People's Democracy

Sit-in Demonstration In Kolkata Against Joint Naval Exercises

AT the time the streets of Chennai reverberated with anti-imperialist slogans from a massive rally, Red flags aloft and fluttering, Kolkata witnessed a big sit-in demonstration at the heart of the city, in the Rani Rashmoni Road locality. The big assemblage listened to CPI(M) state secretary Biman Basu as he inaugurated the programme.

Basu commenced by saying that India was taking part in a military naval exercise involving ships of various weights and categories and attack aircraft, and yet, the country was not a part of any military alliance of any sort. Does this, asked Biman Basu, help India maintain its independent foreign policy in any manner?

The US is keen to establish a military base in and / or around India. The reason why is not far to seek. India is a country rich with natural resources below and above the earth’s surface. It also possesses a precious human resources contingent, skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled, of over 110 crore.

Had the successive union governments, run mostly under the tutelage of Congress and its support structure amongst smaller bourgeois parties, been willing to utilise the resources at the command of India, the country would have had the opportunity to grow into a great nation. ‘We do hardly need to subserve the interests of any country,’ was how the CPI(M) Polit Bureau member put it.

60 years after India had achieved its political independence, ‘we have got ourselves embroiled in a nuclear accord, ruinous to our interests, where the country has to bow to the US for an annual certification of the instrument of agreement, and is not this ridiculously insulting to the nation’s teeming population?’ Must not the Congress-led UPA government have to do a lot of explanation before the masses before, if it knew best, to withdraw from the imperialist network led by the US?

Biman Basu added to say that the BJP’s reluctance to have the ‘deal’ discussed in the parliament was easily explained: the NDA government itself had sidled close to the US in more ways than one, and they are not to keen to see embarrassing skeletons being prised out of the cupboard of recent history.

The sit-in demonstration also saw addresses by, among others, Benoy Konar and Shyamal Chakraborty, central committee members of the CPI(M), Rabin Deb (CPI-M), Nihar Roychaudhury (FB), Mihir Banerjee (RSP), Satya Bhattacharya (CPI), Pratim Chatterjee (FB-Marxist), Subhas Roy (RCPI) et al. There were recitations, songs, and plays during the period of the demonstrations later.