NEW DELHI, 29 January, 2021 (TON): Through Thursday a stalemate could be seen between the police and protestors at UP Gate on Delhi’s Ghazipur border after the UP government ordered the farmers camping there to be evacuated.

The Bharatiya Kisan Union’s (BKU) Tikait faction leading the sit-in announced it would move to Supreme Court on Friday against the attempt to expel the demonstrators.

BKU’s leader Rakesh Tikait, who looked over at the UP Gate when the tensions arose said, “The Supreme Court has not raised any objections to peaceful protest. No violence has taken place here (at UP Gate). I will challenge the order in the Supreme Court on Friday.”

The power supplies to the camps on the highway was cut by the local administration, water tanks service discontinued, and mobile toilets were removed too.

Other protests alongside this folded up, e.g. agitation at Atoha in Palwal on the Delhi-Agra Highway, as the as the tide continued to turn after the Republic Day violence in Delhi during the farmers’ tractor rally.

“The Red Fort incident changed everything overnight,” admitted Shiv Kumar Kakka, who was leading the Atoha protest as he decided to wrap up the agitation, a day after more than 2,000 protesters were booked for a clash in Faridabad during a Republic Day tractor rally.

Kakka said the protest had also lost the support of locals. The previous night, in UP’s Baghpat, police evicted protesters camping on the Delhi-Saharanpur highway. An FIR was also filed against the farmers under IPC sections 283, 341 (wrongful restraint) 188 (disobedience of order promulgated by public servant), 269 (spreading infection) and sections of the Epidemic Diseases Act. At Singhu border, Delhi Police installed new barricades near the passage to the protest site, leaving visitors with no option but to take long detours passing through residential areas.

Police also began stopping private vehicles a few kilometers before from the protest site, allowing only government vehicles to go forward.

The crowd at the protest site too had conspicuously thinned. Farmers said they will stay put and only those who had come to participate in the tractor parade had returned.

Many are of the view that the farmers at the Delhi gates are fighting for the rights of all the Indian citizens as the new farm laws would go over the top, and would disable the right to legal recourse of all the citizens, not just the farmers.