Harkishan Singh Surjeet

WHILE reviewing the present situation at the national and international levels, the recent Bhubaneswar meeting of the CPI(M) Central Committee was overridingly concerned with the morass into which the present BJP-led NDA government at New Delhi is throwing the country and the steps that need to be taken so as to save the country and her people from the impending disaster. Here we do not propose to go into the international situation; that will be taken up some time later. Insofar as the national situation is concerned, it is really grave and calls for immediate action.

The Central Committee noted with concern the grave threats which the BJP’s accession to power at the centre has been posing to national unity and communal amity. Since the very beginning of the BJP rule, the CPI(M) has been warning that the BJP is not just another bourgeois-landlord party; behind the BJP stands the communal and fascist RSS that wants to impose on the country a theocratic state of the Taliban variety, and thereby relegate about 18 crore minority population to the status of second class citizens or non-citizens.

The RSS game became once more clear in December when the prime minister himself came forward to defend his three colleagues who are implicated in the Babri Masjid demolition case. Moreover, he even went to the extent of saying that the construction of a temple at the Babri site was an unfinished task and an expression of "national sentiment." Quite naturally, the statement astonished even those people who had had illusions about the "moderate" credentials of the prime minister. This made it patently clear that, despite all the ifs and buts of BJP leaders, that are but an adjunct of the RSS which has not given up, nor can be expected to give up, its strident communal drive.

The real national sentiment against the prime minister’s "national sentiment" theory found expression in the fact that the patriotic people appreciated the opposition’s firm stand on the issue. When the opposition stalled the parliament’s proceedings for three days, the action received support from the press and the people at large. Indeed, this was an important factor which forced the prime minister to try to wriggle out of the unenviable situation into which he had landed himself. This attempt took the form of Kumarakom "musings" through which Shri A B Vajpayee once again sought to hoodwink the nation. Not surprisingly, the attempt failed in its objective. But the far more important point is that, as we showed in these columns earlier, it was a highly deceptive attempt, as the prime minister’s clarifications nowhere came out of the parameters of the pernicious philosophy that guides the Sangh Parivar.

It is true that some of the ruling NDA’s constituents, or those supporting the combine from outside, resented the prime minister’s statement. But their resentment was on the whole muted. Nowhere did they try to firmly demarcate their position from that of the BJP or the RSS. Whether it is because of their lust for power and pelf or because of any other reason, after their initial murmur the allied parties behaved as if their duty had been done and that they could now go to sleep with perfect peace of mind. Needless to say, this is an ideal situation for the Sangh Parivar, including the BJP, who know that they can very well take the allied parties for granted.

But the people at large are not going to be taken for granted. Not to speak of the minorities, large sections of even the majority community are rising in defence of the secular edifice of our polity and the syncretic culture for which India has always been known. The way the BJP’s hopes were dashed to the ground in the local bodies polls in UP, Gujarat and Rajasthan, or the way BJP leaders are getting panicky about the next assembly elections in UP, shows that the people, secular to the core as they are, are certainly going to assert themselves against the communal combine’s depredations.

The BJP-led government is not only seeking to further the cause of the RSS; it is also assisting the imperialist powers, led by the US, to tighten their grip on the Indian economy. Never since winning her independence from British imperialism after a protracted and tortuous struggle, has the country witnessed such a nakedly pro-imperialist government. The fact is that each and every step the government is taking in the economic sphere, is not in furtherance of the Indian people’s interests but the interests of multinational corporations and their imperialist backers.

There was a time when, faced with constant imperialist blackmail, the country correctly decided to create, strengthen and expand the public sector as the bulwark of her self-reliant growth. Public sector undertakings (PSUs) in steel, coal, power, drugs and pharmaceuticals, fertilisers, agricultural implements and a number of other sectors, did a commendable job in making the country self-reliant against all odds. It is nobody’s contention that there were no problems in the functioning of these PSUs; they were, for instance, saddled with bureaucratic controls with little say for the workers and employees. These problems indeed needed to be removed so that our PSUs could discharge their national duty in a more thorough manner.

But this is not what the BJP-led regime is doing. On the contrary, it is vehemently dismantling the public sector and thereby destroying the very basis of our self-reliance. All this is aimed at giving the foreign and indigenous monopoly capital a chance to take our whole economy in their strangulating grip.

This has severe implications for the common masses. For instance, Enron, a US multinational, is to sell power to the Maharashtra people at Rs 7.80 a unit while the MSEB used to supply power at less than Rs 2.50. This is going not only to put direct heavy burdens on the consumers but also make their life miserable by raising the costs of production of industrial as well as agricultural goods. Yet, at the World Bank diktat, the public sector power generation has been dismantled in Haryana, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, and some other states are to follow suit.

Further rise in unemployment, neglect of the social concerns which the PSUs used to address, neglect of the backward areas and of the less fortunate sections of the people whom the MNCs do not treat as their market, etc, are some other implications of this anti-public sector policy of the BJP government.

