Three farm acts were passed by the Indian Parliament in September 2020, deregulating agricultural marketing, permitting contract farming and removing stock limits. Punjab's farm unions read them as the end of assured procurement at a minimum support price, on which the state's whole agricultural economy rests.
Protests began in Punjab in September and moved to the borders of Delhi in November 2020, where farmers set up camps at Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur and stayed through a winter and a summer.
The camps ran their own langars, medical posts, libraries, laundries and newspapers. Punjab's village gurdwaras and the Sikh institution of langar supplied them. Trolleys were converted into insulated shelters. The organisation of the camps, more than the numbers, was what made the protest hold.
Around 700 protesters died over the course of it, of cold, illness, road accidents and suicide. On 3 October 2021 at Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh, vehicles drove into a group of protesting farmers and killed four of them. Eight people died in the violence that day.
The laws were repealed in November 2021. The demand for a legal guarantee of minimum support price was not met and the movement has continued in different forms since.
It was the largest sustained protest in India in decades and it was organised out of Punjab and Haryana villages.
The unions running it were the older Punjab farm organisations, with a village level structure, a paying membership and forty years of practice at holding a dharna. That is the machinery the camps ran on.
Women were present in very large numbers and ran sections of the camps, which was remarked on at the time as unusual for a Punjab agitation and has not obviously changed who holds office in the unions.
It was also a diaspora event. Money, publicity and political pressure came from Punjabi communities in Canada, Britain and the United States, and the reaction to that inside Indian politics became part of the story.