Can a year long protest rewrite a nation’s agrarian story?
Have you ever wondered why farmers sleeping on highways unsettled an entire nation? This long form review explores Farmer Power by Sudhir Kumar Suthar, unpacking the 2020–21 farmers’ movement, its political aftershocks, historical roots, moral force and unresolved questions. You will walk away understanding why this was not just a protest, but a moment that quietly rearranged India’s democratic furniture.
Why Do Farmers Keep Knocking on the Nation’s Door?
Let us start with a simple, uncomfortable question. Why do farmers, year after year, leave their fields, families and fragile incomes to sit on roads, outside legislatures, or at the edges of cities that barely notice them? If agriculture feeds over 1.4 billion Indians and employs close to 42 percent of the workforce according to World Bank data, why does it so often feel like an afterthought in policy rooms?
Farmer Power enters this conversation without drama or sloganeering. Written by Sudhir Kumar Suthar and published by Penguin India in November 2025, the book looks at the 2020–21 farmers’ movement not as a flashpoint but as a culmination. It treats the protest as the result of long standing structural neglect, accumulated frustration, and a deep anxiety about dignity, survival and voice.
As a reader, you are not shouted at. You are not instructed on what to think. Instead, you are guided through facts, histories, interviews and policy choices that quietly lead you to ask harder questions of the state, the market and even yourself as a consumer of food.
One aspect that quietly reshaped public perception was the visible leadership of women at protest sites. From organising community kitchens to addressing crowds, their presence challenged long held assumptions about rural patriarchy. This role has been documented earlier in depth in an analysis of women’s leadership during the 2020 farmers’ protest , which complements the themes raised in Farmer Power.
Is Farmer Power the Book India Was Avoiding?
There is a reason books like this arrive late. The farmers’ protest embarrassed the political class. It unsettled corporate confidence. It complicated tidy narratives about reform and efficiency. For months, mainstream debate tried to reduce the movement to labels. Misled. Political. Regional. Temporary.
Suthar refuses that reduction. He treats the movement as a serious democratic assertion. One that was uncomfortable precisely because it was organised, peaceful, patient and morally persuasive. In doing so, Farmer Power becomes the kind of book that institutions often wish did not exist. Not because it is angry, but because it is careful.
Who Is Sudhir Kumar Suthar and Does His Voice Matter?
Sudhir Kumar Suthar teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His academic work focuses on development politics, rural change and public policy. That matters because this book is not written from a television studio or a newsroom deadline. It is written from classrooms, villages, archives and conversations.
Beyond academia, Suthar is also a traveller, blogger and poet, and has actively encouraged young researchers to step outside urban echo chambers through the Rural and Agrarian India Network. That grounding shows. The book never treats farmers as abstract data points. They remain human, strategic, divided at times, but deeply aware of what was at stake.
What Is Farmer Power Really About Beyond the Headlines?
At first glance, Farmer Power appears to be about three farm laws introduced in 2020. But that is only the doorway. The real subject of the book is power. Who holds it. Who negotiates it. Who is expected to silently absorb risk in the name of reform.
The book carefully traces how the farmers’ movement evolved from a sectoral protest into a broader democratic claim. It examines procurement systems, minimum support price anxieties, contract farming fears, and the vulnerability of small and marginal farmers who make up nearly 86 percent of India’s agricultural households according to the National Sample Survey Office.
How Does the Book Frame the 2020–21 Farmers’ Movement?
Suthar frames the movement as a hybrid phenomenon. It was rooted in Punjab and Haryana, yet it quickly acquired a national character. It used old tools like unions and sit ins, but also embraced social media, community kitchens and legal literacy camps. It resisted the state, yet insisted on constitutional language.
One of the book’s strongest contributions is showing how the movement balanced emotion and organisation. This was not spontaneous chaos. It was sustained mobilisation. Nearly 300,000 farmers marched towards Delhi between September and October 2020, eventually stationing themselves on national highways for over a year. According to multiple media reports including The Hindu and Indian Express, protest sites developed libraries, clinics, schools and memorials.
