In Ghazipur farmers, leaders dwell on violence

Vinayak Padmadeo

Tribune News Service

Ghazipur border, January 26 

The normal bouncy Ghazipur protest site has fallen silent. The blaring music from the speakers is missing and so are the enthusiastic dancers. 

Discussions are centering around the circumstances regarding the death of a farmer in ITO and whether it was right for unfurling of “Nishan Sahib” at the Red Fort.

“We shouldn’t have done that. We were to keep discipline and I am sorry to say that we were not able to show that we are disciplined,” Mahendra Singh Mukati, from Ujjain said.

Farmers and leaders are also looking for answers after violent scenes put paid to their agitation and brought a bad name to the protest site.

The leaders pointed fingers at a political party from western Uttar Pradesh for foisting troubles on Tuesday. “Few miscreants from a political party joined the rally and created trouble to bring us a bad name,” Rajpal Sharma, general secretary of Bhartiya Kisan Union (Tikait), said.

“But I must say the violence has brought the farm protest a bad name and we are all sad about it,” he added.

Sharma added that the protest site is in mourning. 

“The boy who died today was from our protest site too and we are in mourning,” he said.

However, BKU activist Dharmendra Malik called out Rashtriya Lok Dal for all the violence. 

“We know they were from RLD. The same lot was involved in skirmishes at the Loni border yesterday,” Malik said.

Malik stated that the police was blamed for removing barriers from the roads that were not part of the cleared route.

“Where was the need for the police to remove barriers on the Ghazipur flyover when we were to start from bottom of the flyover,” he said.

“Once that happened it became very hard for any of us to control the crowd and every advisory and instructions we issued went out of the window,” he added.