ception of politics in the present and, in turn, contribute to the
JUNE 24, 2017 vol lII nos 25 & 26 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
practices. To grasp this, the actors I have chosen here are the
leadersat the village, district or state levelwithin the
pyramidal organisational structure of the KRRS. These leaders,
who are usually Lingayats or Vokkaligas, are located in a soci-
opolitical space where their caste identities, allegiance to
political parties, and membership in the movement are often
interconnected. Their practice of politics involves a constant
negotiation of their multiple identities and navigation across
boundaries of the social movement and political parties.
A recurrent narrative within the KRRS is that the movement
is weak today because all the good activists were taken away
by political parties who lured them with the possibility of
greater power. DSK, a senior leader from Dharwad,2 says,
Many KRRS leaders were taken away by political parties
because they were trained activists. They got sold to some
party or the other. BWR, another leader from Gulbarga, says,
All the political parties are now filled with dozens of good activists
from the KRRS. I can name many leaders and activists. This is because
they lured the activists by giving some opportunities, as these activists
are experienced in agitation and mass mobilisation.
As the movement in its initial years maintained a distance from
mainstream politics, the notion that mainstream politics is
corrupt and dirty was deep-rooted and continues to be so within
the movement. Chukki Nanjundaswamy (M D Nanjundaswamys
daughter) recalls that, in the beginning, if they (the leaders)
would meet politicians, they would come back and wash their
hands. Politics, as practiced by the political parties, was per-
ceived to be an extension of the state, and was, thus, presumed to
be necessarily corrupt and exploitative. When leaders left the
movement to join a political party, it was not only betrayal,
but also because the political parties had lured them. Politi-
cal parties were construed as enemies who would lure and
take away good activists to weaken the movement.
The perception that mainstream politics as an extension of
the state machinery is corrupt exists within the movement
even at present. K S Puttannaiah had won a seat in the 1994
elections and has been participating in electoral politics since
then. He says, If all criminals are in politics then what will
be the condition of politics? No political party has any ideol-
ogy. KRRS leaders, who are primarily activists, contest elec-
tions and participate in politics that is corrupt because,
these leaders want to bring a change in the way elections
are done in the country, want to make it more democratic,
and practice an alternative way of doing politics, says
Chukki. Expressing great joy over the victory of Puttannaiah
in the assembly elections of 2013, Chukki sees Puttannaiah as
the real opposition leader, as a representative of the KRRS, as
a face of the movement and all other progressive groups. She
says, I was happy when he said that it is the victory for the
movement, not just his. At least he remembered the KRRS.
Having a minister in Parliament is definitely useful in getting
some policies made. Two of Puttannaiahs supporters from
Mysore say, they [the state] know how powerful he is, and
see him as an evidence of the power of the KRRS. Participat-
ing in elections has been a controversial issue within the
movement as some have preferred to stay outside and some
Economic & Political Weekly EPW Published on Saturday, JUNE 24, 2017
have felt the need to be inside to be able to influence poli-
cies. On the whole, the view that prevails is that, after all, it is
a legitimate way of engaging with politics, to cleanse it of its
corruption, and hence is a matter of pride and recognition for
the movement.
The story of Babagouda Patil is significant because his name
has been imprinted in the history of the KRRS and continues
to influence the way leadership and politics is perceived. A
Lingayat from north Karnataka, he had emerged to be such a
popular leader that he was considered to be an abhinava (second
or new) Basavanna3 in north Karnataka. In 1989, when the
KRRS decided to contest elections, Patil contested and won
from two constituencies. KCB, who has been with the move-
ment since its initial beginnings in Shimoga district, describes
the strength of his leadership in north Karnataka: I saw huge
crowds running on the roads. I asked the people why they
were running. They said, to listen to Baba Gowda.
