People's Democracy

A TORRENT of heavy rain would not deter a massive anti-war march in traversing Kolkata from south to north on the afternoon of October 14. A conservative estimate put the number of people taking part in this peace rally at over one hundred thousand.

Held under the aegis of the Left Front, a highlight of the march was the participation by a large number of Pashtoon-speaking Afghans who marched with big portraits of the legendary freedom fighter, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan who is known as the "frontier Gandhi" in India. A large contingent of the city’s Sikhs, too, marched along side their Afghan brethren.

CPI (M) Polit Bureau member Jyoti Basu and West Bengal chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee flagged off the procession amidst the flutter of dozens of white doves, at the Deshapriya Park in south Kolkata. The marchers were led by the leaders of the Left Front like Biman Basu, Anil Biswas, Manju Kumar Majumdar, Ashok Ghosh, Manoj Bhattacharyya, Kiranmoy Nanda, Kalimuddin Shams, Naren De, and Pratim Chatterjee who were joined by artistes and intellectuals like the noted film-maker Mrinal Sen, and by the ministers of the state Left Front government.

Slogans rose from the march against imperialist aggression and terrorist attack. "If the Sky is filled will war, how will the sun rise?" "If we take eye for an eye, the world will become blind" were some of the slogans.

A rousing call was given for peace and against war. A large number of posters, banners, flags, and festoons complimented the dozens of decorated tableaux that called for an immediate end to imperialist aggression and staunchly condemned every form of terrorist activities against the peace-loving people of the world.

Along the nine kilometre-long route, the marchers were felicitated by young men and women in particular who continued to throng the two sides of the roads along which the marchers proceeded at a fairly brisk pace, especially after the sun had broken through and the cloud cover had parted.

Such was the enormous length of the procession that when the leadership had reached the Deshabandhu Park in the north of the metropolis, the end point of the serpentine procession was nowhere to be seen. Indeed, it took no less than than three hours to travel the stretch of nine kilometres and along the route the marchers emphatically recreated the metropolis’s tradition in exuding determination and fervour while condemning all attempts at disrupting peace and development everywhere on this green planet of ours.

The procession brought back memories of the rallies, demonstrations, and processions that the metropolis had witnessed whilst fulminating against the US aggression on Vietnam, on the Democratic Republic of Korea, on Cuba (especially during the 1962 stand-off), on Chile, on El Salvador, on Nicaragua, on Angola, on Lebanon, on Congo, on the former republic of Yugoslavia, and on Iraq.

Perhaps the last word on the march came from the Jalalabad-born Khaden al-Huseini, a photojournalist from the state television network of Iran who is on his way to Afghanistan to work there alongside the TV team of the al-Jazheera network and who had specifically made a stop-over to film the procession. Describing the march as one of the greatest inspirational sights in his long career, Khaden said that for him, the emotional surge of the people of Kolkata for him meant, "there was hope yet for the stricken populace of my devastated homeland" and that "the aggressor and the saboteur shall never have the last word."