NEW DELHI: India will push on with sweeping agriculture reforms, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sun­day, as he criticised last week’s deadly riot in the capital following a long-running protest campaign by farmers.

Thousands flooded New Delhi on Tuesday, driving tractors from border camps where they have been holding sit-ins since November 26; but the rally turned into a rampage which left one person dead and hundreds of police injured. Modi termed the farmers’ assault on a historic fort “an “insult” to the national flag.

His government has been insisting that the agriculture sector needs to be modernised, but farmers fear the deregulation laws will place them at the mercy of big corporations that already dominate other industries.

In his first public comments on Tuesday’s events, Modi stressed that the government remained “committed to modernising agriculture”.

“The efforts of the government shall also continue in the future,” the Indian leader said in his regular monthly radio address on Sunday.

“On January 26, seeing the insult of our tricolour, the country was very sad,” he added.

The demonstrators swarmed the 400-year-old World Heritage-listed Red Fort on Tuesday, raising religious and farm union flags, though they did not remove the national flag from the top of the monument.

Modi’s comments came as police arrested at least one journalist and filed complaints against others, stoking fears of a media crackdown over the reporting of the protests.

Mandeep Punia, who writes for the English-language Caravan magazine, was detained on Saturday at Singhu, one of the main protest sites.

He was photographed being taken to court on Sunday, where he is expected to be charged on unknown offences, local media reported.

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2021