Celebrating Independence: Comforting Myth in a Dispossessed Reality

As India celebrates its 78th Independence Day on 15 August, the tricolour will flutter proudly across the nation. Speeches will echo the triumphs of freedom, resilience and progress. But beneath the patriotic fervour will lie an uncomfortable truth: independence means little if the nation’s food, land and farmers are being surrendered.

Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order (2022) presents India as a frontline in the global struggle for food sovereignty. That book reveals how multinational corporations, backed by neoliberal policy frameworks and international financial institutions, are reshaping India’s agricultural landscape—threatening farmer livelihoods and the very essence of democratic control over food systems.

Power Play: The Future of  Food (2024) describes how India’s agriculture is being systematically corporatised. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has signed memorandums of understanding with global giants like Bayer, Amazon and Syngenta. These deals, made without public debate or transparency, pave the way for AI-driven farmerless farms, carbon credit schemes that commodify land, genetically modified and herbicide-tolerant crops and digital platforms that dictate farming practices. Although this is promoted as modernisation, it is more akin to recolonisation.

India’s small and marginal farmers—who make up 85% of the farming community—are being pushed to the brink. Rising input costs, debt and lack of guaranteed prices are driving them off their land. The loss of traditional knowledge, biodiversity and rural resilience is also taking place. This displacement is not accidental but engineered and part of a broader neoliberal playbook.

The 2020–21 farmers’ protest was a powerful stand against this. Millions mobilised to resist three farm laws that threatened to accelerate neoliberal shock therapy and facilitate corporate control over agriculture. Though the laws were repealed, the underlying agenda remains intact. The government continues to promote policies that favour agribusiness over agrarian communities, often under the guise of technological innovation and efficiency.

We can already see the results of “innovative” technological meddling via Green Revolution ideology and practices. For instance, modern rice and wheat varieties have lost up to 45% of their nutritional value. Arsenic levels in rice have surged by nearly 1,500%. Agrochemical exposure and the spread of industrialised ultra-processed food are linked to increased levels of obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Yet Bayer—whose products include glyphosate and other toxic herbicides—is being welcomed into India’s agricultural institutions. Herbicide-tolerant basmati rice, developed through mutagenesis to bypass GMO regulations, threatens both human health and export markets.

Initiatives like AgriStack, developed in partnership with tech corporations like Microsoft, aim to digitise land records and farmer data—often without consent. Precision agriculture, carbon farming and platforms like Amazon’s farm-to-fork model are sold as solutions to various crises (perceived or otherwise), but they are tools of control.

Traditionally, farmers could be described as ethno-engineers: they used indigenous knowledge and practical innovations to manage local environments, soil, water and crops in sustainable ways. These farmers developed complex systems such as terracing, water harvesting, composting, mulching and mixed cropping, tailoring them to various climatic and geographical conditions.

Bayer believes this to be “backward” and in need of its humanity-saving insights and miraculous technologies. Farmers enrolled in Bayer’s Climate FieldView or similar systems are being told what to grow, when to grow it and which inputs to buy. Their data is harvested and their autonomy eroded. Farmers are becoming mere cogs in a corporate machine. As a business model, it works—for Bayer.

But this is not just a technological transformation. Given that most of the population are still involved in making a living from agriculture, it is a civilisational one.

The agrarian crisis and the ongoing farmer protests should not be regarded as a battle between the government and farmers. The outcome will adversely affect the entire nation in terms of the further deterioration of public health and the loss of livelihoods and more migration to urban centres which themselves sprawl into more and more fertile agricultural land.

Myth making

True independence is not just political—it is economic, ecological and cultural. It means the right to grow, distribute and consume food that is healthy, local and culturally appropriate; farming that works with nature, not against it; and policies shaped by farmers and citizens, not in corporate boardrooms.

India’s freedom struggle was against colonial rule—it was for dignity, self‑reliance and justice. Today, the struggle continues against digital domination, corporate capture and ecological destruction.

But why does the belief in national independence persist in an age where it is increasingly apparent that hegemonic global capital and globalist neoliberal coercion shape policies rather than national governments—not just in India but also in Starmer‑BlackRock’s Britain, Sweden, Germany and many if not most countries across the world?

The idea of independence is not merely a big lie rolled out to fool the people. It may be something more than just a case of “we rule you—we fool you.” Cultural anthropologists like Clifford Geertz have shown how nations rely on symbolic narratives to forge collective identity. In this broader sense, “myth” is not a simple falsehood but a shared symbolic idea that shapes how people see the world and motivates action. Independence Day, with its flags, speeches and rituals, becomes a ceremony of reassurance, a way to reaffirm a story that may no longer align with material reality.

In other words, within the context of the argument presented here, “myth” is any shared story or symbolic idea that shapes how people see the world and motivates action—even a modern, consciously constructed idea.

Myths offer emotional anchoring even though the reality may be that of recolonisation. Independence is increasingly symbolic (regardless of which country we live in), while actual control over land, food and data slips into the hands of finance capital and transnational corporations.

This is not to say that myths are not used by the powerful to mask systems of exploitation: the myth of independence functions as a kind of false consciousness, obscuring the material conditions of subjugation under global capitalism. The nation‑state, once imagined as a bulwark against imperialism, now often acts as a facilitator of neoliberal interests, managing populations while outsourcing sovereignty to markets.

Moreover, the idea of independence produces subjects who internalise the idea of freedom. Dependency becomes normalised through the language of progress, modernisation and development. Independence becomes a myth people believe and a disciplinary narrative that shapes how they live and what they are willing to accept.

Yet myths are not monolithic. They are not only instruments of control. Throughout history, they have also been tools of liberation when reinterpreted by the people they inspire. Across Latin America, for example, the anti‑colonial myth of Bolívar’s liberation has been revived by food sovereignty and land reform movements as a rallying cry against modern corporate control.

In India, elements of the freedom struggle’s Swadeshi ethos have been reclaimed by contemporary seed‑saving movements: farmers resist corporate seed monopolies by promoting indigenous crop varieties, linking self‑reliance in seeds to genuine independence.

In this respect, myths are no longer a warm, comforting embrace divorced from reality. They become a tool for confronting and transforming that reality. So, the question is no longer whether independence is real but whether ordinary people—whether in an increasingly authoritarian Britain, in India or elsewhere—are willing to fight for the kind that cannot be outsourced, sold or silenced.

For further information on the issues discussed above, download/read the author’s open access books on Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

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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