New Delhi, February 22 The Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) on Sunday appealed to farmers across India to organize public meetings in villages to voice their demands against the India-US interim trade deal.
In a statement issued here, the SKM, an umbrella body of farmer organizations that led the 2020-21 Farmers' Protests, called for adopting a letter written by it to the President, at the village meetings across the country before March 9, the day the Budget Session of Parliament resumes after a recess.
The SKM, in its letter, urged President Droupadi Murmu to direct Prime Minister Narendra Modi not to proceed with the US trade deal. It also demanded the removal of Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal for "agreeing to open agriculture to the exploitation of multinational corporations" and asked her to direct Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to withdraw the letter issued in January. In that letter, the FM had asked the state governments to stop giving bonus payments to paddy and wheat farmers.
The SKM said farmers will hold a procession to their respective village post offices and send the Open Letter written by it to the Rashtrapati Bhawan.
In its open letter, the SKM said the India-US interim trade deal has created an "extremely grave situation of the Government of India having succumbed before the pressures of an Imperial power and endangered the self-reliance and sovereignty of the country."
"Mr. Trump's declaration shows that the terms accepted in the Interim Agreement are blatantly detrimental to the interests of the Indian economy and India's farmers. It is sinister that the Government of India has remained completely silent about those terms," it alleged.
Earlier this month, the US and India announced they had reached a framework for an Interim Agreement on trade, under which Washington would charge a reduced reciprocal tariff of 18 per cent, from 25 per cent earlier, on imports from India. And, according to the White House's Fact Sheet, India would eliminate or reduce tariffs on all US industrial goods and a wide range of US food and agricultural products, including dried distillers' grains, red sorghum, tree nuts, fresh and processed fruit, soybean oil, wine and spirits, and additional products.
However, in a major setback to what was Trump’s pivotal economic agenda in his second term, the US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 verdict written by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled that the tariffs imposed by Trump on nations around the world were illegal and that the president had exceeded his authority when he imposed the sweeping levies. But, shortly after the court verdict, Trump asserted that there is "no change" in the trade deal with India.