Patil left the KRRS and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) in the late 1990s. For some, this was a betrayal of having
switched over to the other side, and for some this was the
result of ego clashes within the movement and with Nanjun-
daswamy.4 Patils decision to join the BJP resulted in consider-
able weakening of the movement in north Karnataka, as sev-
eral KRRS members followed him. It indicated the ease with
which boundaries were traversed. It also showed that for the
followers, allegiance to a leader was paramount, whether he
was in a movement or a political party was inconsequential.
Patil was one such leader. Thus, BWR says:
Patil had contributed a great deal to the movement in the northern
part of Karnataka. So when he went to BJP, we supported that party,
because we knew him. Instead of supporting someone unknown, why
should we not support someone who we knew would be good? He did
not get along very well with BJP, so when he came out of BJP, we also
stopped supporting BJP. I was also given the offer to get some post
in BJP, but I did not want to. My intention was to give service to my
farming community. I never expected anything in return. (field notes,
Gulbarga, March 2012)
The KRRS is built on an elaborate leadership structure and, as
a result, there are several leaders who lead villages, and are
led by district leaders, who are in turn led by state-level leaders.
In effect, leaders lead other leaders. If one leader from the
topmost layer leaves, as in the case of Patil, several leaders who
follow him, and are also followed, leave as well. This indicates
that the axle around which the practice of politics revolves is a
particular leader. One may understand that a leader like Patil
exercised considerable charismatic authority, but what explains
such a phenomenon at the village level? CMP, a leader from
Raichur explains, KRRS leaders have a lot of power in the
village because of their organisation. So, if someones son is
jailed, KRRS leaders will go and get them released on bail or
with a lower fine. For example, Puttannaiah, an ex-president of
the KRRS, is a Vokkaliga and contests elections from Mandya,
the stronghold of the KRRS. He is often late for the KRRS
meetings because he has to solve problems in his village every
morning. KRRS leaders are like naya netas (new leaders or local
political fixers),5 who are proficient in getting things done
because of the power of the green shawl.6
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REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS
Leaders like Puttannaiah, Patil, and many others exemplify a
nature of leadership resulting from an amalgamation of
power that they derive from being the village elite, leaders of
a farmers movement, and having informal linkages with
political parties, simultaneously. These leaders are the agrar-
ian elite, from the dominant Lingayat and Vokkaliga castes,
who have traditionally been landholders and the village
spokespersons. Being the village elite, they often have close
personal ties with political party brokers at the village level. As
members of the KRRS, they derive power from the sanghatana
or the collective, symbolised in the green shawl. Practice
and perception of politics in everyday lives entails negotia-
tion of these multiple identities and the shared memories
of the movement that revolve around figures like Patil and
Nanjundaswamy, among several others. As we have seen earlier,
some leaders leave the movement to join a political party,
some follow these leaders, some enter into informal alliances
with political parties, and some contest elections. As a result,
there exist numerous factions at the village level and the
KRRS today is a loose collective of many small kingdoms
scattered over some pockets of the state. The presence of
numerous factions also owes to the changing nature of the
leadership itself, which in turn is related to the fragmenta-
tion of the farming classes and a complete transformation in
the rural social structure characterised by bigger farmers
moving out of the village and smaller farmers moving out of
agriculture itself (Jodhka 2006). One no longer sees such
mass mobilisation, leaders like Nanjundaswamy or Patil, and
the erstwhile solidarity among farmers movements today.
This solidarity remains strong in some villages in some dis-
tricts, but they function within the territorial boundaries of
the village, or sometimes districts, and stay entrenched in
local issues and politics.
Networks and Solidarities
When the KRRS, under the leadership of Nanjundaswamy,
stepped into the international arena, the terms local and
global became a part of everyday discussions and these
terms attained shared meanings for the activists. It is interest-
ing to note how the terms local and global are perceived dif-
ferently by actors, and how they become somewhat generic
terms with multiple meanings attached to them. Tsing uses
the metaphor of friction to describe interconnection across
differences and how heterogeneous and unequal encounters
can lead to new arrangements of culture and power (2005: 5).
