Rahul moves to revive farm protest on India-US deal, but can he repeat 2020?

New Delhi: Rahul Gandhi’s attempt to build a political and street campaign against the proposed India-US interim trade deal has the familiar shape of a movement-in-the-making.

He met Congress-backed farmer union leaders to “devise a strategy” on Friday morning.

The BJP responded with unusual sharpness. In a midnight reply on Thursday, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal and Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan accused Rahul of “inciting” farmers with lies on the proposed deal.

The political question is not whether this build-up can rattle the government. It already has.

Political pundits are deliberating whether it can mature into another mass agitation, five years after the farm laws protest, or whether it stays a noisy political effort with limited public traction.

Thursday’s trade union-led bandh, backed by some farmer leaders including BKU’s Rakesh Tikait, did not create the kind of nationwide disruption that typically signals a movement has caught fire.

It made some noise, but the day ended with the sense that the coalition has not yet found a pressure point that pulls in the wider public.

Why is 2020 hard to repeat

The farm laws agitation did not succeed only because the farmer unions were strong. It succeeded because the issue landed on a ready economic and political nerve.

Political analysts have argued that arhtiyas/aadhatiyas, commission agents who are central to the mandi ecosystem, saw their incomes and influence threatened by reforms, and that helped build momentum.

The protests had logistics, staying power and an ecosystem that could keep people at the border for months.

This time, the crops at the heart of the allegation, Rahul, are being accused of pushing; the ones he is alleged to be “lying” about are not central to Punjab’s core procurement anxiety.

Punjab’s main concern remains wheat and paddy. These crops and their MSP-linked procurement system form the political spine of the state’s farm economy.

If the deal’s “threat narrative” does not connect to that spine, it becomes harder to generate Punjab-level intensity.

And without Punjab-level intensity, the movement has a ceiling.

Typical Congress’ problem

Congress, on its own, has not been able to generate a large, sustained street mobilisation in the last decade.

The big churn moments, including the farm laws protest, were driven primarily by unions and farmer groups, not by Congress as the organiser. Congress benefited politically, but it was not the engine.

The CAA/NRC protests also created a broad national agitation temperature for a period, and that atmosphere helped different protest streams feed each other.

That kind of cross-issue protest energy is not present right now. There is no CAA/NRC-style national flashpoint creating constant agitation in multiple cities.

The Opposition has to build the mood from scratch. That raises the difficulty level.

Why the BJP is still uneasy

Even if the movement looks weak today, the government is not taking chances. The memory of the farm laws retreat still sits in the BJP’s mind. That is why ministers are responding hard, including rapid rebuttals and aggressive language about “lies” and “incitement”.

The government wants to prevent a simple narrative from settling: that it is quietly signing away farmers’ interests in a foreign deal. Trade agreements are complicated. Complexity is useful for governments, but dangerous if the public starts believing the worst.

That is why the BJP has attacked Rahul personally and tried to reassure farmers that their interests will be protected.

Which way can the tide turn?

At this stage, the tide can still turn either way. It will depend on narrative dominance.

Rahul’s camp needs to translate the deal into a simple, believable livelihood threat with clear winners and losers.

It will have to prove that the anger is not confined to traditional protest bases.

The government will have to give enough transparency to blunt the “secret deal” allegation, as and when such shareable details are in; and convince the public that the alleged crop impacts are either exaggerated, isolated, or not relevant to key procurement states.

The coming weeks will show whether Rahul’s build-up becomes a movement or remains a political noise campaign that rattles ministers but does not threaten Modi on the ground.