Now, farmers start seven-day dharna in front of Best Price in Jalandhar

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, September 30

Members of the Bharti Kisan Union Ekta (Ugrahan) today started a one-week dharna in front of the Best Price mall (now taken over from Walmart by Flipkart) on Jalandhar-Phagwara stretch of National Highway-1.

This morning, the farmers closed both gates of the mall and announced to start the day and night dharna till October 6. Notably, the dharna has started at a time when Flipkart had announced to start its Big Billion sale from October 3 to 10.

Sukhdev Singh Kokrikalan, general secretary of the union, said: “Since October last year, we have been continuously sitting on a dharna in front of Best Price mall in Bhucho Mandi. We had started the dharna as a part of our plan to hold dharnas in front of 40 corporate company offices, showrooms and silos across the state. Bhucho Mandi Best Price was just one of these 40 sites.”

He added: “Recently, the company retrenched over a 100 employees. It was a part of the strategy for the company to annoy the employees who would then go after the farmers blaming them for the issue. The multi-national company could have easily gone ahead continuing to pay them the salary, but they are using this ploy to dissuade us from holding dharna.”

Kokrikalan said to build pressure against the company to re-employ the entire lot of retrenched staff, the union had decided to start seven-day dharnas in front of all its other five malls in Punjab. These include two in Ludhiana and one each in Amritsar and Zirakpur, other than another one in Jalandhar.

“Our dharnas started simultaneously at all five malls today. If the company does not take back its staff in Bhucho Mandi in the next seven days, we may extend our dharna in all the malls”, the union leader said.