People's Democracy

THAT a wave of mass campaigns and struggles is absolutely necessary to bring the country out of the morass in which the present BJP-led government has landed it, is something the recent meeting of CPI(M) Central Committee assiduously sought to underline. Hence the Central Committee’s call for a ten-day campaign from September 20 to 30, as a prelude to the building up of still bigger campaigns and struggles.

The Central Committee’s thinking was induced by the grim reality of today when the country is facing an unprecedented situation on all fronts. The Indian people had never faced so bad a situation since independence, and that’s why we need the same kind of a wave of momentous struggles that characterised (to use the wording of a post-war resolution) the Indian people’s "final assault" on British imperialism.

F all the misdemeanours of the present government, those occupying the people’s attention most are the Gujarat scene and the issue of corruption. As for corruption, the less said the better. It is not that corruption was altogether absent from public life earlier. But the fact is: the BJP-led government has surpassed all records in this field, emerging as a champion of the game. This is something which lakhs of people, including those who had high illusions about the BJP or its government, find extremely disgusting. As a matter of fact, the media hype had created for the BJP the image of a clean party and of a party that would deliver the goods once it came to power. But, today, the same media are unable to defend the party. It has no doubt delivered the goods, but to BJP leaders, their kith and sycophants, while adding to the common people’s woes. In giving corruption a qualitatively different character, the BJP has really proved it is a party with a difference.

Examples are galore. The telecom scandal, sugar scam, UTI fiasco, Mauritius route, Ketan Parekh scam, Tehelka hungama, and now the petrol pump scam and land grab scam --- here is a bird with so many feathers. The fact is that even the Bofors scandal, which cost Rajeev Gandhi his government, was just a peanut in comparison to the mountain of corrupt deals the BJP-led regime has negotiated. Verily, it will take tens of thousands of pages to detail the corrupt deals in which the BJP and its NDA allies have been indulging.

The situation is such that when the prime minister, who has a supposedly "clean" image, announced cancellation of all petrol pumps and LPG outlets allotted in the recent period, nobody was willing to take it as an honest move. The common feeling was that while the prime minister has announced the cancellation, the allottees would move the court, get a stay order and continue to enjoy the booty which the present government’s magnanimity has granted them. (This is precisely what has happened. See Editorial.) In other words, even our latest Mr Clean’s image was of no avail.

N the other hand, the BJP-led government has not spared any effort to harm our national unity. As soon as the BJP came to power, the RSS began to experiment its Hindutva project in Gujarat by launching attacks on the minuscule Christian minority, and soon the wave of attacks spread to MP, UP, Punjab, Maharashtra and other states. The burning alive of a missionary and his two minor sons in Orissa was the height of this communal drive.

At the same time, attacks on Muslims continued to take place here and there --- in Hubli (Karnataka), Moradabad (UP), Malegaon (Maharashtra) and other places. Then, on the pretext of Godhra train burning on February 27, the RSS and its outfits launched a full-fledged attack on Muslims in Gujarat, with the open help, patronage and connivance of the state’s BJP government, led by an RSS pracharak. What to talk of taking this man (Modi) to task, the entire BJP and other RSS outfits got hyperactive to defend him. Not only that. Subsequent information showed that

(1) The brigade was since long preparing for this attack and, Godhra or no Godhra, it would have attacked the Muslims on one pretext or another; and

(2) The forensic report even casts doubt on the RSS-VHP-BJP theory that the Godhra train burning was a handiwork of the Muslim community.

Be that as it may, the Gujarat carnage is so far unprecedented in independent India. Yet, what to talk of feeling ashamed of it, the brigade is out to justify it by all means and also to take advantage of whatever communal polarisation it has created in the state. Nay, when the chief election commissioner said the situation was far from normal in Gujarat and therefore there was no question of holding assembly polls there immediately, Modi even went to the extent of heaping abuses on him in a roadside language. Moreover, he even stooped down to the level of questioning the CEC’s patriotism on the ground of his religion --- one more example of the perverse RSS way of reasoning.

Tripura provides yet another example of how the BJP regime is harming our national integrity. This tiny state, surrounded by Bangladesh on three sides, has been facing terrorist attacks for long. Yet the BJP regime withdrew a number of BSF battalions from there and has not as yet restored them despite the state government’s repeated plea. The job of border fencing goes on at a snail’s pace while the centre has not yet held any talks with the Bangladesh government to get the extremist hideouts busted.

Right now, it is in Jammu and Kashmir where our unity and integrity are at stake. We have already dealt with the issue in detail. Suffice it to remind that it was in this government’s tenure that infiltration in Kargil and some other sectors went on unchecked and the government was found sleeping for months together. In fact, it was our jawans who staked their lives, and many sacrificed their lives, to oust the infiltrators and save the country. This fact and with it the Tehelka scam, which showed how some of even top BJP/NDA leaders were involved in shady defence deals, is an indication enough that with such a government in power, the country needs no more enemies.

