Farmer leader Jagjit Singh Dallewal, who was on a hunger strike since November 26, accepted water and broke his fast on Friday morning, the Punjab government told the Supreme Court, according to Live Law.

Dallewal, chief of the farm group Samyukta Kisan Morcha (Non-Political), was on a hunger strike at Khanauri, located on the Punjab-Haryana border. His strike was part of a wider campaign by Punjab’s farm groups to press the Union government to accept their demand for legally guaranteed minimum support prices. The minimum support price is the cost at which the government procures crops from farmers.

“Mr Dallewal accepted water today and broke fast,” Advocate General Gurminder Singh, representing the Punjab government, told a bench of Justices Surya Kant and NK Singh on Friday.

He added that the state government had dispersed the farmers protesting at the Shambhu and Khanauri borders and opened the National Highway for traffic.

Farmers have been protesting at Shambhu and Khannauri on the Punjab-Haryana border since February 2024, demanding a legal guarantee for minimum support price.

“We know some people did not want settlement of grievances of farmers,” PTI quoted the bench as saying on Friday. “We are not sitting in an ivory tower. We know everything.”

The court also asked the Punjab and Haryana governments to file a status report on the ground situation and directed a high-powered committee formed by it to file its supplementary report.

Headed by retired High Court judge Nawab Singh, the committee was set up in September to resolve the grievances of the protesting farmers.

The bench also dropped the contempt proceedings initiated earlier against the Punjab chief secretary and the director general of police for not taking steps to hospitalise Dallewal while he was on a hunger strike, Live Law reported.

The bench had adjourned the matter at the last hearing in February after it was told that discussions were currently underway between the protesting farmers and the Union government.

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.

Earlier this month, the Punjab Police detained several farmer leaders, including Dallewal and Sarwan Singh Pandher, in Mohali and dismantled structures at two protest sites.

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