Farmer Protest: In the Gautam Buddh Nagar region of Uttar Pradesh, farmers are planning a tractor rally along the Yamuna Motorway. As a result, enormous traffic jams are predicted at the Delhi-Noida border, causing inconvenience to hundreds of commuters.
Traffic Diversions Implemented Ahead of Farmers’ Tractor March
Police have enforced traffic diversions at the Yamuna Motorway, Luharli Toll Plaza and Mahamaya Flyover in anticipation of a tractor march by farmers. Police will examine all cars entering Delhi or Noida, and barricades will be erected along the Delhi-Noida border. To reduce inconvenience, people have been encouraged to take the metro or other alternate routes instead of using the Yamuna Motorway.
This comes as farmers have decided to hold off on their march to the national capital till February 29th, pending a decision, and are remaining at the border crossings of Punjab and Haryana at Khanauri and Shambhu.
Disturbing Incident Unfolds
Farmer leader Baldev Singh Sirsa claimed that his colleague Pritpal Singh was thrashed and dragged by the police from his tractor trolley when he was performing ‘langar seva’, or community duty, near Khanauri on the Punjab-Haryana border. “He was dragged from his tractor trolley, thrashed and later admitted to a hospital in Rohtak. But, we got him shifted to PGIMER at Chandigarh,” he was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
Call for Prime Minister’s Intervention
Sarwan Singh Pandher, a farmer leader, claims that Pritpal Singh has sustained numerous injuries. “We strongly condemn the police action,” he stated. Additionally, he stated that in order to break the impasse in negotiations between the government and farmer leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi need to step up and acknowledge the demands of the farmers who are demonstrating. “The Prime Minister should also take action against policemen who indulge in such ‘barbaric acts’,” he asserted.
Captain Amarinder Singh Denounces Violence
Captain Amarinder Singh, a top BJP leader and the former chief minister of Punjab, denounced the “barbaric act of violence” committed on Pritpal Singh. He asked Manohar Lal Khattar, the chief minister of Haryana, to punish the police officers severely for attacking the farmer.
“I strongly condemn the barbaric act of violence committed by the Haryana Police on our young farmer Pritpal Singh. I urge Haryana CM @mlkhattar to take strict action against the policemen who are guilty of badly beating up an unarmed youngster who was just serving langar to people,” he wrote on X on Sunday.
Farmers’ Protest Takes Intellectual Turn
Protesting farmers hosted a seminar on World Trade Organisation (WTO) regulations on Sunday. Pandher stated that the agricultural industry ought to be excluded from the WTO’s jurisdiction. He claimed that on Monday, the farmers would burn government and WTO effigies.
Following the session, Pandher asserted that farmers are negatively impacted by the WTO agreement. “Before 1995, India used to go according to its own independent agricultural policy, but things changed when India entered WTO,” he said. According to Pandher, the reasoning behind the proposed legal guarantee of the minimum support price (MSP) for crops is that doing so will cause prices to skyrocket, “which we don’t agree will happen”.
Mobile Internet Restored
In the meantime, mobile Internet connections that had been suspended on February 11 due to protests by farmers were reinstated on Sunday in the districts of Ambala, Kurukshetra, Kaithal, Jind, Hisar, Fatehabad, and Sirsa. The dates of the additional suspension extensions were February 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 24.
According to officials, no new directive has been issued to prolong the mobile Internet service suspension in the seven districts.
