On Independence Day, Foreign Agribusiness Will Be Told Get Out, “Quit India!” 

On 15 August, India will celebrate its Independence Day. There will be the usual celebratory flag-waving and flypasts in Delhi along with sound bites about ‘the world’s biggest democracy’. But what has ‘independence’ come to mean?

Placing an X on a ballot paper every now and then does not constitute democracy. If people are misinformed, misled and manipulated to think and act in a certain way, while backroom deals are carried out without their knowledge, then what value ‘democracy’? Then there is no freedom, no self-determination. Someone else is determining the agenda.

The Quit India Movement was launched by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress on 8 August 1942, demanding the immediate end of British rule in India. It inspired a mass civil disobedience campaign featuring strikes, demonstrations and sabotage, despite the British arresting Gandhi and many Congress leaders immediately after the movement’s start.

The movement saw remarkable nationwide participation—including women, students, workers and peasants. Although it was violently suppressed by the colonial authorities, it galvanised the struggle for independence. The Quit India Movement significantly weakened British authority, promoted unity among diverse groups and set the stage for India’s eventual independence.

Now, in 2025, the spirit of the Quit India Movement is being explicitly invoked by today’s farmer protests to inspire unity, resilience and a nationwide call to action.

The Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM)—a coalition of 40-plus farmers’ unions across India—is at the forefront of a continuing struggle against government policies that are eroding rural livelihoods, national sovereignty and federal governance. Their concerns centre on an emerging authoritarian central government controlled by corporate interests and international finance capital, which threatens to subordinate the role of India’s states and dismantle vital protections for farmers and rural communities.

SKM, alongside allied organisations such as the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), argues that the Union Government’s push for agricultural reforms under slogans like ‘One Nation, One Market’ jeopardises the constitutional federal structure. These reforms—including the draft National Policy Framework on Agriculture Marketing (NPFAM)—seek to unify India’s disparate agricultural marketing systems into a centralised, corporatised national market.

According to the SKM, this transformation will severely diminishe the decision-making power of state governments over agriculture, land, industry and markets—domains constitutionally assigned to them.

The NPFAM draft envisions a rescaling of agricultural marketing, replacing state-regulated wholesale markets (mandis) and rural haats with private, corporate-controlled entities integrated via Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and blockchain technologies. Under this model, powerful private corporations, including conglomerates like Adani, Ambani, Tata, Cargill, Pepsi, Walmart, Bayer and Amazon, would engage directly with farmers, bypassing traditional state-regulated market structures. The consolidation of storage facilities and marketing channels under corporate control raises fears of price manipulation and diminishes farmers’ negotiating power.

This change will essentially fundamentally restructure India’s agri-food sector and is aimed at integrating it deeply into global supply chains controlled by agribusiness and international finance capital. This is little more than a neocolonial strategy that would hand over India’s food security and agricultural governance to transnational corporations.

In 2025, farmers are still protesting. The roots of the protests can be traced back to the three farm laws introduced and subsequently repealed in late 2021 following widespread protests. The SKM and the AIKS warn that the NPFAM is effectively a rebranded return of those laws, seeking to achieve their objectives through new policy frameworks.

Key elements of the NPFAM echo the earlier laws’ intent to deregulate markets, permit private agribusiness entry and promote contract farming under conditions favourable to corporate interests. The absence of legislative guarantees for a legal Minimum Support Price (MSP) for agricultural produce and minimum wages for agricultural workers remains a still-unaddressed primary concern, as is the lack of accountability mechanisms to regulate corporate practices.

Farmers face the prospect of becoming mere producers of raw materials for corporate supply chains, with prices dictated by powerful processing industries and exporters. The AIKS stresses that central government proposals, including deepening financialisation via futures and options markets, will enable global corporations and financial firms to assert dominance over the food industry, intensifying farmers’ economic vulnerabilities.

The critique extends to dismantling of India’s longstanding food security frameworks:

• Mandis and Marketing Boards: mandis, regulated by Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs), provide farmers with auction-based sales platforms ensuring some degree of fair price discovery and market access. The NPFAM’s corporatisation proposals threaten these markets’ survival.
• Public Distribution System (PDS): India’s PDS, facilitated by state and central governments, supplies subsidised essentials to millions, underpinning national nutritional security.
• Food Corporation of India (FCI): the FCI manages procurement at MSP, storage and food distribution, acting as a stabilising force in the agriculture sector.

