Activist Yogendra Yadav on Sunday resigned from the Samyukta Kisan Morcha’s coordination committee, stating that he will continue to remain a “soldier” of the farmers’ organisation and will participate in all its key programmes.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha is an umbrella body of several farmer organisations. It had spearheaded the protests against the farm laws that were ultimately withdrawn by the Modi government.
In his resignation letter, Yadav said that he is in touch with other organisations to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party government.
“It is important that the energies of all the movements and the Opposition political parties be brought together to fight against the anti-farmer Modi government,” he wrote. “To achieve this, I am in touch with other movements as well apart from the farmers’ movement.”
Yadav said that during a meeting held on August 31, he had indicated to the organisation that he will no longer be able to be part of the coordination committee.
In the letter, Yadav appealed to be relieved of the responsibility. He also suggested that Jai Kisan Andolan President Avik Saha will be capable of shouldering his responsibilities.
“I am honoured to have been part of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha’s coordination committee during the historic protests for farmer rights,” he said.
In October, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha had suspended Yadav from all its activities for one month for visiting the family of a BJP worker who died in the Lakhimpur Kheri violence.
Eight people, including four farmers and two BJP workers, were killed during a protest against the farm laws in the Uttar Pradesh district on October 3.
Yadav had met the family members of Shubham Mishra, one of the BJP workers, after visiting the relatives of farmers who had died.
His resignation came after last month the activist attended a meeting helmed by the Congress’ Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi ahead of the party’s “Bharat Jodo Yatra”. The march, set to begin on September 7, is touted as the party’s biggest mass contact programme in recent times.
Congress’ interim president Sonia Gandhi had invited several civil society representatives to participate in the 3,500 kilometres yatra.
“There is a consensus that we welcome this Bharat Jodo Yatra because this is the need of the hour,” Yadav had said after the meeting with Rahul Gandhi. “We have agreed to engage with it. Engagement can take many forms. In some cases, engagement can be that someone would walk right from the beginning till the end… forms will vary but we have agreed to engage with this yatra in a positive spirit.”
But during a TV interview in 2019, Yadav had said that the “Congress must die” for failing to take on the BJP government.
“If it could not stop the BJP in this election to save the idea of India, this party has no positive role in Indian history,” Yadav added. “Today it represents the single biggest obstacle to creation of an alternative.”
A few days later, he wrote a piece in The Indian Express justifying why the Congress cannot be the country’s principal Opposition.
Yadav spoke of what the Congress failed to do in five years after the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014.
“The Modi regime’s economic performance was below average,” Yadav wrote in the newspaper. “Did the Congress organise any nation-wide mass movement to articulate and mobilise the farmers’ distress, or the rising unemployment among the youth, or the small traders’ anger against the way the GST was being implemented, not to speak of the disaster of demonetisation?”
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