The Verdict: Who Won, What It Means, Where It Leaves Us — Kissan Andolan: Part 12 of 12

Twelve parts. Four years. Hundreds of pages, thousands of lives, and one question that still has no answer. We have walked every inch of this story, heard every side, and lifted every hidden stone. Now, at the end, I owe you the hardest thing of all: an honest reckoning.

1The whole journey, in twelve steps

Before the verdict, let's see the road we travelled, all at once.

Part 1	Farming, Punjab, and why land is honour — the ground the story grows from.
Part 2	The machine: MSP, mandi, arhtiya, FCI — and the catch that only ~6% truly benefit.
Part 3	The three laws of 2020 — what they said, and how they were rushed through.
Part 4	The government's case — freedom, choice, and reform for the forgotten 94%.
Part 5	The farmers' case — a shield removed, and the danger of "freedom" without power.
Part 6	The uprising — Dilli Chalo and the year-long cities at Delhi's gates.
Part 7	The flashpoints — Republic Day, the Red Fort, Tikait's tears, Lakhimpur Kheri.
Part 8	The blame wars — Khalistan, the toolkit, and the fight over the story itself.
Part 9	The repeal — the surprise victory, and the promises that went unkept.
Part 10	Round Two — a divided movement, Shambhu, Khanauri, and Dallewal's fast.
Part 11	The hidden layers — water, caste, tenants, women, cost, and the WTO.
Part 12	This reckoning — who won, what it means, and where it leaves us.

2The balanced ledger: what each side got right

An honest verdict starts by admitting that both sides were partly right. This is not fence-sitting; it is simply true.

What the government got right	What the farmers got right
The old system really does help only a minority — about 6%, mostly in two states.	Their fear was rational, not hysterical — Bihar had already shown what dismantling mandis can do.
Post-harvest waste is real and huge; farming genuinely needs investment.	A spoken promise on MSP is not a legal one — and only a law can be trusted across elections.
Serious, non-partisan economists had urged marketing reform for decades.	A lone small farmer versus a giant corporation is not a fair contract.
Some reform of Indian agriculture is genuinely overdue.	People whose livelihood is at stake deserve to be consulted, not handed a decision.

3…and what each side got wrong

Where the government went wrong	Where the farmers' movement fell short
It rammed the laws through — ordinance, no consultation, a disputed voice vote. Process poisoned everything.	It defended a model that is draining Punjab's water and helping mainly a landowning minority.
It refused the one thing that would have built trust: writing MSP into law.	It largely forgot the landless, the tenants, and the women who do the work (Part 11).
It badly misjudged the depth of farmers' fear and mistrust.	Its certainty that the laws were "for Adani and Ambani" was potent but never proven.
Telling Parliament it had "no record" of ~700 deaths was its coldest hour.	A C2+50% legal guarantee for all crops may be close to fiscally and legally impossible.

The uncomfortable middle

Read both tables together and a quiet truth appears: this was never a simple fight between good and evil. It was a fight between a real problem (a broken, narrow farm system) and a real fear (that "fixing" it would sweep away the poor's only shield) — handled, by both sides, with too little trust and too much politics.

4So who actually won?

Everyone wants a scoreboard. Here is the honest one.

Round	Who "won"
Round One (2020–21)	The farmers won the battle — the laws were repealed. But nobody won the war: no MSP law came.
Round Two (2024–25)	No one won. It ended in exhaustion — the borders cleared, the core demand still unmet.
The deeper contest	A stalemate. The laws are gone; reform is now harder; and the real crises remain untouched.

The farmers stopped a law. The government stopped a guarantee. And the farm crisis stopped for no one.

That is the truest verdict I can give. The most-watched farmers' movement in the history of the world ended not with a treaty, but with a wound left open — and the deepest problems of Indian farming exactly where they started.

