When Aasees Kaur grew up, he often saw rewards for wheat, cauliflower, and tomatoes on his family’s farm in Amritsar, a town in the Indian state of Punjab, where his Sikh family has been cultivating on the same land for nearly two centuries.
He now lives in Cincinnati, but still has many relatives there whose main source of income is agriculture.
So when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government passed three laws in September to deregulate the sector, removing guaranteed minimum prices for key crops and eliminating the government as an intermediary between farmers and distributors, she joined her family abroad in protest. Kaur, 25, worked with local Sikh activists to stage a car rally this month in Cincinnati, which, despite freezing temperatures, drew nearly 1,000 people.
“Agriculture is all we are,” said Kaur, a community service manager at the Sikh Coalition, the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the United States. “It gave us an education and opened up a world full of opportunities. If we were to stay for now, that would feel so wrong.”
Mirroring protesters in India, where hundreds of thousands of farmers marched on the capital, New Delhi, young Sikh American activists from more than a dozen states drove socially distant caravans to raise awareness of workers’ conflicts farmers – many of whom are their relatives and friends.
The Sikh diaspora has been at the forefront of demonstrations since December, as many members have their roots in Punjab, India’s breadbasket, and were themselves farmers before immigrating to the United States.
Harshwinder Kaur, a 26-year-old law student, helped coordinate a weekend caravan in Denver that pulled out more than 250 vehicles. She said the organizers led the march past local news stations to get reporters’ attention. Like many Sikh Americans her age, Kaur has cousins in Punjab who depend on agriculture to survive and have been protesting since September. Under the new laws, they could lose their land to agro-industrial corporations.
“Being the first generation in America, being proud to be American and having the right to protest has sparked this desire to spread the word about what is happening to our people,” said Kaur, whose parents were co-founders. of the first gurdwara in Colorado or the Sikh House of Worship.
Agriculture is an integral part of India’s economy, employing almost half of the country’s workforce. The country is heading for an agrarian crisis of decades, triggered by ecological and environmental changes. Rising agricultural costs have forced more farmers into bankruptcy, leading to rising suicide rates. For many, the new laws, which appear during a paralyzing pandemic on the market, could be the straw that destroys their existence.
“Delhi is solidifying a new caste-type economic system,” said Mallika Kaur, author of “Faith, Gender and Activism in the Punjab Conflict.” She said the privatization of entire sectors in India, such as health care and education, indicates that corporate interests are expanding at such a rate and scale that it could soon erode most government guarantees.
“The sense that this is a historic moment of enormous unity in the face of government agendas has inspired many people to join the protests,” she said.
For some young Sikh Americans, inaction is not an option when their relatives in India risk their lives – enduring police violence and sleeping on hay in trailers – to protect their lands and earn in decline.
Young people are uniquely positioned to mobilize the diaspora because they have spent “their entire lives as cultural brokers and are best able to offer new perspectives and bring new groups” of supporters, said Naindeep Singh, executive director of Jakara in California. The movement, a grassroots organization for young Sikhs.
The group staged a recent protest in the San Francisco Bay Area, where about 10,000 people drove across the Bay Bridge from Oakland to the Indian Consulate in San Francisco. The rally was not just for Sikhs – the event included a diverse list of speakers, with prominent slots for women and leaders from marginalized backgrounds.
“We wanted to involve as many people as possible,” said Singh, who has long-term relatives in Punjab.
In addition to the solidarity rallies, activists also put pressure on elected officials to condemn the Modi government for using water cannons and tear gas against farmers. In the past week, several congressional leaders have written letters to the Indian ambassador addressing the excessive use of force against dissidents.
Rupinder Singh, an organizer who helped coordinate a caravan in Washington, DC that drew more than 2,000 people, said the laws sparked such a feverish backlash from the diaspora because it not only poses an existential threat. for farmers, but it could also trigger a hunger crisis.
“It gives corporations such unprecedented control of India’s food supply that they will threaten the food security of all Indians in the country,” he said. “It will have a devastating effect on family members living around the world.”