Agrarian Question Revisited: Conjunctural Analysis of Rural Crisis and Political Conflict in Contemporary India

Abstract

This study examines India’s deepening agrarian crisis through a conjunctural analysis framework that combines political economy, historical sociology, and critical policy analysis. Drawing on NCRB data, peer-reviewed field research, and secondary literature spanning 1967–2024, it investigates five interconnected dimensions of rural unrest: agrarian riots, farmer suicides, land dispossession, organized farmer movements, and left-wing armed insurgency. The article makes three original contributions: it shows, through cross-state comparison, that NCRB riot data measure the intersection of agrarian distress with state–farmer political relations rather than distress itself; it identifies and empirically documents five feedback mechanisms connecting the crisis dimensions; and it constructs a conservative quantitative estimate of the female farm-sector suicide undercount. Empirically, the article analyzes a 327% increase in recorded agrarian riots between 2014 and 2015 and 394,206 farm-sector suicides recorded between 1995 and 2023, and traces the evolution of farmer movements from the Shetkari Sanghatana to the 2020–2021 anti-Farm Law protests and the 2024 Delhi Chalo agitation. It concludes that India’s agrarian question is not a set of separable policy failures but a systemic condition in which each failure reinforces the others, requiring simultaneous, structurally coherent intervention.