Mah farmers to march to Delhi to join protesting farmers

Farmers from across Maharashtra have planned protests and marches in solidarity with the farmers protesting at Delhi in the coming week.

Thousands of Farmers from over 20 districts of Maharashtra under the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) Banner will be leaving from Nashik for Delhi on December 21. Farmers will gather at Nashik on December 21 and start a vehicle march to Delhi, travelling a distance of 1,266 Km to Delhi and join the struggle at the Rajasthan-Haryana border at Shahjahanpur around December 24, stated a press statement issued by the AIKS.

The Vehicle Jatha will begin with a massive public meeting at Nashik on December 21 afternoon. It will organise a large demonstration at the Reliance Petrol Pump after leaving Nashik. It will be welcomed by thousands of people at Ozar, Pimpalgaon Baswant, Chandwad, Umrane, Malegaon, Dhule and Shirpur in the Nashik and Dhule districts of Maharashtra before entering Madhya Pradesh.

As the farmers protesting in Delhi have appealed to the people to boycott the products of Ambani and Adani, AIKS has planned a march at Reliance Industries Limited, Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai. 

Farmers have been protesting at the Delhi border for the past several days. Throughout this week, the farmers cleaned the mounting piles of garbage near the protest sites after the locals complained of the garbage situation. “We don’t want to be remembered for wrong reasons,” the farmers said as they cleaned the protest areas ahead of the weekend when more citizens and farmers were expected to join them.

Protests against the three farm reform laws have been ongoing since September, amidst which the Central Government had also stopped railways going to Punjab. Demonstrations began at the end of November when thousands of farmers from northern states of Punjab and Haryana set out towards New Delhi to protest against these bills. The government tried to suppress the protests with force, as they employed water cannons and teargas shells, erected barricades and barbed wire fences, dug trenches on highways, and arrested hundreds of activists. Braving it all,  tens of thousands of farmers have amassed on the Delhi border and have laid siege to the capital.