Suthar’s writing avoids spectacle and instead relies on observation, a trait often missing in public commentary today. This approach mirrors a broader tradition of social critique in Indian writing, where everyday behaviour becomes political commentary, much like the reflective style discussed in this cultural critique on masculinity and social behaviour .
What Makes This Protest Different From Earlier Agitations?
For over a decade before 2020, farmer groups had repeatedly attempted to draw attention to agrarian distress. Loan waivers, crop failures, price crashes and farmer suicides were raised again and again. Governments acknowledged them, formed committees, issued statements and moved on.
What unfolded after 2020, however, was something else entirely. This was not a seasonal agitation or a symbolic march. It was a prolonged occupation of public space that refused to be rushed, dismissed or violently provoked. In global terms, it stands alongside movements that combined discipline with endurance, making it a rare chapter in the history of social movements worldwide.
At its core, Farmer Power is also a book about consequence. About what happens when voices are ignored for too long. Literature that focuses on consequence rather than outrage often stays with the reader longer, a theme similarly explored in this reflection on responsibility and moral aftermath in modern writing .
What Actually Happened Between September 2020 and October 2021?
If you try to remember those months, images return slowly. Tractors lined up like patient elephants. Elderly farmers wrapped in blankets. Women managing langars. Young volunteers managing traffic and social media. The book reconstructs this period with method rather than nostalgia.
Why Did Nearly 300,000 Farmers March to Delhi?
The immediate trigger was the passage of three central farm laws related to contract farming, deregulated markets and essential commodities. Farmers feared that these laws would weaken the minimum support price system and tilt bargaining power towards large corporate buyers.
Suthar explains these fears without simplifying them. Contract farming, however benign it sounds, often risks turning farmers into wage labourers on land they once owned. The dismantling of assured procurement, even indirectly, would expose them to volatile markets where size determines survival.
How Did Highways Become the New Parliament?
Denied entry into Delhi, farmers transformed highways into democratic arenas. This spatial shift mattered. It made protest visible yet non violent. It forced commuters, media and politicians to confront the movement daily.
The book shows how this occupation was not accidental. It was strategic. Highways connected villages to cities. Blocking them symbolically disrupted the flow of goods just enough to be noticed, without descending into sabotage. It was protest as presence.
Were These Just Protests or a New Democratic Language?
One of the most persuasive arguments in Farmer Power is that the movement expanded the vocabulary of Indian democracy. It insisted that dissent need not be loud to be effective. That patience could be radical. That constitutional loyalty and resistance were not opposites.
How Did Civil Disobedience Remain Peaceful Yet Powerful?
Despite provocations, weather extremes and political vilification, the movement largely remained peaceful. This was not accidental virtue. It was conscious strategy. Suthar documents how farmer unions repeatedly restrained anger, knowing that violence would delegitimise their cause.
This discipline unsettled the state more than chaos would have. It created a moral asymmetry that global media noticed. According to reports by BBC and Al Jazeera, the protest became a reference point for non violent resistance in the twenty first century.
What Political Space Did Farmers Carve for Themselves?
The movement carved out a political space that was neither aligned nor submissive. It refused to become an electoral front, yet reshaped electoral outcomes. This distinction is crucial. It explains why the movement could criticise all major parties without collapsing into partisanship.
This space, Suthar argues, forced political actors to respond on unfamiliar terms. Not with speeches, but with negotiations. Not with slogans, but with repeal.
How Does Farmer Power Place This Movement in Global Context?
As you read further, a quiet realisation sets in. This was not only an Indian story. Farmer Power consistently places the 2020–21 farmers’ movement within a wider global moment where rural communities, from Latin America to Europe, are questioning market driven agricultural reforms. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, small scale farmers produce nearly one third of the world’s food. Yet, they remain the most economically vulnerable.
Suthar situates the Indian protest alongside global agrarian struggles without overstretching comparisons. He does not romanticise solidarity. Instead, he shows how farmers everywhere are responding to a similar anxiety. The fear of becoming irrelevant in a system that values efficiency over equity.
Why Is This Considered a Rare Moment in World Social Movements?
