The Punjab Police on Wednesday detained several farmer leaders including Jagjit Singh Dallewal and Sarwan Singh Pandher in Mohali and dismantled structures at two protest sites along the state’s border with Haryana, PTI reported.

The farmer leaders were detained when they were returning from a meeting with a Union government delegation.

Since February 2024, farmers have been protesting at Shambhu and Khannauri on the Punjab-Haryana border, demanding a legal guarantee for minimum support price. The minimum support price is the cost at which the government procures crops from farmers.

However, both protest sites were emptied out by the police at about 9.30 pm on Wednesday, The Indian Express reported.

“We are over 3,000, and you are only a few hundred,” the newspaper quoted Patiala Deputy Inspector General of Police Mandeep Singh Sidhu as having told the protesters. “We have to clear the sites, come what may. Your leaders have already been detained in Chandigarh… We don’t know what happened in the meeting between the government and union leaders.”

The police officer asked the protesters to board the buses voluntarily, saying that he did not want to use force against them.

The police confirmed that the highways, which had been blocked by the protesters, would reopen soon after the structures erected by the farmers are removed.

The Haryana Police was also seen using bulldozers on Thursday morning to remove the barricades on its side of the Shambhu border, ANI reported.

On Wednesday, the farmer leaders who were detained were heading back to the Shambhu protest site after their meeting with Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Chandigarh.

Chouhan said that the meeting, which lasted over three hours, “took place in a positive and constructive manner”. He confirmed that talks would continue, with the next meeting scheduled for May 4, PTI reported.

Union minister and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ravneet Singh Bittu criticised the Punjab Police’s action.

“They voted for you [Aam Aadmi Party government] and Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann should be ashamed,” ANI quoted Bittu as saying. “They [AAP government] did not want a solution to be found through talks between the central government and the farmers...People of Punjab will not allow Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann to enter any village.”

Besides a legal guarantee for minimum support prices, the farmers have also been demanding the implementation of the MS Swaminathan Commission’s wider recommendations for farming in India, pensions for farmers and farm labourers, a farm debt waiver, the reinstatement of the 2013 Land Acquisition Act and justice for victims of the 2021 Lakhimpur Kheri violence.