People's Democracy

EDITORIAL

2005: Meet Challenges Steadfastly

IT has been our normal practice that, in the last issue of our paper every year, we greet our readers and wish them all the best in the new year.  This year, however, People’s Democracy joins the country in mourning the death of an unprecedented thousands of people who have fallen victim to a cruel display of nature’s fury.

The titanic tsunami, rising from the fifth largest earthquake since the beginning of the 20th century, has devastated the whole region of South Asia, killing people indiscriminately in more than half a dozen countries.

Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka have been hit most disastrously. The death toll continues to mount by the day as new bodies are being discovered. The earthquake, whose epicenter was 2028 km south-east of Chennai, has wreaked havoc in the entire region. The impact was so gigantic that it did not spare even the east coast of Africa. 

Tsunamis are giant sea-waves created by major displacements of the ocean water caused by large earthquakes or volcanic explosions. It is a phenomenon that is mostly seen in the Pacific Ocean. India, however, has experienced devastation by tsunamis at regular intervals of about sixty years. The earlier two attacks were in 1883 and 1945.

The entire country must brace itself to provide relief and rehabilitation to lakhs of people who are victims of this tragedy. As we usher into the new year, this is the gigantic task before all of us. 

We join the efforts being mounted, both by the governments and civil society, to raise resources and depute voluntary brigades to assist the affected. Unity of effort is the need of the hour in meeting this adversity, in fact any adversity.

The tsunami striking us in the last days of 2004 must be seen not as an ominous signal for the future, but as the culmination of a legacy of hate and destruction that we, the Indian people, unitedly and finally overcame in the political sphere in 2004.

It is also a reminder that gigantic tasks lie ahead. The defeat of fascistic communalism is only half the battle won. A more bitter engagement awaits us to cleanse our society of this communal virus. This is a task that needs to be addressed with great earnest in the coming year. 

Likewise, the Indian people had brought about a change in the political leadership of the government in 2004 with the strong hope of improving their livelihood and enhancing their quality of life. This objective is as yet very far from achieved. The struggle against retrograde economic policies, and for policies that are pro-people, will have to be intensified in the coming year. 

Nature’s fury and the consequent human agony dramatically, in fact cruelly, remind us that we all will have to redouble our efforts to change India for the better.

The year 2005 is, thus, likely to be an year when the Indian people shall have to rise more determinedly to meet these challenges in a steadfast manner.  People’s Democracy wishes our readers all success in the forthcoming battles to meet these challenges.