People's Democracy

THE 17th congress of the CPI(M) expresses grave concern that the decade of the nineties has brought misery and ruin to the mass of India’s peasants and agricultural labourers, as never before in the history of independent India. A series of central governments pursuing policies dictated by the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation (WTO), representing the interests of the giant agri-businesses and multinational corporations (MNCs), have menaced Indian agriculture as never before. The situation has turned even more serious after the WTO’s Doha conference. This has led to the unprecedented phenomenon of thousands of suicides and cases of kidney-selling by peasants and agricultural workers in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and even in Kerala and Punjab.

In the name of ending subsidies, the BJP-led government’s policies are starving Indian agriculture of the state resources and public investment it badly needs. This has meant a sharp rise in electricity and water costs as well as a steep rise in prices of fertilisers, seeds, pesticides and other inputs, which the overwhelming majority of the poor and middle peasants can ill afford. The BJP-led government at the centre has launched a savage attack on the Indian peasantry in the name of the open market. The latest budget of the central government has virtually put an end to the procurement of agricultural produce at minimum support prices. The hasty and complete removal of quantitative restrictions (QRs) by the BJP-led government at the centre, when it could have waited till 2004, has devastated the peasantry. In the last couple of years, the price of almost all agricultural products has fallen from between 25 per cent to 75 per cent for different crops.

The BJP-led central government, instead of making cheap institutional credit more easily available, especially to the poor and middle peasants, has starved the states of funds to help the peasantry, and has sharply cut down on rural development schemes. Worse still, with this agrarian crisis, it has forced peasants to lease or sell their lands to corporates they cannot compete with, and thereby join the growing army of millions of landless labourers below the poverty line. This process amounts to land reforms in reverse.

Today even production has come to a standstill with agricultural growth at a mere 0.2 per cent this year, and the rate of growth of foodgrain production has slumped even below the rate of growth of the population. Electricity boards are being bifurcated and trifurcated; maintenance and work on irrigation projects have come to a standstill; state seed corporations and scientific research institutions are on the verge of closure for lack of funds; and the recent Gujarat Bt cotton scandal shows that multinationals hope to enslave the peasant with terminator and other untested genetically engineered seeds and use him as a guinea pig. The BJP-led regime is subjecting the citizens of India to the plunder of corrupt multinationals, as is evident from the Enron fiasco in Maharashtra. Even our traditional knowledge of crops and agricultural products is sought to be made inaccessible by patents on neem, basmati, haldi and the like.

But the worst hit by this agrarian crisis are the huge mass of landless agricultural labourers and marginal peasants, a large proportion of whom come from the Dalits and the Adivasis. The days of work available to agricultural labour have gone down from 100 a year in the early nineties, to 78 today. Their real wages have sharply fallen. Drinking water and house-sites for the rural poor remain a perennial problem. Unemployment has greatly risen. Rural employment has risen only by 0.58 per cent per year in the last few years, while a large number of retrenched workers have returned to the villages from cities and swelled the number of the rural unemployed to over 150 million in India. The BJP-led regime has aggravated the problem by ending duties on heavy agricultural machinery like combine harvesters that are fast replacing agricultural labour.

With the destruction of the public distribution system (PDS) through pricing it beyond the purchasing power of the rural poor, by sharply raising administered prices nearly threefold in the last five years, it has created a situation where starvation deaths are occurring in several parts of the country, while 60 million tonnes of grain lie rotting in the FCI godowns!

But resistance against these policies is also rising all over the country. Seven Left-led kisan and agricultural workers’ organisations have led nationwide mass actions. Powerful struggles against enhanced electricity rates have been unleashed in Andhra and Rajasthan. Punjab farmers successfully fought and succeeded in getting grain procured at higher prices last year. Kerala farmers have come on to the streets in mass movements to seek higher minimum prices for crops. The successive defeats of the BJP and its opportunistic partners in 18 of the 22 state assembly elections held during the last four years, is a clear sign of the growing anger of the peasantry.

On the other hand, the example of West Bengal has shown how a combination of alternative policies like radical land reforms, democratisation of panchayati raj institutions, adequate subsidies and increased public investment under a Left Front government have lifted the state to first place in the country in rice production, and also defended the rights and livelihood of the mass of peasants and agricultural workers.

The 17th congress of the CPI(M) gives a clarion call to the mass of peasants and agricultural workers of India, irrespective of their religion and caste, to join a militant, sustained and massive rural upsurge to realise the following immediate demands and to defeat the imperialist-dictated and anti-peasant policies of the BJP-led central government. The 17th congress of the CPI(M) calls upon all party committees and units throughout the country to organise and lead the peasants and agricultural workers for this mass struggle.

1. Stop the flow of agricultural and dairy products from foreign countries by reimposing quantitative restrictions, enhancing import duties, imposing anti-dumping duties and other measures.
2. Ensure remunerative prices to primary producers of all agricultural crops and dairy products through a general system of price support through state procurement.
3. Revitalise a universal public distribution system for all as the basis of our food security and to ensure access to the necessaries of life at affordable prices for those below and above the poverty line.
4. Strengthen and expand employment guarantee schemes and food for work programmes. Take stern measures against the persisting existence of bonded labour.
5. Stop the reversal of land reforms and instead speed up the process of radical implementation of land reforms, with the provision of priority to Dalits and Adivasis and joint pattas for women.
6. Increase public investment in irrigation and power facilities, ensure regular and affordable power supply, provide sufficient infrastructural support and access to appropriate technology.
7. Increase access of the poorer sections to institutional credit at reasonable rates of interest.
8. Agricultural labourers must be ensured a living wage, equal wages for equal work, house-sites, old-age pension and an end to social discrimination on the basis of caste, religion or ethnic origin. Proper provision for housing, creches and for maternity leave, as well as compensation for deaths and accidents must be given. To ensure the above, a comprehensive central legislation for agricultural labourers must be adopted on the pattern of the Kerala law of 1974.
9. Proper scientific control must be exercised on the testing of the genetically engineered seeds.
10. Protection of our biodiversity and prevention of patenting of seeds that have been evolved by farming communities by the traditional methods.