This commentary, part of a forum on India’s Agrarian Question, analyses India’s new controversial union Farm Laws and the farmers’ protest against them in the context of the history of agricultural market laws, and the political mobilisation commonly observed in actually existing markets in different Indian states and regions. It identifies two critical shifts in law and protest and their emerging dynamics and contradictions. The first is the shift in the locus of regulatory power and resistance from the states to the union government; the second is the presence of farmers rather than traders at the forefront of protests against market reforms and in defence of local, state-regulated markets. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.