Republic Day is intended to be a celebration of India’s constitutional soul—justice, liberty and equality. Yet in 2026, it is not state pageantry that best embodies these values but the farmers and rural workers who have been taking to the streets through January. These protests expose a widening moral chasm: a state that celebrates its democratic birthright while simultaneously legislating for a neoliberal future that treats its primary producers as disposable.   

India’s farmers are asserting that if the Constitution belongs to the people, then the people have a moral duty to defend its promises when the state shifts its allegiance to corporate interests.   

On 26 January, the state will display its military hardware—a spectacle of power and national security. Meanwhile, farmer and rural worker mobilisation in January 2026 has increasingly centred on opposition to the VB-GRAMG Act (Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin), alongside resistance to other legislative changes affecting rural livelihoods.   

Launched at the start of the month, a joint campaign involving rural worker organisations, trade unions and farmer groups—including formations associated with the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha—has produced district-level protests, public hearings and coordinated farmer–worker actions in several states, with specific public hearings confirmed in some areas. This campaign is scheduled to continue into February.   

The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) has also re-entered a phase of active mobilisation. Through January, SKM units—particularly in Punjab and Haryana—have held tractor rallies, press briefings and state-level meetings opposing the VB-GRAMG Act, the Seed Bill 2025 and the Electricity Bill 2025.   

In Punjab, farmer organisations have continued to mobilise around questions of agricultural distress and institutional accountability. Protests and meetings linked to payment delays, fears of privatisation and land-use disputes have persisted into January, reflecting longer-running conflicts between farmers, cooperatives and the state.   

Opposition to the Electricity Bill 2025 has also remained active in early 2026. Farmer unions, left parties and trade unions have organised district-level demonstrations, marches and padayatras (foot marches) in parts of north India and elsewhere, expressing resistance to the bill’s proposed restructuring of power distribution and its implications for small and marginal cultivators.   

As Republic Day approaches, several unions and farmer organisations have announced symbolic observances—including planned black-flag demonstrations, public readings of the Constitution and joint farmer–worker meetings intended to highlight the erosion of rights-based governance.   

The government’s legislative blitz in late 2025—the VB-GRAMG Act, the Seed Bill 2025 and the Electricity Bill 2025—represents a philosophical departure from rights-based governance toward corporate-led management:   

The VB-GRAMG Act: By replacing the demand-driven MGNREGA with a budget-capped mission, the state has turned a right to work into a rationed entitlement. Rural hardship, a systemic failure, is increasingly treated as a fluctuating line item in a fiscal ledger.   

The Seed Bill 2025: This legislation strikes at the root of biological sovereignty. To expand corporate control over seeds is to accelerate the commodification of nature itself.   

The Electricity Bill 2025: Privatisation threatens the survival of smallholders. Without affordable and subsidised power, irrigation—and, with it, agricultural viability—becomes untenable for millions.   

It must also be mentioned that in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, a large-scale ‘long march’, organised by CPI(M) and involving thousands of adivasi farmers, tribals and workers recently took place involving around 50,000 people.​ Starting on 19 January, covering about 60 km on foot to the Palghar Collector office, the march continued through January 20-22 with an indefinite dharna for land rights and against threats to livelihoods from development projects. Organisers are talking about escalating the protest.   

The essence of the moral crisis is a struggle between democracy (the power of the many) and neoliberalism (the power of capital). The state increasingly views the agrarian question and other issues through a narrow lens of market liberalisation, reframing democratic dissent as a problem of governance rather than justice (see the new open access book Indian Farmers Against the Global Agri-Catrel: Chronicling Resistance to Corporate Enclosures).   

Protests remind us that democracy is not a performance conducted on a boulevard in Delhi but a lived struggle in fields, tribal areas, villages and worksites. Citizens increasingly insist that the economy must serve the people, rather than the people being sacrificed to the economy.   

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

Featured image: Republic Day Parade 2025 (CC0)

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