Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait, who has been one of the faces of the farmers’ protest against the three central farm laws, on Monday announced the launch of “Mission Uttar Pradesh-Uttarakhand” to “defeat the BJP in the 2022 Assembly elections”.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims that there is nothing anti-farmer in the three farm laws. It is a big lie of the Prime Minister. One of the three laws states that the farmers will have to buy fertiliser, seeds, insecticides, equipment, etc, from the corporates under contract farming. It also states that the farmers have to enter an agreement with the banks to take loans to buy these things. The fact remains that the farmers take loan after mortgaging their properties,” Tikait said at a news conference of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha in Lucknow on Monday.

“We defeated the BJP in Bengal and now we will dislodge them in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand because the government is not ready to repeal the black laws. Our first mahapanchayat of Mission Uttar Pradesh-Uttarakhand would be held in Muzaffarnagar on September 5,” said Tikait, who is the BKU spokesperson.

The farmers had campaigned against the BJP during the March-April Bengal elections.

“We are soon going to sit on dharna at all the entry points to Lucknow, the way we are doing it around Delhi. The government thinks we are getting tired and would suspend our agitation at Delhi’s borders but we are expanding our protest base,” said the BKU leader.

The Morcha is a coalition of farmer unions which is spearheading the farmers’ protest since November last year. Farmers from several states are gathered at Delhi’s borders with Uttar Pradesh and Haryana for the past eight months under the Morcha banner.

Tikait said he is not planning to contest elections as the sole aim of the Morcha was to remove the BJP from power so that the new government repeals the three controversial farm laws enacted by the Modi government.

“We are at war with the ruling BJP and not a single farmer of the country will vote for the party in future. Our simple strategy is to support those who are able to defeat the BJP. We did this effectively in Bengal and will repeat it in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand in 2022,” said the farmer leader.