Most large scale protests either burn bright and fade or turn violent under pressure. The farmers’ movement did neither. It endured for over a year, across seasons, pandemics and political fatigue. That endurance is what places it in a rare category.
For more than a decade before 2020, farmer organisations had repeatedly tried to draw attention to agricultural distress that successive governments acknowledged politely and postponed conveniently. What emerged after 2020, however, was not a louder version of the same complaint. It was an entirely new chapter. A disciplined, decentralised, and morally consistent assertion that rewrote how dissent could function in the modern world.
How Did the Movement Inspire Farmers Beyond India?
International farmer unions and civil society groups referenced the Indian movement in discussions on food sovereignty and democratic participation. Publications like The Guardian and New York Times covered the protest not as a domestic law and order issue, but as a global question about who controls food systems.
Farmer Power captures this resonance without exaggeration. It reminds you that inspiration does not always mean replication. Sometimes it simply means reassurance. The reassurance that sustained, peaceful resistance is still possible.
What History of Farmer Protests Does the Book Remind You Of?
No movement emerges in a vacuum. One of the most rewarding sections of Farmer Power is its historical grounding. The book patiently walks you through earlier farmer agitations, especially in Punjab, where protest has long been a political language.
Why Has Punjab Always Been the Nerve Centre of Agrarian Dissent?
Punjab’s farmers occupy a unique position in India’s agricultural imagination. Beneficiaries of the Green Revolution, they also bore its hidden costs. Monocropping, soil depletion, groundwater crisis and rising input costs created a fragile prosperity.
From the Bharatiya Kisan Union movements of the 1980s to repeated protests over electricity pricing and procurement, Punjab’s farmers have rarely remained silent. Suthar shows how this history created organisational muscle memory. When 2020 arrived, the infrastructure for protest already existed.
What Role Did the Green Revolution Play in Shaping Protest Culture?
The Green Revolution delivered food security but also entrenched dependency on state procurement and chemical inputs. As procurement systems came under threat, farmers felt not just economically exposed but politically betrayed.
This explains why Punjab farmers reacted swiftly. The book helps you see that the protest was as much about preserving dignity earned through decades of feeding the nation as it was about legal clauses.
How Did Decades of Ignored Warnings Lead to 2020?
Perhaps the most sobering insight in Farmer Power is how predictable the explosion was. Farmer suicides, declining incomes and rising debt were documented repeatedly by the National Crime Records Bureau and independent researchers.
Why Were Earlier Farmer Movements Easier to dismiss?
Earlier protests were fragmented. Regional. Often framed as demands for subsidies rather than structural reform. Governments learned to manage optics rather than address causes.
Suthar argues that 2020 changed this pattern because the movement unified economic anxiety with democratic language. It was no longer about compensation alone. It was about consultation, consent and respect.
How Did 2020 Become a Turning Point Rather Than Another Footnote?
Timing mattered. The pandemic exposed vulnerabilities. The hurried passage of laws without parliamentary debate amplified distrust. Farmers sensed that silence would cost them far more than protest.
This convergence, the book suggests, turned an issue based agitation into a historical rupture.
What Does the Book Say About Farm Laws and Agricultural Reforms?
Farmer Power does not reject reform as an idea. It questions reform as process. The book dissects the three farm laws with clarity, avoiding jargon while respecting complexity.
Why Did Farmers Fear Contract Farming?
Contract farming promises stability but often delivers dependency. When large corporations negotiate with individual farmers, the imbalance is obvious. Dispute resolution mechanisms rarely favour the weaker party.
Suthar explains how farmers feared losing autonomy over cropping decisions and pricing. In a country where legal access itself is uneven, faith in contracts was understandably low.
How Critical Is the Minimum Support Price Debate?
Minimum support price is not merely an economic instrument. It is psychological assurance. According to government data, only about 6 percent of farmers directly benefit from MSP procurement, yet its symbolic value extends far wider.
The book shows how dismantling this assurance would expose farmers to market volatility without safety nets. That fear united diverse regions and crops.
Who Are the Protagonists in This Story Without a Single Hero?
One of the book’s quiet achievements is its refusal to manufacture heroes. There is no central leader, no dramatic arc of individual triumph. Instead, the protagonist is collective resolve.