Engagement with LVC, and earlier with PGA, entailed intercon-
nection between actors who represented diverse kinds of
movements in different corners of the world. In the case of the
KRRS, it was Nanjundaswamy who not only represented the
movement on different platforms, but also became the chan-
nel through which ideas (that emerged through interactions
with diverse actors) were brought to the villages of Karnataka.
As a result, ideas, leadership, and issues came to be perceived
through a new lens: the local and the global.
Local and global became terms to understand the transfor-
mation in the conception and experience of space. Something
52 Published on Saturday,
REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS
that was distant had become a part of the everyday, and vice
versa. Relating to the new configurations of space and dis-
tance involved construction of boundaries between spaces,
and reconstitution of political identities and solidarities. Liter-
ature proliferates on theorising the category of space in rela-
tion to social practices and interaction in the works of Manuel
Castells, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Margaret Kohn, and
Doreen Massey, among several others. It is not possible to do
justice to a discussion of such rich debates and important theo-
retical contributions conceptualising physical and social
space, territorial and relational approaches to place, and theo-
retical positions that move beyond space/place binaries in this
paper. I follow the approaches of scholars like Routledge
(2003), Wolford (2004) and Featherstone (2008), who have
explored spatialities of human relations, particularly how
place, scale, and space affect the ways in which grievances are
translated into collective forms of political action. Feather-
stone (2008) applies some of these concepts to the study of
social movements and argues that there is a need for political
geographers to transcend the binaries of local and global,
space and place. Such a binary position conceptualises space
as an abstract economic and political configuration that une-
venly structures the lives of people, and place refers to the
sites where people forge relations and negotiates with these
abstract forces (Nicholls 2009: 81).
For the KRRS, the binaries of space and place took concrete
shape in the shared meanings of the movement since the
1990s. The KRRS embarked on a series of protests during the
1990s under the leadership of Nanjundaswamy. They organ-
ised a rally at the Boat Club in 1992 against the Dunkel Draft,
attacked agribusiness multinational corporation (MNC) Car-
gills office in Bangalore in 1992, and launched the Beeja Saty-
agraha campaign (freedom to save seeds). It launched the
global campaign, Operation Cremate Monsanto in 1998, where
farmers movements from France and Indonesia joined the
KRRS in burning Monsantos GM seeds in field trials. It organ-
ised the Bandi Yatra (Cart March) where farmers movements
of the country jointly threw away imported goods into the sea
from the port in Mumbai as a symbol of protest against free-
trade agreements (FTA s). The Intercontinental Caravan (ICC)
organised by the KRRS in 1999 was a landmark event where
400 farmers from India, along with representatives from other
movements, travelled across Europe staging protests at differ-
ent sites, with slogans like our resistance is as transnational
as capital (Featherstone 2003: 405). These were global cam-
paigns, designed and planned solely by Nanjundaswamy to
resist globalisation.
These were campaigns that were designed to target the
opposition, who were physically distant, and yet controlling
everyday lives. Simultaneously, activities in the international
arena required reimagining a section of the distant as close
allies. But, were these allies really close? Will LVC give us MSP
[minimum support price]? asked a leader from Devanhalli.
Chukki says, Even today I need to explain what LVC does and
that it is not a funding agency, not an NGO. People here will
ask, will LVC solve the problem of pricing? Will engagement in
JUNE 24, 2017 vol lII nos 25 & 26 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
LVC lead to less farmer suicides? Farmer suicides, droughts,
and crop failures were issues that were particular to the
place, that were urgent and immediate, that were experi-
enced directly by the people. CMP, a leader from Raichur,
explains, LVC organises seminars, and would seminars on cli-
mate change be of any use to farmers suffering from drought,
even though they are connected? The phenomenon of globali-
sation and resistance to globalisation, were both equally dis-
tant, invisible, and indirectly related to the everyday lives of
KRRS members. In fact, not only had the relation to space and
distance transformed, but engaging with the global implied
reimagining these relations in spatial terms.
