On the 10th day of the farmers’ protest dharna outside the residence of Punjab Vidhan Sabha Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan at his native village in Faridkot, police on Friday carried out a swift operation to dismantle the continuous sit-in, detaining nearly 200 protesters in the process.The crackdown came three days after district authorities had negotiated a 24-hour deferral with protesting farmers, who had then threatened to block roads and rail traffic in the area.That understanding, brokered to buy time for talks with the state government, appears to have run its course without a resolution, and it was in this backdrop that police moved in on Friday to clear the site before the deferred blockade threat could be revived.Heavy police contingents moved into the protest site, clearing tents and barricades that agitators had erected outside the Speaker’s residence. The detained farmers, drawn from local and regional unions, were shifted to police stations across the district.Officials said the action was triggered by intelligence inputs that protesters were planning to intensify their agitation by blocking national highways and railway tracks in the region. Security around the Speaker’s residence was subsequently strengthened, with multi-layered checkpoints set up along the main access roads.The dharna had been running as part of a broader campaign in which farmer unions have been staging indefinite sit-ins outside Punjab Agriculture Development Banks, seeking to pressure the state government into acting on long-pending demands.Central among these are financial relief and debt compensation for farmers, the return of blank security cheques that land mortgage banks had obtained as collateral, and financial assistance or government jobs for families of farmers who died during earlier rounds of agitation.With talks with the state administration having stalled even after the three-day breather granted by the district administration, union leaders had gone ahead with plans to disrupt road and rail traffic across the Malwa belt, prompting police to act against the protest before the threatened blockade could materialise, said a senior police officer, preferring anonymity.Farmer leader Kaka Singh Kotra strongly condemned police action, describing the detentions as undemocratic and warning of a fresh state-wide agitation unless all those held are released unconditionally.