The strike took place following months of protest from Indian farmers, a response to three farm acts passed by the Parliament of India in September 2020. According to protesters, the farm acts would leave small farmers, the vast majority, at the mercy of large corporations. Poor farmers were already desperate before the laws were passed - in 2019 alone, 10,281 agricultural workers committed suicide.

Dozens of farm unions began organizing protests demanding the repeal of these laws. After failing to get the support of their respective state governments, the farmers decided to pressure the Central Government by marching to Delhi en masse.

The farmers arrived at Delhi on November 25th, 2020 and were met by police, who employed the use of tear gas and water cannons, dug up roads, and used layers of barricades and sand barriers to try and stop their march.

On November 26th, 250 million workers from all over the country initiated a general strike in solidarity with the farmer's struggle. According to Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, trade unions issued a twelve-point charter of demands which included "the reversal of the anti-worker, anti-farmer laws pushed by the government in September, the reversal of the privatisation of major government enterprises, and immediate [Covid] relief for the population".

Farmer protests continued for more than a year, featuring mass marches, clashes with police, and many failed negotiations between farmers' unions and the government. Rakesh Tikait, a leader with Bharatiya Kisan Union (English: Indian Farmers' Union) stated in October 2021 that approximately 750 participants have died in the protest.

Among the dead was a Senior Superintendent of Police in the city of Sonepat, who committed suicide, saying he could not bear the pain of the farmers. His suicide note read "Bullets fired from the guns kill only those whom they strike. The bullet of injustice, however, kills many with a single stroke... It is humiliating to suffer injustice."

In a televised address on November 19th, 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that his government would repeal the three acts in the upcoming winter parliamentary session in December. The national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, Rakesh Tikait, stated the protests would only cease once the laws were repealed.

The film actor Deep Sidhu also joined the protests, and was quoted as having told a police officer the following: "Ye inquilab hai. This is a revolution. If you take away farmers' land, then what do they have left? Only debt."

We Are Grass. We Grow on Everything: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2020).

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  • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Do American boomers hate their kids? I remember them always bragging about how they'd be free when their kids moved out and those that had their kids live with them really resented it and said the kids had it easy because "they don't have to take care of themselves when they have someone else doing it for them."

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Kind of? The older I get the less clear I am on how my 'rents feel about me and my sibs. For one thing; They never actually talk about their feelings so trying to figure out why they're doing the things they do is some kind of espionage cum anthropology bs. Sometimes they do nice things but in ways that seem very them-oriented. Sometimes they're very understanding, then do things that make me question if they've ever met me before. Deeply weird people.

    • Judge_Jury [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      yea

      I guess it's partly their malignant individualism, partly the theology that reinforces it, and partly their worldview of "a civilization in decay."

      Their kids are dependent on them, naturally, and they're forced to provide certain necessities which they resent. Most of the ones I know are Evangelical, which means they consider kids to embody human nature which is synonymous with evil and sin, so their relationship to parenting is basically just to coerce their kids toward becoming an idealized version of theirselves. That frustrates them though, because it doesn't work, so they wind up considering their kids corrupted by the "culture in decay"

      The end result seems to be that they subconsciously love their kids insofar as they're individually capable of love (often not far), they subconsciously resent it, and they consciously believe their kids are bad so their conscious expression of "love" is moralizing coercion

    • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I think its gen x that hate their kids. Boomers were fine with their kids. Millennials were the ones that had to move back home after college.