How Are Farmers Portrayed as Collective Characters?
Farmers appear as organisers, caregivers, negotiators and learners. Elderly protesters shared wisdom. Women managed logistics. Youth handled communication. This distributed leadership made the movement resilient.
Through interviews and anecdotes, certain voices linger. A person running a langar. A young farmer explaining legal clauses. These moments humanise without sentimentalising.
How foes farmer power address small and marginal farmers?
India’s agrarian crisis is not uniform. Small and marginal farmers face disproportionate risk. Farmer Power foregrounds this reality.
Why Are Agricultural Labourers Often Invisible?
Landless labourers suffer from reforms without representation. The book acknowledges this gap, noting how movements often struggle to fully integrate the most vulnerable.
What Structural Inequalities Does the Book Highlight?
Caste, gender and land ownership intersect with policy. Suthar does not claim easy solutions. He documents tensions honestly.
How Honest and Rigorous Is the Research?
If you are wary of books that wear ideology on their sleeves, Farmer Power offers a calmer experience. The research is extensive, yet it never overwhelms. Suthar relies on government reports, union documents, court proceedings, media coverage and field interactions. According to citations in the book, data from the National Sample Survey Office, Ministry of Agriculture, FAO and peer reviewed journals is used to build arguments incrementally. However, BKU Ugrahan,the biggest farmer group in the protest and its leaders dont find a mention in the book. Perhaps one of the most influential group in the protest has been strangely omitted by the author.
What works especially well is restraint. Facts are allowed to breathe. Numbers appear where they add weight, not where they intimidate. This makes the book accessible to readers who may not usually read policy heavy texts.
Does the Book Preach or Present?
It presents. That distinction matters. You are trusted to reach conclusions on your own. The tone remains crisp, almost conversational in places, even when discussing complex procurement mechanisms or federal tensions.
This approach echoes some of the most respected long form writing in publications like Economic and Political Weekly and The Caravan, where analysis respects reader intelligence rather than seeking applause.
How Does Data Strengthen the Narrative?
Statistics appear as anchors. For instance, the book notes that average monthly income of agricultural households in India was ₹10,218 as per the 2018 NSSO survey, barely keeping pace with inflation. When read alongside arguments for market exposure, the fear becomes tangible.
Sources include government white papers and parliamentary answers, which makes dismissing the argument far more difficult.
Is There a Political Undercurrent That Raises Eyebrows?
No serious review can ignore the book’s subtler tensions. One such moment arrives in the acknowledgements, where Suthar thanks a senior BJP leader for support during the writing process.
What Does the Acknowledgement Section Reveal?
The leader mentioned had ridden the anti BJP wave in the aftermath of the farmers’ protest to win on a Congress ticket, only to switch sides later. This sequence inevitably raises questions.
While the book itself remains critical of policy rather than party, the acknowledgement introduces a faint shadow. It does not discredit the research, but it does invite caution. Transparency, even when uncomfortable, is better than silence.
Does This Compromise the Author’s Neutrality?
Not significantly. The analysis remains consistent and evidence based. Still, readers may wish for a brief clarification. This is a minor blemish on an otherwise balanced work.
How Did the Movement Reshape Punjab’s Political Landscape?
The farmers’ movement did not contest elections directly, yet it changed outcomes. Punjab offers the clearest example.
Why Did Farmers Drift From Congress and Akali Dal?
Punjab farmers had benefited from Congress era policies and successfully weakened Akali Dal and BJP alliances. However, prolonged dissatisfaction with traditional parties created space for an alternative.
The movement discredited established outfits by exposing their silence or opportunism during the protest. Voters remembered.
How Did AAP Become the New Political Shelter?
The Aam Aadmi Party openly supported the farmers’ movement. Its Delhi government facilitated resources and moral backing. This alignment translated into electoral trust.
Once AAP came to power in Punjab, carrying symbolic echoes of the farmers’ yellow flags, protest leaders gradually faded. Dissent softened. Demonstrations became rare and restrained. This stands in sharp contrast to how fiercely farmers once challenged every major party in the country.