At the same time, this government is heaping indescribable miseries on the rural masses who constitute more than two third of the Indian population. Not only the costs of agricultural inputs like seeds, fertilisers, power, irrigation and insecticides are increasing, the peasantry is also facing the problem of declining prices of its produce in the market. The BJP government’s policy to liberalise the imports of agricultural commodities has further aggravated the crisis in the countryside. The prices of pulses, potatoes, milk powder, butter and butter oil, coconut, rubber and a number of other products in the Indian market have sharply gone down not because of any overproduction but because of the glut in the market created by the indiscriminate import of these commodities.

The gravity of the situation can be understood from the fact that the price of potato has come down from Rs 900 to 90 a quintal, forcing the potato growers to throw their produce into the streets. Similarly, paddy is being sold at about two third of the support price of Rs 540 per quintal declared by the government. And, after a month or so, after the rabi crop is harvested, perhaps wheat, gram and other crops will also suffer the same fate.

Just like in industrial sector, here also the pro-imperialist bias of the BJP-led government is more than obvious. This government liberalised the import of agricultural commodities much before the time stipulated for it by the WTO agreement. The situation is going to further worsen after April this year when the remaining quantitative restrictions are to be removed.

This is a situation that our peasantry had never faced since independence. It is true that the terms of trade have never been in favour of the peasantry, but still they could manage to make a saving, howsoever small it was. But today even this paltry profit is being denied to our peasantry. Agriculture is fast turning into a loss-making proposition, and this is going to seriously undermine the food security of the Indian population as a whole. The way the multinationals and other vested interests are trying to give a push to, for example, floriculture at the cost of foodgrain production, only shows the growing unprofitability of Indian agriculture. At the same time, it also points to the conspiracy of making the country abjectly dependent on imperialist powers for our food. It is worth recalling here that it was the same danger of imperialist blackmail, symbolised in PL 480, from which our hard-working peasants extricated the country with their sweat and blood.

The growing ruination of the peasantry is also killing the employment potential of Indian agriculture. The days of work available for agricultural workers has already substantially gone down. This is the section that is at the lowest rung of Indian society, not getting adequate wages and totally deprived of any social security whatsoever.

The BJP government’s callousness is evident here also. While liberalising the economy, the government has been talking of giving the Indian players a "level playing field." But the fact is that the playing field is highly unleveled insofar as our peasantry is concerned. The agricultural commodities that we are importing into our country are all highly subsidised by the governments of the exporting countries. In the USA, caring a hoot for the WTO rules, the government gives an average subsidy of 30,000 dollars every year to each farmer. The same is the story in European Union countries. According to a study, the EU gave its farmers (in 1999) a subsidy of 1018 dollars per tonne on skimmed milk powder, 1923 dollars per tonne on butter and 2444 dollars per tonne on butter oil. In Japan, the subsidy per farm is as high as 33,000 dollars. It is at such a time that the Indian peasant is being deprived of whatever little subsidy he had, in the name of fiscal deficit or on other excuses. What, then, is the possibility that the Indian peasant will be able to compete with the imported agricultural commodities?

The poor in rural and urban areas are also facing a threat to their food security because of the government’s moves to dismantle the public distribution system. They are being deprived of food at a time when the FCI godowns have more than 40 lakh tonnes of cereals as buffer stock. A good chunk of this stock is already rottening. But, instead of providing foodgrains to the poor at subsidised prices, the government is proposing to cheaply export these foodgrains. The message is clear: Subsidy to the foreigners but none for the Indian poor!

This is the situation that is forcing various sections of Indian people to rise up in defence of their interests. Not only the middle class employees and professionals but even the blue collar workers are by and by bracing themselves up for facing the threat being posed to their livelihood by the BJP-led government. The past few months have seen a number of struggles by various sections of the Indian workers, employees and middle classes. Several of these struggles were spontaneous in character, showing the growing restlessness among the concerned sections.

The peasants and agricultural workers too are slowly but steadily gearing up to fight the threat which the policies of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation are posing to their life and livelihood. At several places, they have spontaneously risen in protest, and the trend is not going to subside.

It is a welcome sign that the organisations of workers, peasants, agricultural workers, employees, youth, students, women and other sections are striving to intervene in the developing situation in order to mould the popular discontent into a democratic direction and give the spontaneous struggles an organised shape. Right now, some organisations of the peasants and agricultural workers are in the thick of preparations for an all-India programme of picketing the central and state government offices on February 5 to 7. There are indications that the programme will evoke massive response all over the country.

But this cannot be an end in itself. Resistance to the BJP-led regime has to be further widened and deepened. Organisations of all sections of the people, particularly those led by the Left parties, have to see that the process of mass mobilisation and mass resistance increasingly gains momentum till the anti-people, anti-national and anti-secular depredations of the BJP-led government are defeated, as a prelude of the overthrow of this government itself from power. For, the sooner this government goes, the better it will be for the people who earn their living by honest labour. This is also needed to safeguard our secular society and polity.