Kashmir also illustrates the BJP government’s abject failure on the foreign policy front. Today, as this government has given up our consensual foreign policy of non-alignment and anti-imperialism, US imperialists are in a position to dictate what we should do on Kashmir. On the contrary, what to talk of supporting the persecuted Palestinians’ demand for a homeland, we don’t even demand that the US dismantle its base in Diego Garcia that threatens us as well.

HE BJP government has also surpassed all records in cruelly attacking the working people’s livelihood. The last four years saw a spate of industrial closures, retrenchment and sometimes even forced retirement of employees in the name of a ‘voluntary’ retirement scheme. The government is refusing to revive the sick industrial units, even those that may yield profits after a small investment. On the contrary, it is on a spree to sell even efficient and profit-giving PSUs to private parties for a song. The disinvestment in VSNL and other companies, the sale of BALCO and other misdemeanours are eye-openers. Moreover, we should be thankful to the Mahajan-Shourie feud that brought to light how the Tatas were milking the VSNL after taking it over. A clear indication that BJP/NDA luminaries are most probably doing all this for some kind of quid pro quo.

At the same time, the regime is heaping unprecedented burdens on the people by hiking taxes and administered prices of various goods and services, many of whom (like power, irrigation, fertilisers, and even education) are of importance to our economy as crucial investments. This process has alienated not only the workers and peasants, but even the urban middle classes and salaried people who used to be a solid base of the BJP. This was why even the RSS-controlled trade union (BMS) and Swadeshi Jagran Manch began to feel unnerved and bay for Yashwant Sinha’s blood. Of late, the new finance minister Jaswant Singh has started throwing some sops to the middle classes, but whether he will succeed in winning them back is doubtful.

It is in this background that the country is today plagued with floods here and droughts there. In his celebrated study of the Bengal famine of 1942, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen showed how it was not any shortage of foodgrains but a lack of purchasing power in the people’s hands that caused the famine. A somewhat similar situation exists now. When the FCI godowns stocked about 61 million foodgrains, several dozen people starved to death in Koraput, Bolangir and Kalahandi districts of Orissa even though the NDA ruled the centre as well as the state. But, quite willing to export foodgrains at subsidised rates, the regime says no to any food subsidy for the vulnerable. The dismantling of the public distribution system shows the regime’s real anti-people character. If only the regime had wanted, it could create lots of public assets by starting/strengthening the Food For Work and other schemes, and generating jobs thereby. That would have gone a long way in saving the people from starvation and ameliorating their lot to an extent. But they did nothing of the sort. If anything, it gave the capitalists concession after concession and allowed them to loot the public wealth. If the regime allotted foodgrains to Andhra Pradesh for Food For Work, it was only to enable the TDP and BJP to mint money by selling these grains to private traders.

Today, while the states are facing a resource crunch, the centre is willing to help them only if they agree to implement the LPG policies and heap more burdens on the people. If this is not arm-twisting, what else it is?

T is this process that has alienated the people from the BJP-led NDA, as reflected in the long string of defeat of NDA parties in the last four years. That explains why the BJP is in a hurry to encash the polarisation in Gujarat before it is dissipated and the hard realities of life overtake the people.

However, even though the CEC has declined to hold immediate elections in Gujarat, these elections will prove crucial whenever they take place. For, in Gujarat, as in J&K, no less than our national unity, communal harmony and secular ethos are at stake. Therefore defeating the BJP in its strongest citadel will certainly galvanise the patriotic people all over India, give a setback to the RSS project of a Hindu Rashtra and save our existence as a civilised nation. It is heartening that the opposition parties have agreed, in theory, to give a one-to-one fight to the BJP in Gujarat. Though some parties are still in a hitch, we do hope that it will be overcome soon.

But the Congress too has to realise that if it adopts double standards, it cannot make the people believe its sincerity in taking on the communal forces. Assembly elections in Tripura are due in February 2003, and the Congress has already entered an alliance with the INPT there, with an eye on these polls. This INPT is an overground front of the outlawed terrorist outfit NLFT and captured the ADC in May 2000 with the help of the NLFT guns. And now the Congress has aligned with this very INPT in the hope that it will oust the Left Front from power, as it did in February 1988 with the help of the TNV guns. Any such duplicity on part of the Congress will not make it a credible partner in the struggle against communalism.

T is in this overall situation that the CPI(M) Central Committee has called for a mass awakening campaign next month. Even though demonstrations and other militant actions are not ruled out, the central emphasis will be on reaching out to the patriotic and democratic masses by all means possible. It is to be noted that millions of our masses are outside the fold of any political party, but are not indifferent to whatever is happening to their livelihood, to our national unity and integrity, to our education and culture, and even to our foreign policy. These very masses have to be approached and mobilised for defending the country’s future.

It has to be stressed that the called-for campaign will not be an end in itself, but a prelude to increasingly bigger and more militant struggles, so as to oust the BJP-led coalition from power as the first important task in a series of future tasks. While all the democratic and secular people have to be involved in this struggle, it is the Left parties on whom the main responsibility devolves in regard to discharging the task. For, it is the Left parties whom, despite their weakness in the country as a whole, the people take as the most resolute, uncompromising defenders of their interests as well as of national unity. Hence the Left parties have to stretch themselves all the more strenuously to mobilise other forces and reach the people for the assault.