India, June 4 -- Faced with the police's tear gas and rubber bullets, farmers from Punjab have been protesting outside Delhi since February, a reprisal of the uprisings of 2020 and 2021, albeit on a smaller scale. Their demand for guaranteed crop prices points to poor returns from farming and rising debt of cultivators.

While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has dominated large swathes of India's rural heartland in the last 10 years, discontent and anguish among agriculturists is common. Rural dwellers do appreciate gleaming highways, cash transfers, subsidised cooking gas, piped water and free grain among a welter of welfare benefits offered by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Yet, c...