Facilitating corporate interests, the government seeks the withdrawal of state involvement in these key institutions, exposing India to volatile international markets controlled by global agribusiness, thereby undermining food sovereignty and rural welfare.

In response to this proposed neoliberal shock therapy, the SKM has launched a series of coordinated protests to press their demands and safeguard farmers’ rights.

Quit India

On ‘Quit India” Day on 13 August, symbolically invoking the historic Quit India Movement, farmers nationwide will conduct vehicle and tractor parades, public demonstrations and the burning of effigies representing Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This protest specifically targets proposed Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) — particularly with the US — fearing they will exacerbate corporate dominance and market flooding with (GMO) cheap imports.

The date, 13 August, comes two days before Independence Day celebrations. Something that may appear increasingly hollow as time marches on and we see the recolonisation of India’s economy by foreign interests.

From 15 August, the campaign will include public hearings, grassroots mobilisation and awareness drives culminating in a large-scale worker-farmer protest action in Delhi and various state capitals on 26 November, marking five years since the historic farmers’ protests at Delhi’s borders.

The movement’s core demands include a constitutionally or legally enforced MSP aligned with recommendations from the Swaminathan Commission, ensuring farmers receive at least 50% above the cost of production, loan waivers and financial relief tailored for farmers.

Farmers also want the withdrawal of bans on using 10-year-old tractors in the National Capital Region (NCR), the restoration of fertiliser subsidies, regulation of spurious agricultural inputs. Stronger state infrastructure to maintain food security is called for along with support for small-scale producers and meaningful dialogue involving farmer organisations and state governments.

Many of the key demands are long standing, but official responses to the protests and farmers’ demands have sometimes involved tear gas, water cannons and other harsh measures, reflecting attempts to suppress dissent and reassure international investors of a stable climate for foreign direct investment. In late 2021, SKM leader Rakesh Tikait noted that around 750 protesters had died in the prolonged struggle.

Various officials have been recorded endorsing harsh crackdowns on demonstrators, further fuelling resentment and mistrust. This marks a broader trend of state suppression intended to clear the path for a corporate-financial takeover of the agricultural domain.

The SKM and the AIKS protests and demands are well-founded.

In India, as elsewhere, we are seeing the erosion of traditional diets and farming practices, resulting in an increasing reliance on ultra-processed foods and global corporate supply chains.

Moreover, underinvestment in rural infrastructure and agriculture over decades has been deliberate, portraying Indian farming as backward and ripe for ‘modernisation’ that privileges corporate profit over food sovereignty.

The commodification and financialisation of food and agricultural land will serve to further embed corporate influence at all levels, from seed to store (or, increasingly, e-commerce platform), paralleling a global pattern of food insecurity and corporate dominance.

This corporate hijack is not unique to India.

In late 2024, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, and expressed enthusiasm for partnering with the global investment firm. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, in a letter, warmly welcomed this collaboration, stating that Labour looks forward to working with BlackRock to “change the face of our UK”.

But what kind of “change” is being envisioned? It appears to involve making life increasingly difficult for farmers, especially through inheritance tax policies designed to push them off their land. This would pave the way for BlackRock to acquire farmland that is treated simply as an ‘asset class’, leading to industrial-scale agriculture and subsidy-driven green investments that could see vast expanses of countryside covered by solar panels.

Given BlackRock’s global ambitions, Larry Fink is likely eager to replicate this strategy in India, especially as the country’s government advances development of a land market catering to international finance interests.

India stands at a crossroads. The 2025 protest campaign reflects deeper battles over food sovereignty, federalism, rural livelihoods and the democratic rights of citizens. The struggle is not merely against specific trade deals or policies but against an overarching neoliberal agenda that threatens to fully disempower farmers and reshape India’s agricultural landscape to suit global capital at the expense of millions.

For a deeper exploration of the issues discussed in this article, see the open access downloadable books available here.

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his two free books Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order and Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth here.

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