UP elections, Punjab protests: The politics in Modi withdrawing farm laws

Decision to drop controversial reform could not have been better timed, strategically and electorally, for the BJP.

It took a politically significant remark from Rahul Gandhi and threat of a street protest by the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), a vocal ) constituent of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for the Narendra Modi government to freeze an amendment to the land acquisition law in 2015. Gandhi critiqued the Modi dispensation as a “suit boot ki sarkar”, signifying that it was loaded, in terms of its politics and policies, in favour of the corporate sector.

It took more than a year for the government to repeal the three farm laws that provoked massive protests, beginning in Punjab on August