People's Democracy

Vibrant Public Meeting Concludes 30th AIKS Conference

Ashok Dhawale

ON March 9, 2003, the 30th national conference of the All India Kisan Sabha concluded at the Guru Gobind Singh Stadium at Jalandhar with a vibrant public meeting of several thousands of peasants, agricultural labourers, workers and other sections of toiling people who came from every nook and corner of Punjab. The Punjab unit of the Kisan Sabha and other mass organisations in the state had put in great efforts to ensure its success.

CPI(M) general secretary and AIKS senior vice president Harkishan Singh Surjeet had himself toured various parts of the state for 10 days as part of the campaign for the rally. CPI(M) Punjab state secretary and central committee member Balwant Singh, AIKS Punjab president Rachhpal Singh, AIKS Punjab general secretary Lehambar Singh Taggar, and hundreds of other cadres of the Kisan Sabha and other mass organisations had addressed meetings in various districts, tehsils and villages to prepare for the rally.  

The conference delegates, led by AIKS president S Ramachandran Pillai and AIKS general Secretary K Varadha Rajan, marched in a procession from the conference venue to the venue of the public meeting. Jalandhar city in general, and the venues of the conference and the public meeting in particular, had been decorated with thousands of red flags, red banners, red bunting and red placards to mark the 30th AIKS Conference.

The main speakers at the public meeting were Harkishan Singh Surjeet, former prime minister H D Deve Gowda, West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, S Ramachandran Pillai, K Varadha Rajan and Balwant Singh. Among others who spoke included Rachhpal Singh and Lehambar Singh Taggar. The foreign fraternal delegates from Vietnam and Cuba, the two veteran AIKS leaders Shitala Prasad from Uttar Pradesh and Pandian from Tamilnadu who had joined the organisation over five decades ago in 1940, and the new all India office-bearers elected at the conference, were introduced to the rally by AIKS president S Ramachandran Pillai.

Harkishan Singh Surjeet in his speech led a blistering attack on American imperialism for its aggressive war drive against Iraq, and on the BJP-led central government for its communal conspiracies, its anti-peasant policies and its stinking corruption. He hailed the victory of the Left Front in Tripura, and also welcomed the defeat of the BJP in Himachal Pradesh. He dwelt upon the serious problems being faced by the peasantry in Punjab, pinpointed the root cause of these problems in the IMF-WB-WTO-dictated policies of the ruling classes and called for intensifying the struggle against them. Recalling the best traditions of the struggles waged and sacrifices made by the peasantry of Punjab during the freedom movement and after, Surjeet called upon the gathering to take forward the struggle for the preservation of national independence and national unity in the same spirit.

H D Deve Gowda in his speech said that the dozen years of economic reforms introduced by the Congress government and further speeded up by the BJP-led regime had made the rural and the urban poor the worst sufferers. He charged that these reforms, with the massive cuts in subsidies and import liberalisation, were ruining the peasantry as never before. He talked about the brief tenure of the United Front government, when as prime minister, he had increased the subsidies for fertilisers and had increased the allocation for irrigation. While sharply criticising the BJP for its destructive Hindutva line, he also attacked the Congress for its ‘soft Hindutva’ approach that was more than evident in the Gujarat elections and even thereafter. He said that only an alternative of Left and secular forces could save the country and its peasantry, and called for strengthening such an alternative. 

Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, after calling upon the gathering to resolutely oppose the US war drive against Iraq and the BJP’s communal manoeuvres against secularism and national unity, gave a vivid account of the 26 year-old record of the Left Front government of West Bengal. In no state of the country has a political combination won assembly elections for six times in a row. The reason for this lay in the massive struggles of peasants, workers, youth, students and women that were led by the CPI(M) and the Left Front for several decades. That is how the Congress monopoly over power was broken and communal forces like the BJP were checked in West Bengal.

Today, he said, West Bengal is one of the front rank states in agriculture, along with Punjab and Haryana. But the vital difference is that in West Bengal, 70 per cent of the land is in the hands of 94 per cent small and marginal peasants. This is because, due to the implementation of land reforms, the Left Front government has distributed over 10 lakh acres of land to the landless and to marginal peasants. Over 15 lakh sharecroppers have been registered and provided security of tenure. The amount of land under irrigation has more than doubled from 30 to nearly 60 per cent under Left Front rule. Agricultural workers are being paid a minimum wage of Rs 47 per day. As a result of all these steps, West Bengal has become the largest producer of rice, fish, potatoes and vegetables in the entire country.  

West Bengal, Bhattacharya said, was the first state in the country to make school education totally free. Salaries of teachers, from the school to the university level, are being paid by the government. In industry also, we are making progress in certain areas like agro-industries, chemicals, plastics, information technology and so on. But here the problems have been created by successive central governments. Now the BJP-led regime is blatantly closing down public sector units in West Bengal, aggravating the problem of unemployment. It is starving the state governments of funds for development. It is against these policies that we have to constantly struggle.

Concluding his speech, the West Bengal chief minister said that both Punjab and Bengal had a glorious common history during the freedom struggle, during which several martyrs from both states shed their blood in the struggle against British imperialism. Bhagat Singh and his colleagues are heroes to all of us. Hence, he assured that the people of West Bengal will always support the democratic forces in Punjab in the common struggle against all communal and reactionary forces in the country.

S Ramachandran Pillai and K Varadha Rajan, in their brief speeches, related the main decisions taken by the 30th conference of the AIKS and called for further strengthening of the peasant struggles to face the manifold challenges before the country today. They expressed the confidence that this conference would be remembered as a turning point in the glorious history of the peasant movement in India. The public meeting concluded amidst a volley of resounding slogans hailing worker-peasant unity and with the slogan that was first made famous throughout the country by Bhagat Singh and his comrades, “Inquilab Zindabad!”