For months, government spokespersons and a section of the media were looking for a leader among the consortium of more than three dozen farmer unions protesting against the farm laws. On the night of January 28, they finally found one in Rakesh Tikait, the national spokesperson of the Bhartiya Kisan Union, who broke down before the media, alleging that there’s a “conspiracy against farmers”.
His critics might call his emotional outburst a smart political move but Rakesh Tikait, the second son of Mahendra Singh Tikait, the mercurial farmer leader who revived the BKU in the late 1980s with a string of dramatic protests in Muzaffarnagar and Meerut against the then Congress government, provided a new spark with his tears and tenacity to the dying embers at the Ghazipur border protest site. Till January 28, the BKU was just playing a supporting role at Singhu and Tikri.
In fact, when Mr. Tikait first emerged at the U.P. Gate on Ghazipur border on December 28 with scores of his…