By Ananya Sharma
New Delhi: Like the earlier rounds of meetings, the fifth round of deliberations between the representatives of 40 Farmer Unions and Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Railways & Commerce Piyush Goyal and Minister of State for Commerce Som Prakash again proved inconclusive here today. Farmer leaders and the government will once again meet on December 9 — a day after the farmers’ scheduled ‘Bharat Bandh‘.
When the meeting started at Capital’s Vigyan Bhavan at 2 pm, farmer leaders expressed their unhappiness over the way farmers were being stopped from entering Delhi. The government though requested them to send back the elderly and the children home from the protest location due to cold weather and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The farmer leaders, however, made it clear that they were in the meeting not for discussions but they wanted a concrete answer from the government on whether it was repealing all the three new farm laws or not. The government, as MoS Agriculture Kailash Choudhary had stated earlier, was to clear all doubts of the farmers in today’s meeting. Agriculture Minister Tomar sought to assure the farmers’ unions that the existing APMC was a strong organisation and it will not be weakened. He said the Government was committed to the welfare of farmers and had taken “a number of steps and pro farmers reforms”. He said that MSPs have been hiked multiple times and will continue in future.
Interestingly displaying a major shift in their strategy, the farmer leaders did not take up the issue of a new law on Minimum Support Price (MSP), but stuck t their earlier demand that the government should roll back the new farm laws.
Sources said that since the farmer leaders refused to discuss anything despite repeated requests by Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, the latter even stepped out of the meeting for a while under the pretext of holding discussions with his officials. The Minister appealed to the Farmers Unions that they should give up their agitation and solve their grievances through talks and dialogue. Tomar regretted that the talks were not moving forward and said that on the question of repealing the agri laws, the Centre will have to consult the concerned departments as well as state governments. He wanted the farmers to resume the meeting on Monday also but the farmers categorically told him that also but finally it was decided to hold the meeting on December 9.
“Tomar thanked the farmers for maintaining discipline. We told him that the government should give us in writing whatever it decides and then only we will make our next move,” Dharmendra Malik, general secretary of one of the protesting unions, the Bharatiya Kisan Union, told globalbihari.com. He added: “Tomar concluded today’s meeting by saying that he will send us a proposal on 9th December.”
BKU Leader Rakesh Tikait said that “The government will prepare a rough draft of the changes they propose to make on the farms law after consulting the states.”
Prior to the meeting today, senior BJP Ministers Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, Narendra Singh Tomar and Piyush Goyal had also called on the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, at his residence today.
