COINCIDING with the Monsoon Session of Parliament, the CPI(ML) launched a month-long campaign from July 25 to August 24 against the anti-poor, pro-imperialist policies of the UPA Government. The campaign began with mass demonstrations all over the country on July 25, demanding that the Government during the Monsoon session pass laws for Universal Employment Guarantee, central legislation for agrarian labour, social security legislation for unorganised sector workers, debt remission and alternative agricultural policy for the distressed peasantry, and 33% reservation for women in Parliament and State Assemblies. Burning local issues were also highlighted in some states.
As part of the campaign, August 6 (Hiroshima Day) was observed as day marked by protests against US imperialism and the UPA Government’s surrender to it. The campaign is due to culminate in militant mass protests of rasta roko/rail roko/chakka jam/jail bharo on August 24. We carry reports of the campaign from some of the States.
The blatant subversion of Mandate 2004 by the Congress-led UPA government is perhaps most clearly evident in Andhra Pradesh. If Mandate 2004 had been likened to a mini political earthquake against the NDA government’s rabidly neo-liberal and communal fascist agenda, the epicenter of that earthquake lay in Andhra Pradesh. In the Assembly elections held along with the Lok Sabha elections, the Andhra electorate had pulled down Chandrababu Naidu’s cyber-savvy regime with an overwhelming verdict that came to be recognized as a popular referendum against the Fund-Bank establishment and its disastrous policies.
Till his May 2004 poll debacle, Naidu was the poster boy of India’s economic reforms and Andhra was projected as the biggest success story of ‘globalisation’ of Indian economy. The Andhra ‘model’ sought to illustrate the ‘spectacular potential’ of achieving rapid economic growth and development through a concentrated thrust on the ‘new economy’ (IT sector, in particular) even as agriculture and manufacturing, the two basic sectors of the ‘old economy’ remained starved of investment. It is this criminal neglect of agriculture that reduced Andhra to a shocking graveyard for farmers and agricultural labourers.
The Congress made a big issue of the agrarian crisis and rural distress during the elections, but back in power it has done scarce little to remedy the situation. The number of suicides has gone up and the debt burden continues to mount. The government also made a huge noise about implementing land reforms, but land redistribution means nothing more than building a land market and ‘enabling’ the rural poor to buy lands by borrowing money at market rates from the government! Instead of regularizing the land in possession of the rural poor, the government is trying to redistribute the same land, dividing the landless population in the process. Worse still, leaders and activists of land struggles are being harassed and persecuted by implicating them in false cases.
Against this backdrop, the Andhra Pradesh State Committee of our Party has been steadily intensifying land struggles in East and West Godavari, Krishna and Visakhapatnam districts. As part of the nationwide mass campaign against the UPA government’s anti-people and pro-imperialist policies, the AP State Committee held two big conventions on the agenda of land and liberty, first at Kakinada on 6 August and then in Hyderabad on 16 August. This was the first time such a major programme was organized independently by the Party in Hyderabad. Both the conventions saw an encouraging participation of rural activists. The Hyderabad convention reflected the growing influence of the land redistribution movement led by the Party and the agricultural labour organization (see separate report) as well as the expanding contours of Party work in Andhra Pradesh with activists arriving not only from the Party’s traditional pockets in the coastal region but also from Anantapur, a Rayalseema district which witnessed hundreds of suicides.
Addressing the Kakinada convention, noted human rights activist K Balagopal lauded the landless poor for their courage, determination and resilience. Giving a historical account of the land reforms legislation in the state, rendered ineffective through deliberate exemptions, carefully cultivated loopholes and tardy implementation thanks to the pro-landowner nexus of the judiciary, bureaucracy and political leadership, he called for intensifying the struggle for more effective identification, acquisition and redistribution of ceiling surplus land, including the hundreds of thousands of acres that are still being held in the names of temples and endowments. He condemned the state repression let loose by the YSR government on the activists of land struggles and extended full support to the growing popular campaign for land and liberty.
Among the speakers at the Hyderabad convention were eminent academicians Prof. K Gopal Aiyer, who has been closely studying the implementation of land reform measures in Andhra, and Prof. Hargopal, a member of the ‘Committee of Concerned Citizens’ which had been instrumental in facilitating the talks between the state government and the Maoists, apart from Comrade Omkar, veteran leader of the historic Telengana movement and senior central leader of the MCPI, and Comrades Dipankar Bhattacharya and N Murthy from the Party Central Committee. Prof. Aiyer estimated that at least another one million acres of land could be made easily available for redistribution if exemptions given to temples and absentee landlords are eliminated. Drawing attention to the dangerous policy of diverting agricultural land in the coastal region for so-called ‘aqua culture’, Prof. Aiyer underlined the importance of coastal Andhra in the present phase of land struggles.
Comrade Murthy placed a written report of the land struggles being waged by the Party in the coastal region and also a report submitted by a Party fact-finding team regarding the hundreds of deaths being caused by malaria in the agency areas of Visakhapatnam and Srikakulam. Comrade Omkar welcomed the Party’s initiative and stressed the need for closer cooperation among communist revolutionary organizations around the basic agenda of the people in Andhra Pradesh. Comrade Dipankar called upon the assembled activists to intensify the struggle and emerge as the champion of the rural poor’s quest for land, liberty, social security and dignity. He also appealed to the progressive democratic intelligentsia of Andhra Pradesh to exert greater pressure on the Andhra government and thwart its design to curb democracy and impose the elitist pro-privatization agenda of the World Bank.
