CIVIL SOCIETY CALLS OUT ‘FAKE STATE NARRATIVE’ TO SUPPRESS FARMERS VOICES

Sat 30 January 2021:

Prominent members of civil society on Friday condemned the government’s attempt to criminalise the legitimate protests by farmers and demanded an unconditional withdrawal of “motivated FIRs against the leadership of the farmer movement”. They called it a “brazen misuse of the police and the law to silence people’s legitimate democratic expression”.

The demand was made at the Press Club where senior academics, activists and lawyers gathered to express solidarity with the struggling farmers.

Speakers said that despite clear, unequivocal condemnation by farmer leaders, of any violence on January 26, the government has activated the criminal justice machinery to lodge FIRs against them under a range of criminal laws, including an anti-terror law, the UAPA.

This is now becoming a familiar playbook of the ruling establishment, last seen in the winter of 2019, when the equal citizenship movement against the CAA-NRC, and its young leadership, was similarly vilified, terrorized, charged under UAPA, and arrested, they said.

The speakers said that the fake state narrative of the farmers movement as a ‘violent conspiracy’ against India, is an exact copy-paste of the narrative “we saw last year around the anti-CAA movement, once again being spun to try and tar and suppress the democratic voices of our people. Violent mobs are being deliberately incited, to target individual farmers leaders and at protest sites”.

The speakers drew attention to the section of a subservient media that is, once again, pushing these lies. Several speakers spoke of the completely peaceful nature of large sections of the farmers rally on January 26th, where with pride and the tricolour aloft their thousands of tractors, farmers made their way into the capital city of their republic.

“This vision of a people’s democracy on display was entirely obliterated by the mainstream media, and only the discordant violence by some, was made the dominant story.

Any individual striking even a marginally different note to the dominant state-sponsored narrative, is now being targeted,” they said. The speakers expressed alarm at how senior journalists and public figures have been charged with sedition among other criminal sections of the IPC, simply for a tweet that was retracted.

The Press conference was addressed by Senior Advocate Prashant Bhushan, Secretary of the Gandhi Peace Foundation Kumar Prashant, activist Shabnam Hashmi, economist Atul Sood, scientist and Co-Convener of the Nation For Farmers Dinesh Abrol.

The speakers appealed to all Indians to organize a day-long fast and all-religion prayer meetings in their respective towns and cities on Saturday at 5. 17 pm. Saturday, that’s January 30, is observed as Shaheed Diwas, the day Gandhiji was assassinated.

In Delhi, the prayer meeting will be held at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, near ITO, it was announced at the press conference.