The effort to build such a national body of farmers, in comparatively recent times, was made earlier by C. Narayanswami Naidu of Tamil Nadu. Himself a farmer from Coimbatore, he had led the Tamil Nadu farmers in several struggles against the government. He had started working towards bringing farmers under one umbrella way back in 1970 when Joshi was still in Switzerland. Later, on 14 December 1980, he had called a meeting in Hyderabad of farmers’ organizations in the country. It was quite an arduous task even to collect addresses of such organizations but Narayanswami worked hard to make that happen. For reasons not known, Joshi was not present in that meeting. Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Union was formed in that meeting and Narayanswami was unanimously elected as its President. It was agreed that the Union would be totally free from politics. It was also decided to meet again to discuss the constitution of this Union and other related issues. For different reasons, that subsequent meeting got delayed. The meeting that Joshi attended at Khanna in Punjab in May 1982 was called precisely as a follow-up of that first meeting. Unfortunately, Narayanswami himself could not attend. The news reached Khanna that he himself had joined politics and formed his own political party just a few days earlier. In later years, Narayanswami got totally absorbed in his work in Tamil Nadu and could not devote time to fulfill his earlier vision of forming the National body for farmers. Joshi was more or less accepted as the leader of Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Union at that Khanna meeting. However, he later experienced several difficulties in getting together farmers’ leaders. To fix the dates for such a meeting in itself was a hassle because farmers in different States had their peak harvest times in different months. Finance was also a difficulty. Air travel was not common then and farmers’ organizations, unlike their industrial counterparts, never had a system of collecting membership fee. Even if they managed to come together, there 264
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
