The farmers suspended their march to Delhi on Friday after some of them suffered injuries when security personnel fired teargas shells. The security personnel at Haryana’s Shambhu border lobbed tear gas shells at protesting farmers on Sunday, amid a disagreement over the list of 101 people permitted to pass through the police’s barricading.
The group of 101 farmers resumed their foot march to Delhi from the Shambhu border, where they had been camping since their first attempt to march to the capital was foiled in February, to press their various demands, including a legal guarantee for minimum support price (MSP).
As the protesting farmers inched closer to multi-layered barricades at the Shambhu border, the police fired shells to disperse them. The tear gas shells forced the farmers, some of whom had covered their faces and were wearing protective eyewear, to get back a few metres.
A police officer deployed at the Punjab-Haryana Shambhu border told news agency ANI that the protesters weren’t on the list. He claimed they were not letting the police identify them and were “moving as a mob”. “We will first identify them (farmers) and then we can allow them to go ahead. We have a list of the names of 101 farmers, and they are not those people. They are not letting us identify them; they are moving ahead as a mob,” he said.
Meanwhile, a protesting farmer told the news agency that the police’s list was wrong. “The list they (police) have is wrong – the list doesn’t have the names of farmers coming here. We have asked them (the police) to let us move ahead and we will show them our identity cards. Police are saying that we (farmers) don’t have permission to move ahead – so why do we have to prove our identity?… We are trying to sort things out through dialogues – but anyhow we will move ahead,” he said.
The farmers suspended their march to Delhi on Friday after some of them suffered injuries due to teargas shells. The Haryana Police had earlier asked the farmers to not enter the state from Punjab citing a prohibitory order clamped by the Ambala administration under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS).
The group of farmers have demanded that they be allowed to move to Delhi for talks with the Centre over their demands. The police claimed the group created a ruckus. On Saturday, farmer leader Sarwan Singh Pandher said they had not received any communication from the Centre for talks on their demands.
