Chandigarh: Asserting that farmers will continue to protest peacefully in support of their demands, senior farmer leader Baldev Singh Sirsa on Saturday said for how long the government will keep the roads blocked, ultimately they will have to resolve the issue.
"Is there anything for which there is no solution? The demands on which we are agitating are old ones," 82-year-old Sirsa said.
The government should give a legal guarantee of a minimum support price (MSP) for crops, he said. "If farmers don't get even an MSP for their produce, where will they go?" he asked.
"If loans of thousands of crores of rupees of corporates can be waived, why not that of farmers and farm labourers?" he further said.
He said the farmers have been protesting in a peaceful manner at Shambhu and Khanauri border points along the Punjab-Haryana borders for past several days.
"We are not the ones who have blocked roads. If the Haryana government has put up barricades to prevent our 'Delhi Chalo' march, we have been sitting peacefully and continuing our agitation," he told reporters.
"For how long will they block roads? But we will continue to protest peacefully. We walk on the path shown by our gurus. We already set an example of peaceful agitation for 13 months at Delhi's borders (against now repealed farm laws)," he said.
The demand of a legal guarantee for an MSP and other demands are not of Punjab farmers alone, he said.
Meanwhile, Sirsa thanked United Sikhs, an NGO, for providing medical and legal aid to the farmers.
Director, United Sikhs, Punjab, Amritpal Singh said many farmers were injured during the protest recently and the organisation decided to provide medical aid and deployed three ambulances at the protest site.
Farmer leaders Manjeet Singh Rai and Jaswinder Singh Longowal had on Friday asserted that their 'Delhi Chalo' agitation will continue till their demands are met, saying they will announce their next course of action on March 3 after a prayer meeting for a farmer who died during clashes with security personnel in Khanauri.
The next announcement will be made after the final prayers at Shubhkaran Singh's native village Balloh in Bathinda district, they had said.
Shubhkaran Singh was killed and around 12 police personnel were injured in clashes at the Khanauri border point on the Punjab-Haryana border on February 21.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (Non-Political) and the Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM) are spearheading the 'Delhi Chalo' march by farmers to press the government to accept their demands.
The march was put on hold for two days after Shubhkaran Singh was killed on February 21. Two days later, the farmer leaders said the protesters would continue to camp at Khanauri and Shambhu on Punjab's border with Haryana till February 29.
Earlier, the farmer leaders had rejected the BJP-led Centre's proposal for procuring pulses, maize and cotton at an MSP by government agencies for five years, saying it was not in favour of the farmers.
In the fourth round of talks with the farmer leaders on February 18, a panel of three Union ministers had proposed that government agencies would buy pulses, maize and cotton at the MSP for five years after entering into an agreement with farmers.
The farmers are also demanding the implementation of the Swaminathan Commission's recommendations, pension for farmers and farm labourers, no hike in electricity tariff, withdrawal of police cases and "justice" for the victims of the 2021 Lakhimpur Kheri violence, reinstatement of the Land Acquisition Act, 2013 and compensation to the families of the farmers who died during a previous agitation in 2020-21.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)