Farmer Demands or Rights ?

In the days I used to comb the Indian countryside, one Jat farmer whom I absolutely loved talking to, in his really serious moments, used to say - farmers of India have no demands, they can take what they want. I am talking of the luminary Mahendra Singh Tikait of Bhartiya Kisan Union. The sad story is that immediately in half an hour, this man would change and discard his wisdom and get yet another Jat of his Balian biradari to start penning down on a torn piece of Amar Ujala Hindi newspaper - a list of farmer demands from all the surrounding villages. Lo behold, the list of demands, would actually begin to reach four figures, sometimes when the fancy would take him he would scold the chaps who were compiling the list of farmer demands to not exceed 999 in any case. And then somebody would come up with the 1000th demand of a young buffalo calf to be distributed to each farmer by the government. Tikait would then suddenly get bored and then say - "Achha chalo, Joshi ji ko Maharashtra se bula lo. Wo padha likha manas hai. " But then how Mahendra Tikait behaved with Sharad Joshi is another long story.
Joshi even in those days, used to say, farmers of India can fight only, and only if they can be crystallized around one single demand - remunerative prices for farm produce. The sheer complexity of regional differences amongst Indian farmers, prevented him for seeing the benefits of any other approach.
Even today I find, whenever ten farmers sit down together and become extremely pleased when the local constable of the local thana salutes them, they ask somebody to bring out a piece of paper and pen, and start compiling that next authoritative list of " farmer demands " to put before the government.
And of course we all know that Chidambaram, Pawar, Ajit Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Indian bureaucrats know very well, to suppress their yawns and get away from the audience with the venerable Chaudhary sahib.