At the time of a global pandemic, when the Indian government should be focusing on delivering health and economic measures, they turned their attention to pass the farm and labor laws that can crush the bargaining power of two groups who together form 90% of the work force in India. This historic ongoing protest is a very clear call by the farmers and laborers to condemn the government’s neoliberalism 2.0 agenda. It is not the so called ‘educated’ upper caste middle class, but exactly this majority who faced the brunt of the reforms in both 1991 and now, are standing undeterred on the streets today. As much as a section of the Indian media and experts would like to portray these protests in silos, it is the consequence of deeply embedded structural inequalities experienced by workers and farmers over the last decade that we, as a society have been a passive witness to.
