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Indian farmers to protest in Europe against globalisation

Gurdip Singh in New Delhi

With issues like patents, biodiversity and the World Trade Organisation regime acquiring serious dimensions, Indian farmers are readying to fly to Europe later this month to propagate their viewpoint.

Led by star leader-activists such as Mahendra Singh Tikait and Prof Nanjundaswamy, the Indian farmers will interact heart-to-heart with multinational corporations like Nestle, Monsanto, Shell and Novartis. For good measure, Europe will get to see Indian style picketing, protests and dharnas and more.

More than 400 Indian farmers from various states will join an inter-continental caravan in Europe. The caravan will call a halt to the ''destruction'' caused by globalisation.

Many of them do not speak English, but they will use different ways to communicate with Europeans, many of which are more direct and real than language -- the most important of which is action.

There will be plenty of action during the caravan, action at the gates of headquarters of corporates like Nestle, Monsanto, Novartis and Shell. There will also be action in front of multilateral institutions such as the WTO and NATO and action against the leaders of the European Union and G-8.

The countries which the Indian delegation will visit include Germany, France, Holland and Geneva.

They will take up issues relating to the challenges being thrown up by the WTO ministerial conference to be held in the United States later this year.

Besides Tikait of the Bharatiya Kisan Union and Prof N D Nanjundaswamy of the Karnataka Farmers' Association, Vijay Jawandhia of the Shetkari Sanghatana will comprise the lead team.

The peasants have been selected from the state-level farmers organisations. They will be joined by participants from peasant, indigenous, women's and other grassroot movements from Latin America, Africa and south-east Asia.

Dialogue will be held with a wide range of grassroot organisations and people from other walks of life about alternative development models to plan direct action against the centres of power that are at the root of these problems.

The political content of this caravan hinges on several issues:

• Global policy making with particular reference to free trade and economic globalisation.
• Transnational corporations and transnational capital.
• Third World debt
• Militarism and nuclear issues.

Yudhvir Singh of the Delhi Gram Vikas Panchayat, an organisation devoted to the interests of farmers in the capital's urban and rural areas, said an important objective of the caravan is to promote greater contact and cooperation between all organisations from Europe and other continents.

It also aims to bring its political content close to the people's lives in all places in Europe.

Singh, who had been in the vanguard opposing India's signing the WTO agreement and attempts to join the patents treaty, said the caravan is not conceived as an isolated project.
It is seen as the beginning of a long-term process of convergence of diverse organisations and individuals with similar views on social change.

According to Haryana Rashtriya Janata Dal president Swaraj Lamba, a sympathiser of the movement, the caravan is about people who agree on the need to reclaim their lives challenging from below and build structures of power and construct alternatives controlled by the people.

Lamba described the Indian farmers' movement as one of the strongest and most dynamic actions in the global civil society. She said the poor of developing countries, including India, have been most directly affected by a development model imposed and maintained from the north in collaboration with the southern elite.

Lamba said such a development paradigm is condemning people to poverty, destroying the natural resources on which their livelihood is based, taking away control of their lives out of their hands and making them dependent on extremely exploitative and highly volatile multinational capital.

The Indian farmers will meet as many Europeans as possible directly, face to face, communicate with them not through newspaper articles or video documentaries, but at the human level. They would convey directly to them their understanding of the world system of governance to people of all walks of life, not just to those who are already politically active.

UNI

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