The Local and the Global
Scholars have argued that a dual discourse of the local and the
global fragmented the movement, created multiple divisions
within an already declining movement, and did not result in
any social transformation at the local level (Assadi 1997; Mad-
sen 2001; Pattenden 2005). Based on a study of the ICC, Pat-
tenden concludes that,
the KRRS leadership has, in effect, developed a dual discourse aimed
at its social bases (focusing on material issues of immediate concern)
and at an international audience (focusing on the globalisation of ag-
riculture). (2005: 1979)
In a conversation with Assadi in Mysore, he said,
one criticism that has been levelled against the movement is that while
it was becoming or claiming to be global, the KRRS was neglecting or
forgetting the basic local issues which had sustained the movement for
the last twenty years.
However, the point we may note here is that this perception in
terms of the local and the global binary is rather simplistic.
The divergence in the movement may be seen as a reflection of
different conceptions and experiences of place and space for
people with different material conditions.
After all, leaders like Nanjundaswamy or his daughter
Chukki typify transnational activists, who are well-educated
middle-class intellectuals. According to Tarrow,
the fundamental socio-cultural change that has increased transna-
tional activism is the growth of a stratum of individuals who travel
regularly, read foreign books and journals and become involved in
networks of transactions abroad. (2006: 35)
Puttannaiah (who was the President of the KRRS, and had won
a seat in the 2013 elections) said, I do not know about interna-
tional networking. Ask Chukki. I have gone abroad once, but I
do not know what happens at the international level. Refer-
ring to Nanjundaswamy, BN, a leader from Mysore said, It was
a one-man show. Nanjundaswamy got involved in these net-
works and as a result of his travels, he was often absent. A fre-
quently absent leader, the abstract forces of globalisation, and
the invisible networks of LVC, all the three overlapped and
attained a spatial dimension, where all were equally distant. It
also brought a temporal shift. It was as if the movement had
evolved to take a new form that was unknown to the other
leaders. For the other leaders, the 1990s were distinctly differ-
ent from the 1980s, and consequently the local attained the
meaning of being old, and the global, new. Thus, the local
Economic & Political Weekly EPW Published on Saturday, JUNE 24, 2017
was a term that came to imply the place, the movement as it
was in the 1980s, and the practice of politics specific to the
place, where leaders like Puttannaiah reigned. Whereas, the
global became associated with the abstract forces of globalisa-
tion, a distant leader, and transnational networks functioning
in spaces of resistance unrelated to the real problems of the
farmer. Different experiences and perceptions of place and
space within the leadership intersected with the differences in
their identitiesparticularly a dominant caste village elite
vis--vis the urban middle-class intellectualresulting in the
localglobal binary within the movement.
Counter-globalisation networks have been integral to the
construction of political identities. Featherstone (2008) explores
the processes of articulation through which solidarities are
constituted between struggles in different spatial and tempo-
ral contexts. He focuses on political activities that entail differ-
ent organisational forms, different subjectivities, and ways of
ordering and constructing solidarities. In the following section,
we focus on how networking practices in the transnational
and national spheres overlap and are intertwined, resulting in
reconstitution of political identities and formation of solidari-
ties. We look through the lens of leaders involved in the pro-
cess of networking, both at national and international levels.
Two networks emerged at the national levelthe South Indian
Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements (SICCFM) and
the Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements
(ICCFM). Both are a part of LVC. The ICCFM includes farmers
movements of the country who are members of LVC. The SIC-
CFM is closely associated and has considerable overlap with
the ICCFM. However, the SICCFM specifically comprises move-
ments of the southern region of the country and reaches out
beyond farmers groups (that are a part of the ICCFM) to other
diverse groups such as landless labourers, Dalits, and Adivasis,
and is oriented more towards questions of right to food, food
sovereignty, FTA s, and introduction of GMOs in agriculture.
