New Delhi, Feb. 12 -- Couldn't break them with laws, so they were sold out with deals to the Americans! That single line captures the uneasy continuity in India's agricultural policy over the last few years. When Indian farmers rose up against the three farm laws, they weren't merely resisting technical reforms. They were blocking what they understood, correctly, as a structural corporate takeover of Indian agriculture. The laws were pushed with unprecedented urgency, defended with open hostility toward dissent, and finally repealed not out of conviction, but exhaustion, after a year-long agitation that shook the country and embarrassed the government globally. That defeat clearly rankled.

Today, under the language of "trade frameworks" ...