People's Democracy

People Want A CLEAN-UP,

THROWING all principles and moral values to the winds, this Vajpayee government continues to shamelessly cling to office. While the country seeks a clean-up operation following the scandalous tehelka exposures, the government is busy with a cover-up operation. Elsewhere in the issue, these efforts are detailed.

What is worse is the fact that the saffron brigade has taken recourse to the only activity they are competent at, i.e, instigating communal riots in order to divert people’s attention away from the corruption scandals. Elsewhere in this issue, we have detailed the manner in which the recent communal riots in Kanpur were engineered by these forces. The fact that reports of burning of the Quran are coming in from as far off places as Punjab and Kolkatta, confirm a well-designed and planned effort to create communal disturbances. Bartering national security for personal gain is combined with whipping up communal hatred and spilling the blood of innocent people. Mr Vajpayee today presides over this lethal combine of immorality and communal criminalisation.

In the meanwhile, the agenda of saffronisation continues to move at a faster pace. Every institution in the country is being undermined with fascistic fervour. What is at stake is not only the secular democratic foundations of our institutions, but elementary principles, rationality and natural justice.

A case in point is the recent national film awards. Three members of the jury have resigned in protest, and, a fourth strongly dissented the decision of the jury, saying that the saffron brigade manipulated the jury’s decision. Those chosen to select the best produced by our film industry were people of dubious credentials having little to do with either culture or aesthetics. The jury included the editor of the RSS mouthpiece Panchajanya, BJP MP Shatrugnan Sinha’s TV producer, Cuttack BJP MLA, I&B Minister Sushma Swaraj’s campaign manager in Bellary and the uncle of the actress who won the award. Can there be any greater instance of saffron nepotism? This is a nauseating expression of "cultural policing" at its worst. The awards presented in the name of the President of India are, thus, to be given to those whom the saffron brigade considers as advancing their interpretation of "Indian culture". Strangely, the chairman of the jury Ms Vyjayanthi Mala Bali, with her new found love for the BJP, justified the decision as being taken by a majority! If numbers were to decide on the quality of films, then one can bid goodbye to standards of excellence. Ironically, the Delhi Assembly has recently, as a consequence of numbers, declared that the Election Commission should derecognise the BJP as a national party! Would the BJP accept the logic of numbers in this case?

In tandem, the University Grants Commission has issued a circular to all universities to introduce a course on vedic astrology. Coming on the heels of the open patronisation of vedic mathematics, such decisions, instead of taking India into the 21^st century, take us back into the darkness of medieval times.

The packing of all bodies of historical and scientific inquiry by saffron elements is part of a larger strategy to rewrite Indian history and to replace scientific temper with irrational and obscurantist communal attitudes.

The dangers to India, its institutions and the people, with the continuation of the Vajpayee government, are thus not confined only to the issues of corruption and political morality. The longer this government continues, the faster is the process of undermining the secular democratic content of every institution in the country and, therefore, of the Indian Republic. For the sake of India and the people, this government must go.

COME April 1^st, quantitative restrictions (QRs) on all remaining 715 items will be removed. These are mainly items of mass consumption produced by domestic industry, particularly the small-scale sector.

The removal of QRs on 714 commodities last year, mainly agricultural products, has caused severe havoc. The large-scale cheaper imports have ruined the lives of crores of Indian farmers, caused starvation deaths and distressed suicides; but the havefattened the profits of the traders, as consumers pay highes prices.

With the removal of QRs on the remaining items, not only more units producing mass consumption goods will face ruination, the consequent unemployment intensify miseries of the people already under heavy unprecedented economic burdens.

Fears have been expressed about large-scale imports of cheaper goods from neighbouring China. Domestic production could be protected by increasing customs duties, permitted under even Vajpayee’s much-loved WTO. Instead the Vajpayee government has preferred the course of rendering India’s domestic industry defenseless vide the the recent budget revenues from customs duties have been rendered by over Rs 2,500 crore. While increasing its revenues through excise duties by over Rs 4,500 crore. This makes goods produced abroad cheaper, and goods produced domestically more expensive - a clear-cut recipe for domestic de-industrialisation.

The Vajpayee government’s acts therefore, are directly benefiting foreign capital and imperialist interests.

The current struggles of the peasantry against this disastrous policy of withdrawal of QRs, will now be joined by millions of people in urban areas who very soon will face the threat of ruination. Only such struggles can force this Vajpayee government to either reverse these anti-national and anti-people policies, or else to quit office.