NEW DELHI: The dispute between PepsiCo and Gujarat farmer groups over growing a specific variety of potato has turned political, with senior leaders of both the BJP and Congress parties tweeting and calling the company’s decision to sue farmers in Gujarat as ‘ill advised’, amidst threats to ‘boycott’ PepsiCo products in the country.“I am giving an ultimatum to PepsiIndia to withdraw cases against Indian farmers in the next 72 hours otherwise we will start a campaign to boycott all PepsiCo products in India,” tweeted Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, spokesperson of the Delhi unit of the BJP.Member of Parliament in India and senior leader of the Indian National Congress Ahmed Patel’s tweet read: “Pepsi’s decision to take Gujarat’s potato grower farmers to court is ill-advised and brazenly wrong. It is in violation of the farmer’s rights under the PPVFR Act.” Patel’s tweet added that the state government ‘shouldn’t keep its eyes shut’. “Corporate interest cannot dictate what our farmers must or mustn’t cultivate,” the tweet said.Earlier this month, the US multinational had sued farmers in the state of Gujarat for alleged “rights infringement” on grounds that the farmers were “illegally” dealing with its registered potato variety used in its Lays chips On Friday, PepsiCo India offered to withdraw the legal cases against the Gujarat farmers provided they abstain from cultivating the FC5 variety. Four of the farmers have been accused by PepsiCo of using its registered variety of potato seed. The farmers have sought time till June 12 to respond.PepsiCo said it has proposed to “amicably settle with people who were unlawfully using seeds of its registered variety”. A company spokesperson said: “PepsiCo has also proposed that they (the farmers) may become part of its collaborative potato farming program.”Advocate Anand Yagnik, who had appeared on behalf of the farmers, had said the litigation is a case of “corporate arrogance”. “A MNC enters into our farmlands, procures crop without our knowledge and frames us. It is infringing upon the right to privacy and dictating terms about what we should eat. This is unacceptable,” he said.Yagnik had further claimed that PepsiCo officials entered the farms with advocates in plain clothes and collected crop samples without the knowledge of the farmers. “The entire process of evidence collection was flawed,” he said.