Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha on Wednesday called off the agitation he was leading in Akola district since Monday in support of the demands raised by farmers in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region. He made the announcement after Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis called him and accepted all their seven demands.
“The chief minister has accepted our demands,” Sinha said, according to the Hindustan Times. “But I don’t look at this agitation from the point of view of victory or defeat. Farmers will benefit.”
Among their demands are better prices for crops and cases against a few Bt cotton companies.
“At the meeting with the local collector, we agreed on a date for the fulfilment of these promises,” Sinha told The Hindu. “I have made the farmers promise me that they will not take the suicide route. If they have a problem, they will approach somebody, and we will all try to solve those problems.”
The former Union minister was detained on Monday evening, along with some 250 farmers, while protesting outside the Akola district collector’s office against the BJP government’s alleged apathy towards farmers in Vidarbha. Although they were released later in the evening, Sinha said he “will not budge” till their demands were met.
Various politicians, including Nationalist Congress Party’s Sharad Pawar, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, had expressed their support for Sinha.
The veteran politician has been at loggerheads with the BJP ever since he wrote an article in September, attacking the government for the economic slowdown.
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