Why Does Farmer Dissent Sound Muted Today?
This is perhaps the most uncomfortable question the book indirectly raises.
This is perhaps the most uncomfortable question the book indirectly raises, and also the one it never answers outright. After a movement that mobilised hundreds of thousands, occupied national highways for over a year and forced the repeal of central legislation, the relative quiet that followed feels jarring.
Farmer Power helps you understand this silence not as sudden contentment, but as a complex aftermath of success, fatigue and political realignment. Prolonged protest extracts a cost. Lives were paused, incomes disrupted, and families stretched thin. When the laws were repealed, many farmers returned home not victorious, but exhausted.
There is also the question of power proximity. In Punjab, where the movement had its strongest organisational base, political outcomes shifted dramatically. Traditional parties were discredited, and the Aam Aadmi Party emerged as a beneficiary of the farmers’ moral authority. The AAP government in Delhi had openly supported the movement, and this translated into a strong political alliance in Punjab that still holds.
Once the party came to power, carrying symbolic echoes of farmer iconography and language, dissent softened. Protest leaders who once stood defiantly against every major political outfit now found themselves closer to the corridors of power. Some became advisors. Others exercised restraint. The yellow flags that once represented independent farmer assertion began to blend into party symbolism.
This shift raises an uncomfortable possibility. That movements which succeed electorally, even indirectly, risk losing their oppositional edge. When the state begins to speak the language of protest, it becomes harder for protesters to speak back without appearing disloyal or impatient.
Farmer Power observes. It allows you to sit with the irony that the same movement which asserted independence so fiercely now struggles to generate the same urgency. Dissent has not disappeared, but it has become cautious, fragmented and quieter.
For you as a reader, this section provokes reflection rather than judgement. It asks whether democratic movements can sustain autonomy once power shifts in their favour. And whether silence after success is a sign of resolution, or merely the pause before the next reckoning.
Have Protest Leaders Faded Into Party Politics?
Some leaders entered advisory roles. Others aligned informally to bigger political parties. As proximity to power increased, resistance lost urgency. Some farmers started their political journey only to be met by abject failure.
What Changed After Power Changed Hands?
Power has a silencing effect. The same voices that roared on highways now speak cautiously. Farmer Power does not moralise this shift, but it documents it carefully.
Which Lines From the Book Stay With you?
One line lingers: “The protest was not against reform, but against being reformed without being heard.” It captures the emotional core without drama.
Another one -'There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.'
What Are the Book’s biggest strengths?
The enduring strength of Farmer Power lies not in any single argument, but in how carefully the book is put together. It is structured to inform without exhausting, to persuade without pushing. In a landscape crowded with loud opinions and instant takes, this restraint becomes its quiet advantage.
Does its crisp tone work?
The book respects your time and intelligence. At 264 pages, it remains focused on its central questions and resists the temptation to over explain or digress. There is no filler disguised as passion, no repetition used to simulate urgency.
Each chapter advances the argument incrementally. Policy discussion is clear rather than dense, and historical context is offered where it sharpens understanding, not where it displays expertise. This makes the book readable in short sittings without losing coherence, an underrated quality in serious nonfiction.
The pricing and length also matter in an unromantic way. At ₹499, the book is positioned for accessibility rather than prestige. It signals that the intended audience includes students, activists and general readers, not just institutional libraries.
How does it balance empathy and analysis?
Farmer Power manages a balance that many books struggle to achieve. It is empathetic without becoming sentimental, and analytical without turning abstract. Farmers are treated as political actors with strategy and agency, not as symbols of suffering.
Empathy never slips into sentimentality. Analysis never turns cold. This balance is rare.
The author listens carefully without surrendering critical distance. He acknowledges internal disagreements, tactical compromises and moments of uncertainty within the movement. This honesty prevents the narrative from sliding into idealisation.
At the same time, the book never loses sight of the human stakes involved. Economic data is tied back to lived experience. Policy decisions are shown to affect real lives. This balance gives the book both moral credibility and analytical strength.
Together, these qualities make Farmer Power a book you can trust. Not because it tells you what to think, but because it shows you how to think through a complex and emotionally charged moment with clarity and care.
