While PM holds Kisan Samvad, SP stages bonfire meetings with farmers

In a day-long state-wide campaign, Samajwadi Party leaders and workers are reaching out to farmers on Friday to express the party’s solidarity with their ongoing protests against the three Central laws. SP workers plan to engage farmers in villages around bonfires to discuss their concerns.

The event day coincides with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Kisan Samvad’ or a dialogue with farmers, seeking to dispel their apprehensions with the farm laws that have led to a prolonged farmers’ protest at borders of the national capital of Delhi.

SP president Akhilesh Yadav has asked party’s sitting MPs, MLAs, MLCs, former legislators and office bearers to go to villages to participate in the Kisan Ghera programme and explain that the SP has “always stood by” their cause.

The name of the outreach programme, Kisan Ghera, means to convey the small farmer gatherings, party workers hope to organise around bonfires.

The party has released a list of 132 prominent leaders, who would hold dialogues with farmers in as many villages across the state.

On the eve of the event, on Thursday, Akhilesh Yadav said that never before were the farmers treated so unfairly and faced such injustice as under the present BJP government at the Centre. He claimed that the BJP government ‘did not fulfil’ even a single promise it had made to farmers and introduced three anti-farmer laws to make matters worse.

Akhilesh even called PM Modi’s Kisan Samvad and Kisan Samman Nidhi distribution programme scheduled for Friday an ‘insult’ to farmers.

“The BJP government is insulting the farmers, who are protesting on the roads for their rights with nominal ‘Kisan Samman’ money. The government wants the farmers to incur huge losses due to the black laws (farm laws). In its arrogance of power, the BJP is also insulting the food farmers put on the plates of every citizen of the country,” he tweeted in Hindi.