Coinciding with Monday’s International Women’s Day, Time magazine has featured Indian women farmers protesting New Delhi’s reforms on its cover.
India’s mainly Sikh farmers from Punjab have mounted protests for months over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agricultural laws that they consider as unfair.
The international edition of the magazine is titled On the Frontlines of India’s Farmer Protests while the article is headlined ‘I Cannot Be Intimidated. I Cannot Be Bought.’
“In response, women farmers—mostly from the rural states of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh—scrambled onto stages, took hold of microphones and roared back a unanimous “NO!”,” says writer Nilanjana Bhowmick.
An activist Jasbir Kaur says women are protesting alongside their men.
“Why should we go back? This is not just the men’s protest. We toil in the fields alongside the men. Who are we—if not farmers?” Jasbir Kaur, a 74-year-old farmer from Rampur in western Uttar Pradesh, says.
Kaur, who is mobilizing farmers at the Tikri protest site, said women are often not seen as farmers.
“Their labor is immense but invisible. Women are changing women here. They are claiming their identities as farmers,” she says.
Another Punjab farmer Amandeep Kaur says the “law will kill us, will destroy what little we have.”
The women also stated they were disappointed that they were considered to be “mere care workers providing cooking and cleaning services at these sites”, and not “equal stakeholders”.
The protesting farmers, who have converged outside of capital New Delhi for more than three months now, say the new laws will hurt them severely and benefit the corporate sector at their cost.
PM Modi says agricultural laws are necessary and will ultimately benefit the farmers.
Critics say the move has unnecessarily stirred up political instability during the COVID-19 crisis.
The international community has also expressed concern over prolonged protests and the lack of respect for farmers’ rights.
TIME's new international cover: "I cannot be intimidated. I cannot be bought." The women leading India's farmers' protests https://t.co/o0IWwWkXHR pic.twitter.com/3TbTvnwiOV
— TIME (@TIME) March 5, 2021
