Vindicated: Farmers stay put, say SKM has final call on next step

New Delhi: Even as the Delhi Police's public exercise of removing the extravagant layers of barricading on border protest sites where farmers have been agitating against the three farm laws for nearly a year, farmer leaders called out the police for not removing all barricading from the protest sites, said that this was a sign of the police "correcting their mistake" and most importantly revelled in the knowledge that they had been vindicated with regards to who was actually blocking the roads in Ghazipur, Tikri and Singhu.

After the Delhi Police removed the last of the boulders, barricades and concertina wires from the Ghazipur border protest site on the NH-9, farmer leaders reiterated that they were not the ones blocking roads and said that the Samyukt Kisan Morcha would decide the further course of the protests from hereon.

Significantly, union leaders said that they would make way for traffic to move through the areas in the coming days but factions such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union have insisted that the protests will grow further at the border sites in the coming days.

Farmer leaders said any decision to entirely clear both the carriageways at the protest sites will be taken by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), an umbrella body of over 40 farmer unions protesting against the Centre's farm laws.

Senior farmer leader and SKM member Darshan Pal said at the Singhu border, farmers have occupied the portion of road which is already closed for traffic due to construction of a flyover.

Now, the exercise of "removal of barricades by the police clearly proves our point that it was the police that have blocked roads and not the farmers. We never created any problem. Any bottleneck from our side will also be cleared for traffic movement", Pal said. "So far, there is no call to go to Delhi," he added.

But in a union statement, BKU spokesperson Dharmendra Malik appealed to farmers to gather at the Delhi-UP border in large numbers to strengthen the movement and make it stronger than ever before, casting aside all doubts over the weakening of the movement.

The opening of the road stretch would help thousands of commuters in Ghaziabad, Delhi and Noida as well as those travelling between the national capital and the interiors of Uttar Pradesh, towards Meerut and beyond.

In addition to the protesters at Ghazipur claiming vindication, there was a general sense of relief among them that what they had been saying from day one had been accepted for the time being. Some farmers said that they had from the first day wanted to protest inside Delhi and the authorities were the ones who had drawn battle lines by barricading them out of the city.

Importantly, not all barricading has been removed from the three protest sites — only the heavy layers of boulders, containers and nails that were laid down as a knee-jerk reaction to the Republic Day violence during the tractor march have been removed so far.