5What it means for India

For democracy

Something remarkable did happen. Ordinary people — with no money, no party, and no single leader — peacefully out-lasted one of the most powerful governments in the democratic world and forced it to reverse course. That is a genuine, historic demonstration that people still count. But the cost was steep: hundreds of deaths, a poisoned public conversation, sedition cases, and a country that learned to shout past itself.

For farming

Here is the sad irony. Because the reform was done so badly and beaten so completely, the word "reform" is now almost radioactive in Indian agriculture. Yet the underlying crises — vanishing water, crushing debt, farms too tiny to live on, a safety net that reaches too few — did not pause to watch the drama. They are still growing.

For trust

Perhaps the greatest casualty was trust. The farmers trust the government less; the government fears the farmers more. And the next time real change is needed, both will remember this — which may make the change India actually needs even harder to achieve.

6The question still hanging

Strip away every event, and this entire four-year saga balances on a single, still-unanswered question: will India put a floor price for crops into law — and can it?

As this book is written in 2026, the answer is still no, and still unresolved. The government has not legislated MSP, citing cost, inflation, exports and global trade rules. The Supreme Court has kept nudging the Centre to engage the farmers seriously.¹1As of 2026 no legal MSP guarantee has been enacted; the Supreme Court has urged the Centre to engage protesting farmers on a fresh plea seeking a legal MSP. MSP is still announced for ~22–23 notified crops via the CACP. Drishti IAS; Wikipedia, "2024–2025 Indian farmers' protest." The farmers have not dropped the demand. The committee that was supposed to settle it never earned their trust. And so the question simply waits — the way it has waited, in truth, since the Swaminathan Commission first raised it two decades ago.

Remember this — the real axis of the whole story

Everything — the laws, the marches, the deaths, the repeal, Round Two — orbits this one question. Until India answers it (yes with a workable design, or no with an honest alternative), the andolan is not truly over. It is only resting.

7What a real answer might look like

I promised at the start not to tell you what to think, and I will keep that promise. But after all this research, I can at least describe the shape of an answer that the whole story seems to point toward — the kind of thing thoughtful people on many sides quietly agree on, even as the loud ones fight:

The shape of a real solution	Why the story points here
Reform with farmers, not at them	The process wound (Part 3) shows change imposed in secret will be rejected, however good.
Widen who counts as a "farmer"	The landless, tenants and women (Part 11) must be inside any fix, not outside it.
Guarantee and diversify	Back prices for pulses, millets and maize to break the paddy-water trap (Parts 1 & 11).
A smart, affordable price backstop	Not "buy everything" and not "buy nothing" — a targeted floor the budget can bear (Part 11).
Rebuild trust, patiently	Because trust, not economics, is what actually broke here.

None of that fits on a placard, and none of it wins an election. Which is precisely why it is so hard — and precisely why it matters.

8Author's closing note

I began this book (Part 1) by promising you four things: simple words, every side, fact kept apart from opinion, and no hiding the hard parts. I have tried to keep all four, even when it meant writing sentences that would annoy people I agree with.

What I learned writing this

When I started, I quietly expected to find a villain. I did not find one. I found a government that saw a real problem and reached for it clumsily, arrogantly, and without asking. I found farmers who saw a real danger and defended themselves with extraordinary courage — while looking past their own blind spots. I found a media and a politics that turned living people into symbols in a war that was never really about them.

Mostly, I found the farmer himself — the one on the trolley, worried about the price of his wheat, the water under his field, and the debt on his shoulders — who kept disappearing behind everyone else's slogans. If this book does one thing, I hope it puts him back at the centre, as a human being rather than a hashtag.

I am not going to tell you whose side to take. You have the whole picture now — the laws, the fears, the facts, the hidden layers — and you are more than capable of deciding for yourself. That was always the point. Not to win you over, but to hand you the truth, whole and honest, and trust you with it.

Thank you for walking all twelve parts with me.

— Lovepreet Singh

For the farmers who set out for Delhi and did not come home —
whatever side you stand on, they deserved to be understood.