New Delhi: Pitted against farmers who earlier used the sheer power of their tractors to break through barricades and other obstacles in their march towards Delhi, police has now come up with innovative methods to check their advance – barbed wires and wooden boards laded with iron spikes cemented on to the roads.
Also, the iron barricades have been further fortified by concertina wires, double layers of concrete slabs further strengthened by pouring in concrete mix between them to make them difficult to move even by tractors once the concrete solidifies.
The internet also remained suspended at the protest site.
Iron rods have been hooked between two rows of cement barriers on a flank of the main highway at the Singhu border. Another portion of the highway at the Delhi-Haryana border is practically blocked as a makeshift cement wall has come up there.
At Ghazipur on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border, there are multi-layer barricades to stop the movement of vehicles. Barbed wire has also been put up to keep off people on foot.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday attacked the government over barricades and road blocks set up at farmer agitation sites on Delhi's borders, and asked the Centre to "build bridges and not walls".
"GOI, Build bridges, not walls!," Gandhi said on Twitter posting pictures of barricades and road blocks at farmer protest sites.
Earlier, police had dug up trenches across the roads and even parked buses and other heavy vehicles to prevent the farmers from moving towards Singhu, Tikri and other borders, but could not succeed.
The protest sites on the Delhi borders now are marked by heavy presence of police and paramilitary forces in riot gear, apart from buses parked across roads to dissuade more farmers from Punjab, Haryana and western UP from joining forces at the protest sites at Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur.
"These iron spikes and nails are tyre-killers used to prevent the entry of tractors into Delhi. We are using these in the backdrop of what happened on January 26 and the violence that followed," a senior Delhi Police officer told IANS.
Even drones are coming in handy to keep a vary eye on trouble-makers, with police doing intensive checking of vehicles on the Delhi border that has resulted in massive traffic snarls at the entry points to the national capital.
"No talks with govt until harassment stops"
There can be no "formal" talks with the government until "harassment" by police and administration stops and detained farmers are released, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha said on Tuesday.
In a statement, it alleged that increased barricading, including digging trenches, fixing nails on roads, setting up barbed-wire fences, closing internal roads, stopping Internet services and "orchestrating protests through BJP-RSS workers" are part of "attacks" being organised by the government, its police and administration against the farmers.
The umbrella body of farmers' unions termed the "frequent Internet shutdown" at protest sites and blocking of many Twitter accounts related to the farmers movement "direct attack on democracy".
Farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, are protesting the Centre's farm laws for more than two months at the borders of the national capital, choking highways to neighbouring states.
They claim that the new laws will weaken the minimum support price (MSP) system. But the Centre says the laws will only give farmers more options to sell their produce.
On Republic Day, a tractor parade by farmers in the national capital turned violent and many protesters were arrested.
Farmer unions on Monday announced a countrywide 'chakka jam' on February 6 when they would block national and state highways for three hours in protest against the Internet ban in areas near their agitation sites, harassment allegedly meted out to them by authorities, and other issues.
(With IANS & PTI inputs)