After Nanjundaswamy, Chukki has taken over the activities
of networking at the national and international levels and
works in association with Kannaiyan Subramaniam and Ash-
lesha Khadse. Subramaniam, an activist from Tamil Nadu, is
the coordinator of the SICCFM. The formation of the SICCFM in
2009 is significant. It indicates a need felt by leaders engaged
in networks to build alliances with diverse actors, with not
only Dalit and Adivasi movements of the southern states of the
country, but also NGOs, such as Focus on the Global South and
GRAIN, which are associated with LVC at the transnational level.
The SICCFM forms a platform for activists, from both move-
ments and NGOs, where solidarities are formed between actors
from different fields. Ashlesha Khadse, who was the technical
assistant of LVC in South Asia (currently coordinator of Amrita
Bhoomi), forms a key link, connecting networks at the national
and transnational levels. It is the close association of Chukki,
Subramaniam and Khadse that lies behind the intricate and
intertwining networks and overlapping spheres of the
national and transnational.
Interestingly, the BKU is not part of the SICCFM, either
because it is located in the northern region of the country,
vol lII nos 25 & 26 53
REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS
and/or because of difference in ideological focus. But, the
Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha (AGMK), a Dalit organisation, is an
integral part of the SICCFM. This indicates a complete reshuf-
fling of solidarities owing to the different conceptions of space,
distance, and identities. For these leaders, engaging in the
transnational sphere has become necessary since the eco-
nomic reforms of 1991, because they locate the deepening of
agrarian crisis in the forces of liberalisation and the with-
drawal of the state. As a result, they are attempting to create
new political spaces that go beyond territorial boundaries and
imagine new forms of collective identities. C K Janu of the
AGMK says, It is no longer an issue of a particular community,
but part of a growing global crisis, we must work together to
address these issues. Crafting notions of all-inclusive collec-
tive identities between actors who otherwise share conflicting
relations, or are located in different spatial, temporal, and
social contexts, become crucial to build solidarities. While
these alliances remain limited to the leaders and are not
smooth processes, the purpose of such networks is to go
beyond the territorial boundaries and particular identities.
Thus, we need to understand the localglobal divergence not
simply as a dual discourse within the movement. It must be
seen as the result of external factors, such as the deepening
agrarian crisis during liberalisation and the consequent trans-
formation in the casteclass dynamics in the village, and
internal factors, such as different conceptions and experiences
of space, distance, and identities by different leaders, along-
side a fragmentation in the leadership within the movement,
as well as the formation of solidarities with diverse actors.
Food Sovereignty and Zero-budget Natural Farming
India is brimming with stories of alternative experiments
(Kothari and Shrivastava 2012), and zero-budget natural
farming (ZBNF) is one such alternative farming method.
ZBNF, developed by Subhash Palekar (2010), is a variant of
natural farming that stands on two pillars: one, that there is no
external input and hence it is zero-budget, and two, the pro-
duce of native cows is used to increase soil fertility. Natural
farming is not just a farming method, but also a philosophy, the
origins of which go back to Masanobu Fukoukas natural farm-
ing experiments (documented in The One Straw Revolution
[1975]) in 1938 in Japan. The key idea of natural farming is
practicing a do-nothing or natural way of farming without
disturbing the natural environment. The KRRS started encour-
aging ZBNF since 2005 when one of its members, Krishnappas
achievements became a success story of ZBNF. Since then, Pale-
kar became a farmers hero in Karnataka, and is fondly called
Krishi ka Rishi, meaning the farmers sage. In Karnataka, the
KRRS has been the key force behind establishing ZBNF as an
agro-ecological practice. Currently, ZBNF is being practiced in
different parts of Karnataka, and Amrita Bhoomi, an agro-ecology
school of LVC, founded by the KRRS in Chamrajnagar district,
forms a platform where training camps are organised and farm-
ers exchange knowledge and traditional seeds.