Where does farmer power fall short?
No serious book benefits from being treated as flawless, and Farmer Power is no exception. Its strengths are substantial, but so are its silences. A critical reading reveals not failures of intent, but limits of scope and emphasis that are worth acknowledging.
Could Some Voices Have Been Explored further?
While the book makes space for women farmers and agricultural labourers, their presence often feels episodic rather than sustained. Women appear prominently during moments of mobilisation, care work and symbolic resistance, yet their long term economic and political challenges remain under explored.
Women farmers and landless labourers appear, but briefly. More sustained engagement would have strengthened the narrative.
Similarly, landless labourers, who are among the most vulnerable within the rural economy, remain at the edges of the narrative. Their relationship to the farm laws, the protest sites and the outcomes of the movement is complex and deserves deeper engagement. A more sustained exploration of these voices would have strengthened the book’s claim to represent the full spectrum of agrarian experience.
This limitation does not invalidate the book’s analysis, but it does remind you that even the most comprehensive accounts are shaped by access, emphasis and disciplinary boundaries.
Does Academic Distance Limit Emotional Depth?
At times, yes. Suthar’s commitment to analytical clarity means that emotional moments are often observed rather than inhabited. Readers accustomed to narrative driven nonfiction may find sections restrained, even muted. Readers seeking visceral storytelling may find sections restrained. This is a trade off.
There are moments where a deeper immersion into personal stories could have amplified the emotional resonance without sacrificing rigour. However, this restraint is also a conscious choice. The author avoids emotional manipulation, allowing the moral weight of events to emerge through accumulation rather than intensity.
Whether this feels like a limitation or a strength will depend on what you seek from nonfiction. For readers who value reflection over drama, the tone may feel appropriate. For others, it may feel distant.
Who Should Read This Book and Why?
Farmer Power is not written for a narrow academic audience, despite its scholarly foundation. Its concerns touch everyday life more directly than many readers might expect.
Is This Only for Policy Nerds?
Not at all. Anyone who eats food should read this.While students of political science, sociology and public policy will find the book particularly useful, its core questions are universal. How are decisions made? Who gets consulted? Who bears risk when reforms go wrong?
If you have ever wondered why agricultural distress keeps resurfacing despite repeated reforms, this book offers clarity without condescension.
Why should Urban Readers Care?
Because highways do not block themselves. People do.
Because urban life is not insulated from rural decisions, even if it feels that way. Cities eat what villages grow. Highways that carried tractors also carry food, fuel and labour.
The farmers’ protest disrupted everyday routines precisely to make this connection visible. When highways were occupied, it was not just a logistical inconvenience. It was a reminder that systems function because people participate in them, often without recognition.
Reading Farmer Power helps you see that link more clearly. It turns an inconvenience into a conversation, and a distant protest into a shared democratic question.
How does This Book Compare With Other Writing on Farmers?
Unlike daily news, this book offers memory. It stands apart by refusing urgency while retaining relevance.
If most writing on farmers reaches you through breaking news alerts, Farmer Power will feel unfamiliar in the best possible way. News coverage is designed to react. It prioritises immediacy, conflict and headline friendly moments. This book, by contrast, is built for memory. It asks not what happened today, but what will still matter when today is forgotten.
Journalistic accounts of agrarian distress often appear in fragments. A protest here. A suicide statistic there. A seasonal price crash. While these reports are essential, they rarely have the space to connect events across time, policy cycles and social structures. Suthar’s book does that connecting work. It places the 2020–21 farmers’ movement within a longer continuum of agrarian anxiety, political negotiation and institutional neglect.
Compared to activist literature, Farmer Power also takes a different route. It does not mobilise emotion for immediate action. There are no calls to outrage or rally. Instead, it builds understanding patiently. This makes the book slower, but also sturdier. It is meant to be returned to, cited and argued with, not just agreed with.
Academic writing on agriculture, on the other hand, often suffers from distance. Papers and reports analyse farmers as variables within models. What Farmer Power manages to do is bridge that gap. It retains analytical rigour while keeping farmers visible as thinking, organising political subjects rather than abstract data points.
