Rakesh Tikait, the man spearheading the fake and misinformed farmers’ protests, which have begun evaporating at a tremendous pace, seems to have foreseen the inevitable. With the Covid-19 pandemic raging once again across the country, and the new addition of cases on a daily basis surpassing the 1,00,000 mark for days on end, Tikait and his gang of hoodlums are realising that the days of their agitation are numbered and that it is only a matter of time before the authorities clear up the protest sites and send the few protestors remaining on the borders of Delhi back home.
Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Dr Harsh Vardhan recently made it a point to mention how the farmers’ protest had turned out to become a super spreader event, whose consequences the nation as a whole is having to suffer. In a virtual interaction with the health ministers of 11 high burden states Tuesday, Vardhan said, “In Punjab, the UK variant of the virus has been found in over 80 per cent cases. Cases are surging and genome sequencing has also established the presence of the variant. This case surge is mainly event driven with marriages, local body elections and farmers’ agitation playing a part.”
The farm union leaders seem to have gotten the message lock, stock and barrel. For this very reason, Rakesh Tikait has resorted to saying that the protestors (or whatever is left of them) will not move even if a nationwide lockdown is reimposed. “Farmers will not go back home till these laws are repealed. They talk of coronavirus but we have told the government that they should not treat this stir like Shaheen Bagh. This agitation will not end. We will follow the coronavirus guidelines and this agitation will continue till our demands are met,” Tikait said. He added the protesting farmers will follow all Covid-19 protocols and if need be, continue their agitation till 2023.
The Shaheen Bagh protests were winded up by the government early last year as the country braced for the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. With the temperatures rising to unbearable magnitudes, and with the harvest season having approached, farmers have returned to their home states, and numbers on the borders of Delhi have largely dwindled. Many feel that this would be the right time for the government to strike and wind up the misinformed agitations for good.
Read More: Jat leaders face a threat from Rakesh Tikait and his Communist comrades
Rakesh Tikait, on his part, is reportedly being beaten wherever he is going. Two weeks ago, a person had tried roughing up Rakesh Tikait in Cuttack, while more recently, in Rajasthan’s Alwar district, the fake farmer’s ‘convoy’ was attacked. Across the country, people have rejected the farmers’ protests as any sane individual sees right through the fabrications and falsities being spread by the unions and their radical leaders. Rakesh Tikait is attempting to blame the government for the natural death of an agitation that was founded on a bunch of lies.