Amrita Bhoomi was conceived by Nanjundaswamy and was
finally established by the efforts of Chukki in 2013. The key
54 Published on Saturday,
REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS
idea behind the formation of Amrita Bhoomi is to encourage
agro-ecological practices of farming, as an alternative to con-
ventional farming methods and is closely linked to the notion
of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty as a discourse and prac-
tice has gained much recognition among policymakers, activ-
ists, and researchers. LVC is the key force behind popularising
the concept. Broadly defined as the right of the nations or the
people of a region to control and protect their own food sys-
tems, including the markets, production modes and food cul-
tures, it has emerged as a critical alternative to the dominant
neo-liberal model of agriculture and trade (Wittman et al
2010: 2). For LVC, it is the framework to bring otherwise
disconnected struggles on a common platform so as to negotiate
place-based experiences and spaces of resistance, and to
create a collective framework. Closely linked to food sover-
eignty is the concept of agroecology, which implies, a combi-
nation of recovery, revalorisation of traditional peasant farm-
ing methods and the innovation of new ecological practices
(Rosset and Martinez-Torres 2012). Thus, agroecology and
food sovereignty go hand-in-hand, and, with the efforts of
the KRRS, ZBNF is established in Karnataka as one such agro-
ecological practice.
Networks are channels through which ideas and discourses
travel and encounter other well-defined and concrete ideas.
More often than not, because of different histories and geogra-
phies of the origins of such ideas, they remain disconnected.
This is a process through which different ideas travel, result-
ing in a complex interplay where certain strands of different
ideas get entwined, some remain loosely tied, and some do not
meet each other. What emerges from these encounters is
something different, which again travels and the process con-
tinues. Thus, struggles connected through networks are con-
stantly shaping each other. It is not possible to describe the
entire genealogy of the idea of food sovereignty8 here. How-
ever, we may focus on the encounter of two concepts: food sov-
ereignty, which travelled through the network of LVC to Karna-
taka, and the concept of Beeja Satyagraha. Beeja Satyagraha
was launched by Nanjundaswamy in 1993 and incorporated
farmers rights to livelihood, freedom to save seeds, and resist-
ance to neo-liberal models of agriculture, and called for a sus-
tainable system of agriculture. It invoked Gandhis Salt Satya-
graha campaign using peasants seeds as a symbol of peasant
resistance against MNC-patented seeds. Here, the farmers of
the country were constructed as one composite group reject-
ing GMOs in agriculture. Such a powerful notion remained in
the shared memories of KRRS activists, but was not practised.
LVC conceptualises a collective identity of the agrarian
population as people of the land, which incorporates small
and medium farmers in the global South. This is a collective
vision that encompasses all people associated with agriculture
and land and is inclusive of all the various agrarian classes in
different regions and contexts. In view of the presence of
diverse agrarian classes, this is a necessary abstraction to
forge a sense of the collective and unity for a global agrarian
resistance. For Nettie Wiebe, of the National Farmers Union
of Canada, there is one common demand, one common
JUNE 24, 2017 vol lII nos 25 & 26 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
problem, whoever we are or wherever we come from. The
alternative to this problem is food sovereignty. On the one
hand, it is this populist strand that entwined the concepts of
food sovereignty and Beeja Satyagraha. And on the other,
Subhash Palekars strong opposition to the West invoked the
already existent Bharat versus India discourse of the farm-
ers movements. Alternative agro-ecological farming prac-
tices in the global South informed by a notion of food sover-
eignty contradict the ideological content of natural farming
that Palekar calls spiritual farming with strong nationalist
claims (Bhattacharya forthcoming). Despite such ideological
contradictions, ZBNF is a success story of agro-ecology among
the farmers of the KRRS and also in Karnataka, possibly
because the rich farmer base of the KRRS can afford the tran-
sition cost from chemical to natural farming, have enough
land and a native cow to practice such a method. It is this
convergence of the interests of the farmers, the leaders of the
KRRS functioning in different spheres, and the interplay of
discourses that lies behind the success of ZBNF as an alterna-
tive practice of farming.
