Farmers leave today: Goodbye, Singhu

A day before protesting farmers head home on December 11, preparations to leave behind the sprawling Singhu border protest site after more than a year were overwrought with emotion.

On Friday, Preetpal Singh (61) helped his fellow villagers load rows of bamboo, which formed the walls of their hut at Singhu, into a trolley. “I’m getting the feeling one gets when they’re leaving home for a long time,” he said. They will leave for their village in Punjab’s Fatehgarh Sahib district on Saturday morning.

“We had built this hut for protesters from our village this summer. At first, we thought we would leave the materials behind here, but our families told us we shouldn’t do that. So now we’ve decided that we’ll take all this material back to the village, rebuild the hut there and put up photos from the protest and of us doing our duties during the last year. Our younger generations will be able to see how we lived and struggled during this historic movement. There is a nice park in our gurdwara, we might do it there,” he said.

Around three months ago, protesters from Ichhewal village in Patiala had built two ‘houses’ with metal frames on a divider on the highway, which they were busy dismantling on Friday.

“A trolley came from our village yesterday to help us carry everything home. We had bought all the metal with collections from our village, so all the material will go to our gurdwara,” said Jasmer Singh (55).

The biggest structure at the site is the over 200-feet-long metal shed set up at the main protest stage. According to Deep Khatri, a coordinator, this will be dismantled over the next few days, its parts sold for the best offer, and that the money will be submitted to the kisan morcha.

Even as thousands of farmers were busy packing their belongings, those who have been cooking and distributing food at langars planned how to ensure protesters are fed on their way home.