Why Does It Stand Apart From News Coverage?
News coverage thrives on urgency. The farmers’ movement, however, was defined by patience. That mismatch meant that many daily reports struggled to capture its essence. A year long sit in does not produce daily novelty, but it does produce slow transformation. This is where the book succeeds where headlines cannot.
Suthar documents what news cycles often miss. The routines of protest. The internal debates. The ethical choices to remain peaceful. The gradual shift in public perception. These are not moments, they are processes. And processes require time and reflection to be understood.
Most importantly, the book refuses to close the story neatly. News demands closure. The repeal of farm laws offered that. Farmer Power resists it. It shows that while laws were withdrawn, the underlying questions of agricultural livelihoods, market power and democratic consultation remain unresolved.
The book becomes a record of how democracy behaves when it is tested not by speed or spectacle, but by endurance.
What Five Books Should You Gift as Secret Santa This Christmas 2025?
Books make the best Secret Santa gifts because they stay long after the wrapping paper is gone. Here are five thoughtful, conversation starting reads that suit curious minds, reflective readers and people who enjoy ideas as much as stories.
- Annihilation of Caste by B.R. AmbedkarA foundational text that remains disturbingly relevant. A sharp reminder that social reform requires discomfort, honesty and courage.
- The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley RobinsonA rare blend of fiction and policy imagination that tackles climate change with realism rather than despair. Perfect for readers who want hope grounded in science, economics and moral urgency.
- Everybody Loves a Good Drought by P. SainathA modern classic of rural reportage that exposes systemic neglect and resilience in India’s villages. This book pairs well with Farmer Power for anyone wanting historical and human context.
- Invisible Women by Caroline Criado PerezA sharp, data driven look at how public policy often ignores women by default. An eye opening gift for readers who enjoy statistics that change how they see everyday life.
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. FranklA timeless exploration of suffering, dignity and purpose. Short, profound and ideal for anyone navigating uncertainty or seeking perspective beyond daily noise.
What do leading scholars say about farmer power?
Academic endorsements are about whether a work adds something new to how a subject is understood. In the case of Farmer Power, the early scholarly reception suggests that the book is already being treated as a reference point rather than a reaction piece.
Sociologist Surinder S. Jodhka of Jawaharlal Nehru University describes the book as one of the first comprehensive English language accounts of the year long sit ins at Delhi’s borders. What matters in his assessment is not just coverage, but sympathy without romanticism. He notes how the movement revealed internal dissensions in Indian society while still managing to acquire a national character, something few protests originating in a single region have achieved.
This observation is important because it places Farmer Power within a sociological tradition that treats movements as mirrors of society, not interruptions to it. The farmers’ protest, as Jodhka suggests, brought questions of the rural and agrarian back into mainstream political life, where they had slowly been sidelined by urban centric economic narratives.
From a global development perspective, Ben M. McKay of the University of Calgary highlights the book’s conceptual strength. He points to Suthar’s use of hybridity to explain how farmers combined traditional protest methods with new forms of citizenship, media engagement and state negotiation. This framing matters because it allows the movement to be read not as an exception, but as part of a broader global pattern of democratic assertion under neoliberal pressure.
McKay’s reading also situates the book beyond India. By linking agrarian resistance to global democratic struggles, Farmer Power becomes relevant to readers interested in rural transformation across continents. It is no longer just about farm laws, but about how marginalised groups re negotiate their relationship with the state.
Anthropologist A.R. Vasavi adds another layer by focusing on the cultural and ethical dimensions of the movement. She describes the protest as evolving from opposition to legislation into a broader defence of democratic norms. Her endorsement draws attention to how farmers generated a culture of care, public service and collective responsibility during the protest, from community kitchens to educational spaces.
This matters because it challenges the stereotype of protests as purely disruptive. Vasavi’s reading reinforces one of the book’s quieter arguments. That the farmers’ movement was also a civic project, producing new forms of solidarity and public engagement even as it resisted state policy.
Do these endorsements matter?
Taken together, these scholarly responses position Farmer Power as an early archive of a historic moment. Endorsements from sociology, anthropology and global development signal that the book speaks across disciplines, not just to policy specialists.