Conclusions
Two separate waves, starting at different points in time, where
the troughs of the two waves overlap might be a useful
imagery here. There is no doubt that the farmers movements
of the 1980s have subsided. We have seen earlier that, in the
case of the KRRS, it exists as a loose collective of many small
kingdoms scattered over some pockets of the state. With lack
of able leadership at the state level, leaders get entrenched in
smaller and smaller territories and deal with issues that are
particular to their regions, in other words, their local issues.
Simultaneously, some leaders having direct networks with LVC
and other diverse actors at the national level engage in poli-
tics, defying fixed territories, or in global issues. With a non-
existent leadership that could have functioned in between
these two spaces, it is undeniable that the movement is frag-
mented, both horizontally and vertically. This indicates the
decline of a movement, metaphorically located in the trough of
the first wave.
It is argued here that this is because of different conceptions
and experiences of space for different actors. A complete
reshuffling of spatialities of human relations has taken place.
Leaders have become distant, and yet solidarities develop with
distant actors, while long-term allies seem not so close, but
unlikely alliances with diverse actors emerge, and identities
also attain different spatial dimensions. I have attempted to
unravel the existent localglobal disconnect, by demonstrat-
ing that perceptions of actors differ because of different expe-
riences of space, which, in turn, are related to different mate-
rial conditions. These differences primarily pertain to the
practice of politics by actors in different spheres, the local, the
national, and the transnational. While there is considerable
overlap between the transnational and national spheres, the
local sphere remains disconnected.
What marks the beginning of the second wave, overlapping
with the trough of the first one, are the imaginations and
Economic & Political Weekly EPW Published on Saturday, JUNE 24, 2017 vol lII nos 25 & 26 55

REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS

practices of alternative experiments. Food sovereignty, as
the critical alternative, gets fused with the notion of Beeja
Satyagraha, and ZBNF becomes a success story of agroecological
practice in Karnataka. Three processes are at play here: a
transnational agrarian movement popularising the notion of
food sovereignty and agroecology, a farmers movement
attempting to reinvent itself and create alternatives, and the
natural farming movement. This is significant because diverse
actors in different spatial and temporal contexts are contribut-
ing towards a possibly rising wave.

Notes
1 For example, Initiatives in Critical Agrarian
Studies (ICAS) is a community of like-minded
scholars, development practitioners, and activ-
ists from different parts of the world who are
working on agrarian issues. It is based at
the International Institute of Social Studies
(ISS), The Hague, Netherlands.
2 Names are not stated to maintain anonymity.
3 Basavanna, also known as Basaveshwara, was a
12th-century philosopher and social reformer in
Karnataka. He fought against the caste system
and untouchability, and rejected many Hindu
rituals and the ideas of karma and reincarna-
tion. He practiced monotheism through worship
centred on Shiva in the form of the linga or
ishtalinga. Lingayatism or Veerashaivism is a dis-
tinct Shaivite tradition in India, established
much before the 12th century, but attained new
heights because of Basavanna.
4 The movement underwent a split in the late
1990s and there exist several versions and
interpretations of it today. Ego clashes with
Babagouda form one part of the story, which I
have not elaborated here for lack of space.
5 Political entrepreneurs, or political fixers, or
pyraveekars, who have information and con-
nections with the administrative system, pos-
sess skills to exert pressure to get things done
and hold considerable authority in villages.
There is extensive literature on the emergence
of political fixers and the association with caste
identities.
6 All KRRS members wear a green shawl as a
symbol of their membership in the movement.
8 For more on food sovereignty, see P McMichael
(2009).
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