India / Tear gas, water cannons used at Cong rally in MP; Digvijaya Singh, others held

Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh police on Saturday used water cannons to disperse Congress workers who were taking out a march from Jawahar Chowk to Raj Bhavan in Bhopal in solidarity with protesting farmers. Congress leaders including Digvijaya Singh were detained by the police, India Today reported. Other leaders who were detained include Jaivardhan Singh and Kunal Choudhary along with other party workers.

Madhya Pradesh: Police use water cannons to disperse Congress workers who were taking out a march from Jawahar Chowk to Raj Bhavan in Bhopal, in the support of farmers.

On January 15, the Madhya Pradesh Congress had protested at nearly 500 places in the state against the Centre’s new farm laws, with state unit chief Kamal Nath driving a tractor in his native Chhindwara and senior leader Digvijaya Singh taking part in a rally in Sehore. Nath had said a majority of the farmers in MP had not got minimum support price (MSP) for their produce and the implementation of the three new laws would only increase woes in the agricultural sector.

Singh, who had taken part in a tractor rally in Baktara, called them “black laws” and said they were totally against the interests of the farmers.

Protests were also held in Guna, Narsinghpur, Dewas and Rewa among other places, party functionaries had said.

Notably, thousands of farmers, mostly from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, have been camping at several border points of Delhi since November 28 last year, demanding a repeal of the three farm laws and a legal guarantee on the minimum support price (MSP) for their crops.

Enacted in September last year, the three laws have been projected by the Centre as major reforms in the agriculture sector that will remove middlemen and allow farmers to sell their produce anywhere in the country.

However, the protesting farmers have expressed their apprehension that the new laws would pave the way for eliminating the safety cushion of MSP and do away with the “mandi” (wholesale market) system, leaving them at the mercy of big corporates.