For months, government spokespersons and a section of the media were looking for a leader among the consortium of more than three dozen farmer unions protesting against the farm laws. On the night of January 28, they finally found one in Rakesh Tikait, the national spokesperson of the Bhartiya Kisan Union, who broke down before the media, alleging that there’s a “conspiracy against farmers”.
His critics might call his emotional outburst a smart political move but Rakesh Tikait, the second son of Mahendra Singh Tikait, the mercurial farmer leader who revived the BKU in the late 1980s with a string of dramatic protests in Muzaffarnagar and Meerut against the then Congress government, provided a new spark with his tears and tenacity to the dying embers at the Ghazipur border protest site. Till January 28, the BKU was just playing a supporting role at Singhu and Tikri.
In fact, when Mr. Tikait first emerged at the U.P. Gate on Ghazipur border on December 28 with scores of his supporters, the impression was that he would be used by the ruling party as a bulwark to keep the restive Punjab and Haryana farmers in check. Even those in the All India Kisan Sangharsh Committee took time to believe his commitment. After his father’s death in 2011, Mr. Tikait’s claim to fame was a Kisan Kranti Yatra in 2018 that led to a skirmish with the Delhi police at the same Ghazipur border in 2018.
After the dramatic turns of events on Thursday, the Ghazipur border became the gravitational centre pulling in support. And the 51-year-old constable-turned-farmer leader emerged as an unlikely hero.
Media savvy all along, he maintained that he voted for the BJP but the party didn’t live up to its promises. In the early days of the protest, his concerns were as much about pending payment of sugarcane crop, rising prices of diesel and electricity as the farm laws. “The government is looking to privatise agriculture and is looking at farmers just as labour,” he told The Hindu in early December. He courted controversy when he asked temple trusts to donate to the farmer protest as they do during the Kanwar Yatra (an annual Hindu pilgrimage). Aware of making statements, every evening the colour of his turban would change from green to saffron. “Saffron is not just the colour of the ruling party.”
With smaller landholdings, in the conversations, he would talk about how farmers of western Uttar Pradesh didn’t have the material back-up to sustain a long protest. He built bridges with the farm unions of the terai region of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand who were more equipped to stay put. He would advise his acolytes to spend in tractors rather than SUVs and learn from their counterparts on the flyover. He would jokingly describe the space under the Delhi-Meerut Expressway, where his supporters had assembled, as Dehradun and the stage on the flyover, where the farmers from the terai first put the tents, as Mussoorie. In the last 60 days, Mr. Tikait made a journey from ‘Dehradun’ to ‘Mussoorie’.
Also read: A field day for Rakesh Tikait
The local BJP leaders and Ghaziabad administration failed to realise that their political clout might have reduced but the status of Mahendra Singh Tikait and Chaudhary Charan Singh clans remains intact in western U.P. The ties between the two families had become tenuous after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, but on Thursday, Ajit Singh, Charan Singh’s son and leader of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), was the first one to call Mr. Tikait to say that he is there for the farm leader.
Support pours in
Mr. Tikait’s breakdown video, along with a tweet of support by RLD vice-president Jayant Chaudhary, spread like wildfire in the sugarcane belt of U.P., Haryana and Rajasthan. His tears were seen as an insult to the farmer’s dignity and a huge crowd turned up for a farmers’ ‘Mahapanchayat’ called by the BKU in Muzaffarnagar and Mathura.
More importantly, it bolstered his position as an undisputed leader of farmers in western Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. After his rival V.M. Singh of the Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan left the protest site on Wednesday, holding Mr. Tikait responsible for the Republic Day incidents, Mr. Tikait warned against using the incident to tarnish the Sikh community. “We rushed to Ghazipur once we heard his outburst. He is our sole leader now,” said Sewak Singh Siddhu, a prominent farmer from Udham Singh Nagar, Uttarakhand. Shamim Hussain, a farmer from Bulandshahr, who reached the protest site to offer water to Mr. Tikait, saw hope in the revival of the Jat-Muslim amity that marked the region before the Muzaffarnagar riots. Interestingly, it was after the riots that the Tikait brothers, Rakesh and Naresh, gradually tilted towards the BJP.
Senior BJP leader Rajnath Singh had supported Rakesh Tikait during his protest against the Congress government ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. However, Mr. Tikait didn’t completely burn his bridges with Ajit Singh. He fought the 2014 election on the RLD ticket from Amroha, finishing fourth.
Rajvir Singh, a veteran BKU hand, who has worked closely with the Tikait brothers, says though the pagdi of Baba Tikait passed on to the elder brother, it is Rakesh Tikait who is the true inheritor of his father’s legacy. “While Naresh limited himself to Muzaffarnagar, the more astute Rakesh accompanied his father to the protest sites. Police detention and jail are not new to him.”
Cynics feel from now on the protest could reduce to Jats versus the government. Mr. Tikait says a section of the media and the government would try to paint it like that as earlier they called it Sardar vs the government, but he would prove them wrong, again. With the Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad turning up in solidarity on Friday night, he could well be an important player in the caste-infested politics of Uttar Pradesh.
