Meet key faces of farm protest 2.0: A rebel and a lone warrior

As thePunjab farmer groups again hit the roads in a bid to march to Delhi to hold protests over their various demands, running into massive security force contingents – who have put up multi-layer barricades and used lathicharge and teargas shells to stop them – two new farmer leaders have come under spotlight: Sarwan Singh Pandher, the coordinator of the Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM) and the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee (KMSC), and Jagjit Singh Dallewal, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (non-political) convener.

These two farmer leaders have been instrumental in their organisations’ call for “Dilli Chalo” to protest for a legal guarantee on minimum support price (MSP) and loan waivers among other demands.

They were also the main representatives of the farmer unions when a group of Union Ministers, including Piyush Goyal and Arjun Munda, held two rounds of meetings with them in Chandigarh on February 8 and February 12, which remained inconclusive.

Although the KMM and the SKM (non-political) are umbrella bodies of farm unions from across the country, the Dilli Chalo agitation mainly involves farmer groups from Punjab and Haryana.

Pandher is an Amritsar-based farmer whose union KMSC operates in 16 districts of Punjab. Although the KMSC was part of the farmers’ agitation against the now-repealed farm laws in 2020-21, it was even then charting its own path.

In 2020, when 32 farmer unions of Punjab had given a rail roko call from October 1, 2020 to protest against the farm laws, the KMSC had given a similar call from September 24.

Later, when other farmer unions withdrew the rail roko stir on November 22, 2020, the KMSC rolled it back only on November 26 when farmers had started marching towards Delhi. On December 11 that year, the KMSC