The month-long campaign against the anti-people and pro-US policies of the UPA Govt. was started in Assam through protest demonstrations in different places including state headquarters Guwahati and in other cities like Dibrugarh, Jorhat and Tinsukia. In Guwahati, the Party took out a procession from Judges Field to the Deputy Commissioner’s office, where the protesters staged a dharna and submitted a memorandum to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha through the D.C. of Kamrup. Apart from Party-led organizations, employees of CGHS participated in the programme.
Apart from the main five demands raised in the all-India campaign, the Assam demonstrations also demanded withdrawal of the decision to handover the oil fields of Assam to foreign companies, withdrawal of the decision to abolish the Central Government Health Scheme, and immediate intervention of the government to ensure a reasonable wage-revision agreement for the tea garden workers of Assam and to ensure the long-awaited Sunday wage for the tea workers. Similar programmes were also held at Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and Jorhat.
In Bihar, many Central Committee members joined the dharna on July 25 at Income Tax Crossing in Patna. At district H.Q. Arrah,a huge dharna was organized. Similarly, at Masaurhi and Paliganj blocks of Patna, at Jehanabad, Arval, Dehri-on-Sone, Bhabhua, Biharsharif, Buxar, Aurangabad, Navada, and Gaya etc., dharnas were organized and memorandum submitted to the D.Ms. In Siwan, a protest march, attended by 1000people, was organized from the Party office to Babunia Mor, which later culminated into a dharna in front of D.M. office. In Darbhanga, a march was organized from Lahariasarai to the district H.Q. where a dharna was held. In Bhagalpur, a march was taken out and a mass meeting was held in front of the railway crossing. In Muzaffarpur and Begusarai, processions were taken out while dharnas was held in Betia, Gopalganj, Samastipur and Hajipur
More than six months have elapsed since the cowardly killing of Comrade Mahendra Singh, CPI(ML) leader in Jharkhand. But the government and the CBI are yet to come out with any thing substantial in that regard. One may recall that Comrade Mahendra Singh’s murder was masterminded by the then Giridih SP Dipak Verma and BJP leader Ravindra Rai and the government was forced to order a CBI inquiry under tremendous pressure of the democratic opinion all over the country. However, the reinstalled BJP-led government in Jharkhand transferred Dipak Verma to Palamu, instead of taking any action against him, obviously, on another ‘assignment’ by the BJP regime, i.e., to deal with the militant assertion of the rural poor in that district.
As part of its month-long campaign against the UPA Government, the CPI(ML) organised a statewide ‘Rail Roko-Rasta Roko’ agitation in Jharkhand on August 16 to warn the governments, UPA’s in centre and BJP’s in the state, of more intense agitations if the culprits, including Dipak Verma, are not arrested and CBI failed to complete its investigation in time. While more than two thousands activists were arrested and there were incidents of lathicharge by the police like the one in Gharwa of Palamau region, this agitation forced the state’s routine to come to a halt as railway and road traffic was blocked at many places. A procession was taken out in Ranchi which blockaded the roads converging at the Albert Ekka square despite heavy police arrangement. All the roads connecting Ranchi main road were blocked. Later, hundreds of CPI(ML) activists including Polit Bureau member Swadesh Bhattacharya, CC member Rajaram and State Secretary Subhendu Sen, were arrested and sent to a camp jail where a protest meeting was also held by the agitators. Ranchi-Tata main road was also jammed at Bundu.
In Giridih, the constituency which elected Comrade Mahendra Singh to the State Assembly for many terms, people expressed their resentment over the governmental inaction and complicity by blocking the Grand Trunk road for a whole day. This was done under the leadership of Vinod Singh, CPI(ML) MLA. Giridih-Jamua road was also blocked for hours. At Saria, place where Mahendra Singh was assassinated, a complete blockade was there. Rail traffic was disturbed as dozens of trains were stopped for hours at Hazaribagh Road and also at Koderma. Dhanbad-Sindri Rail line was also blocked. Trains were also blocked at Nagaruntari station. Roads were blocked at places like Koderma, Nirsa, Dhanbad, Jharia, Baliapur, Garhwa, Daltanganj, many places is Latehar and Bokaro, and also in Jainamor, Kasmar and Santhal Pargana besides several other places.
This statewide agitation has expressed once again people’s desire to punish the killers of Comrade Mahendra Singh and if this was not done by the government at will, people have their option of forcing the govt. to do so.
CPI(ML) organized demonstrations at district headquarters all over the state, demanding that the Central government pass the Employment Guarantee Bill in the monsoon session itself. Demands on central legislation for agrarian labourers, legislation for the social security of unorganized workers, an alternative agriculture policy and 33% reservation for women were also raised. Along with this, the Party started a month-long campaign exposing the anti-people, pro-American policies of the U.P.A. government. Thousands of people participated in demonstrations in Chandauli, Sonbhadra, Mirzapur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Kanpur, Pilibhit, and Moradabad etc. In Lucknow, a dharna was organized in district headquarters where construction workers participated in a large number. In Ballia, 1500 people marched to district headquarters. In Mirzapur, 1000 people participated in a march and dharna at district headquarters while 200 participated at Jamalpur block. In Chandauli, 300 people participated at Niyamatabad block headquarters while 200 attended a dharna at Chakia. A dharna was organized at Naugarh. In Sonbhadra, dharnas were organized at Robertsganj and Duddhi, where 250 and 200 people participated respectively. In Sitapur, 400 people marched to the D.M. office. Here, a large number of women agrarian labourers participated enthusiastically. In Unnao, where our work has recently started, 400 workers marched to the D.M. office. In Allahabad 250 people participated in the dharna at district headquarters. In Deoria, 400 men and women attended the dharna at district headquarters. In Pilibhit, 250 people marched to the district headquarters and sat on a dharna. q