Third Edition Of Ganashakti

From Durgapur Starts Publishing

B Prasant

A THIRD edition of Ganashakti, the daily Bengali organ of the Bengal state committee of the CPI(M) has started to be published from the industrial township of Durgapur.  The Durgapur office of the Ganashakti was inaugurated by state secretary of the Party, Anil Biswas, on the morning of January 3.  Situated at the city centre, the office has been named the Saroj Mukherjee Bhavan.

Addressing a gathering on the occasion, Anil Biswas said that in the wake of the publication of the second edition of Ganashakti from Siliguri, the third edition of the organ from Durgapur would strive to engage itself in essentially enhancing the consciousness of the reading people.  “We have no desire at all to go in for any kind of profit-hunting spree à la the corporate press,” was how Biswas put it.

The corporate media fix principles based on profit. An organ of the Communist Party fixes principles and proceeds along the chosen path, not bothering about profits.  Recalling the past, Biswas said that during the thirties of the last century, Saroj Mukherjee, the first editor of Ganashakti, had to face incarceration because he had ‘dared’ to print a quotation of Lenin in an edition of the paper.

Biswas said that in the backdrop of an increasing assault on the principles and practices of socialism, it was essential for a daily newspaper like Ganashakti to put forth more editions and reach out to wider circles of readership with the correct message.  In Bengal, the opposition was constantly engaged in assault on the Left Front and the Left Front government.  The corporate media on its part is willing to do whatever it can to embarrass and indict the CPI(M) and the Left Front.  The big media would go to any length in its intense and orchestrated drive to try to influence the reading public’s mind against the democratically elected state government.

The corporate media, Biswas said, were wont to “criticise us posing either as the visionaries of the right or as the prophets of sectarian left.”  At one point of time, the media would engage itself in riling against the Left Front for the principled stand the LF has assumed against liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation.  On the other hand, they would be critical of the Left Front for its supposed transformation into a revisionist outfit devoid of militancy and struggle.

The real intention of the corporate media, said Biswas “is to move people away from the arena of politics by setting up before them a wrong set of priorities based on a capitalist, consumerist culture.”  The role of Ganashakti must be to sharpen the political consciousness of the people and to bring in more and more people into the arena of struggles and movements.  “We want to tell people why factories are closed down and why crop prices keep falling across the land,” said Anil Biswas.

Biman Basu in his address said that the principal task of the Party workers of the five districts of central Bengal would be to “ensure that Ganashakti reaches out to as many members of the reading public as possible.”  Basu was critical of the news being bandied about in the corporate media over the issue of taxation by the Panchayat bodies.

State secretariat member of the Party, Madan Ghosh who heads the Saroj Mukherjee Trust, said that the Party workers in the mofussil had long felt the need for an additional edition of Ganashakti, and he added to say that the Siliguri and now the Durgapur editions would go a long way to fulfilling their need for the Party organ for countering bourgeois propaganda.

Central committee member of the CPI(M), Benoy Konar, who presided over the functional narrated how the Party workers of Burdwan, Bankura, Birbhum, Purulia, and Murshidabad had organised a collection drive to put together no less than Rs 34.5 lakh for the Durgapur edition of Ganashakti.  The gathering was also addressed by Ganashakti editor, Narayan Dutta, and by the paper’s assistant editor, Avik Dutta.  Central committee member of the CPI(M) Nirupam Sen inaugurated, on this occasion, a permanent stall of the National Book Agency at the Saroj Mukherjee Bhavan.

Elsewhere at Durgapur, a mass rally was held at the corporation grounds the same evening.  Addressing the rally, Bengal chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said that the manner in which the Trinamul Congress and the BJP gave a call for a bandh statewide on the issue of taxation by the Panchayats spoke volumes about the combine’s utter opportunism and anarchic behaviour. 

A few areas have been identified for the Panchayats to collect taxes, said Bhattacharjee, and no decision has been made to start the tax collection drive.  Yet, the Trinamul-BJP combine, aided and abetted by smaller parties, have started to organise a campaign of lie against the Left Front government.  These elements, said the chief minister, would never be able to alienate the toiling people from the Party and the Left Front, try as they might.  Bhattacharjee was also critical of the anti-people policies of the BJP-led union government.

While other newspapers publishing from across several places in the state cater mostly to local news, Ganashakti, assured Anil Biswas, would never deprive any one region of the political content of the paper.  In running the paper while keeping up with the times, Ganashakti would not make the disastrous mistake of the daily organ of the Communist Party of Italy, l’unita, which had strayed away from the line of socialist ideology.  Back in 1980, recalled Biswas, l’unita, trying to compete with the bourgeois media went down to the level of running news on horse racing. There can be no competition of any kind between a profit-driven and an ideology-driven news publication.

Anil Biswas said that Ganashakti “has grown over the years struggling against very many adversities.  It has remained steadfast in the task of identifying the real issues affecting the state and the classes.  It has gone relentlessly on increasing its readership base.  Biswas underscored the importance of the task of widening the readership of Ganashakti in view of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.  Biswas concluded by citing the manner in which Ganashakti could successfully struggle through its columns to highlight the multi-layered political, social, and economic dimensions of the nation’s evolving national scenario.