For you as a reader, this means the book is likely to be cited, debated and taught, not merely remembered. It also means that its arguments will be tested, challenged and refined over time, which is exactly what serious writing invites.
Most importantly, these endorsements affirm that the farmers’ movement deserves sustained intellectual attention. Not because it was dramatic, but because it changed how democracy was practised in public view. Farmer Power earns its place in that conversation by documenting the movement with care, restraint and analytical honesty.
What is the verdict on Farmer Power?
This is not a comfortable book. It is a necessary one. It reminds you that democracy survives when ordinary people refuse to be invisible.
By the time you close Farmer Power, you are unlikely to feel triumphant or outraged. What you feel instead is unsettled, and that is precisely the point. This is not a book designed to make you cheer for a side. It asks you to sit with discomfort, to acknowledge that democracy is often slow, inconvenient and shaped by people who are rarely invited into studios or panel discussions.
Sudhir Kumar Suthar succeeds in documenting the 2020–21 farmers’ movement without turning it into folklore. He resists the temptation to mythologise suffering or simplify motives. The farmers here are strategic, sometimes cautious, sometimes conflicted, and always aware that protest carries cost. This honesty gives the book its credibility.
The book’s greatest strength lies in how it reframes the movement as a democratic intervention rather than a policy dispute. You come to see why the protest mattered even after the farm laws were repealed. It was about consultation, dignity and the right to be heard before decisions are finalised. In that sense, the highways around Delhi became classrooms where the meaning of citizenship was quietly re taught.
That said, the book is not without limitations. Readers looking for deeply personal storytelling may find the academic distance occasionally limiting. Certain voices, especially women farmers and landless labourers, deserved more sustained attention. These gaps do not weaken the argument, but they do leave you wishing the canvas had been stretched further.
And yet, when weighed as a whole, Farmer Power stands as one of the most grounded accounts of a contemporary social movement in India. It reminds you that protest does not always roar. Sometimes it waits, listens, organises and endures. Democracy, the book suggests, survives not because institutions are flawless, but because ordinary people refuse to become invisible when decisions are made about their lives.
If you care about how food reaches your plate, how power is negotiated in public spaces, or how dissent can remain disciplined without losing its edge, this book deserves your attention. Not because it offers comfort, but because it offers clarity.
Does It Change How You See Farmers and Democracy?
Yes, and not in the way slogans or speeches usually do. Farmer Power quietly alters your perspective by refusing to treat farmers as background figures in the national story. You begin to see them not as recipients of policy or beneficiaries of subsidies, but as political actors who understand the state, the market and their own leverage far better than they are often credited for.
The book also nudges you to rethink democracy itself. Not as an event that happens every five years, but as a continuous negotiation between citizens and institutions. The farmers’ movement shows democracy at work outside voting booths, in waiting, organising, debating and holding ground without collapsing into chaos.
As a reader, especially if you live far from farms and fields, this shift can be uncomfortable. It forces you to confront how distant your daily life is from the systems that sustain it. Food stops being a commodity on a shelf and becomes the outcome of political choices, power imbalances and human endurance.
Perhaps most importantly, the book changes how you view protest. It is no longer noise on the margins or inconvenience to be managed. It becomes a form of civic participation that emerges when formal channels feel closed. You may not agree with every demand or method, but you understand why silence was never an option.
By the end, democracy feels less polished and more real. Messy, slow, sometimes stubborn, but alive. And farmers, often spoken about but rarely listened to, emerge as people who knew exactly what they were doing when they chose to sit still and wait for the nation to notice.
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Who Is Tushar Mangl?
Tushar Mangl writes on books, investments, business, mental health, food, vastu, leisure and a greener, better society. Speaker, author of Ardika and I Will Do It.
Frequently Asked Questions Readers Often Ask?
When a book addresses protest, politics and power, readers naturally arrive with doubts and hesitations. These are some of the most common questions people ask before picking up Farmer Power.
Is this book partisan?
Is it difficult or overly academic to read?
Does the book glorify protests?
Is the book still relevant now that the farm laws were repealed?
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