People's Democracy
(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
No. 29
July 22, 2012
|
Vol. XXXVI
No. 29 July 22, 2012 |
CPI(M)
State
Committee Meet Concludes with Massive Rally Ashok
Dhawale THE
CPI(M)’s
Maharashtra state committee that was recently elected in
March 2012 at the
Akole state conference in Ahmednagar district, had decided
in its first meeting
at the Comrade B T Ranadive Smarak Bhavan at Belapur in
New Mumbai on April 29,
to henceforth rotate state committee meetings in different
districts of the
state, to give a boost to the movement all over
Maharashtra. Accordingly, from
July 6 to 8, 2012, meetings of the party’s state
secretariat and state
committee were held at Solapur in western HISTORY OF RESISTANCE Solapur
has a glorious
history of resistance in the freedom struggle. For a
couple of days in 1930,
the people rose and liberated the city from British rule,
an event that has
gone down in the annals of the anti-imperialist movement
as the Solapur
Commune. A draconian Martial Law was imposed by the
British to crush the
struggle; untold repression was unleashed; and four
leaders of the uprising –
Srikisan Sarda, Mallappa Dhanshetty, Qurban Husain and
Jagannath Shinde – were
hanged. Solapur
is also
well-known for being the birthplace of the legendary Dr
Dwarkanath Kotnis, who
led the Indian Medical Mission to Solapur
is also the
birthplace of our departed veteran party and CITU leader,
Comrade M K Pandhe. As a
result of collective
efforts over several years under the leadership of
Narsayya Adam, a newly elected
member of the CPI(M) Central Committee, CITU state
president and a firmer MLA, Solapur
is today the strongest working class centre of the party
in the state. In the
last few years, the AIKS work in rural areas has also
begun to spread. Solapur
hosted the CITU state conference in 1987 and the CPI(M)
state conference in
2005, and also the state conferences of the AIDWA and DYFI
in recent years. The
SFI’s state level camp was held here only last month.
There have constantly
been large and militant struggles of beedi
and powerloom workers and other toiling sections under the
CPI(M)-CITU
leadership. A major
constructive achievement of the party here has been the
successful completion
of the Comrade Godutai Parulekar Housing Scheme, which
comprises 10,000
low-cost houses for women beedi workers at Kumbhari
village near Solapur city. This
is perhaps the biggest workers housing scheme of its kind
in the country. A bitter
struggle is on with the government for other major housing
schemes, like the
Shaheed Qurban Husain Housing Scheme for Muslim women,
Comrade M K Pandhe
Housing Scheme for powerloom workers, Lokshaheer Comrade
Anna Bhau Sathe
Housing Scheme for Dalits, Comrade Meenaxitai Sane Housing
Scheme for beedi
workers and so on. UNPRECEDENTED
RALLY
The city
of On the
evening of
July 8, after the conclusion of the CPI(M) state committee
meeting, Solapur was
witness to the largest-ever mass rally held by the CPI(M)
in this city. Over
50,000 people gathered at the Punjal Kreeda Maidan. The
huge ground was completely
packed by women, and this rally saw the largest ever
participation of women in
any CPI(M) rally in The
audience
overwhelmingly comprised all sections of unorganised
workers and the urban
poor. Along with workers of all the unions affiliated to
the CITU and members
of the abovementioned housing schemes for which a struggle
is on, other mass
organisations like the AIDWA, AIKS, DYFI and SFI also
played their part in
ensuring the unprecedented success of this rally. July 8
happened to
be the birth anniversary of the towering national leader
of the CPI(M) and
former CPI(M)
Polit Bureau
member and leader of the party’s parliamentary group,
Sitaram Yechury, who
attended the three-day state meetings of the CPI(M), was
the main speaker at
this rally. He was welcomed with a massive bursting of
crackers. After he lit
the Flame of Socialism at the venue of the rally, the
public meeting began
under the chairmanship of Narsayya Adam. All members of
the party’s state secretariat
and state committee as well as Solapur district leaders
were seated on the
dais. CALL
FOR MASS STRUGGLES Sitaram
Yechury
warmly congratulated the Solapur comrades for the massive
success of the rally,
especially commending the remarkable participation of
women. Launching a
vitriolic attack on the Congress-led UPA-2 regime, he said
a government
involved in corruption scams of thousands of crores of
rupees claimed that it
had no money for giving food, education, employment and
housing to the poor. Worse
still, a government that claims to have no funds for
social welfare schemes for
the poor, has no hesitation in doling out thousands of
crores of rupees to European
imperialist countries to help them out of their crisis. It
gives lakhs of
crores of rupees as tax concessions to big business, but
through price rise and
unemployment the same government drives the working people
into ruin. The time
has come,
he said, to launch intense mass struggles against the UPA
regime and its
policies. The Left parties have given a nationwide
struggle call on the issue
of food security and the CPI(M)’s Maharashtra state
committee has chalked out a
programme to make this stir a success in the state. Dwelling
on the
importance of preserving and strengthening secularism, he
came down heavily on
the BJP-RSS and their communal agenda. At the time of
Partition, he said,
Muslims had the choice to go to Pakistan. But crores of
Muslims refused to go
and accepted India as their motherland. And yet the
communal forces raise questions
about their patriotism. This has to be fought tooth and
nail. The rabid
communalism of the Narendra Modi regime in Gujarat and the
rampant corruption
of the Yedyurappa regime in Karnataka reveal the real face
of the BJP. While
commending
the party in Solapur for successfully completing the
Comrade Godutai Parulekar
Housing Scheme for 10,000 women beedi workers, he deplored
the fact that the
state government had not yet given sanction to the Shaheed
Qurban Husain
Housing Scheme for over 20,000 Muslim women. He alleged
that some weighty
Congress leaders in the state were behind this delay. He
called upon the
gathering to launch a big mass struggle to get this scheme
off the ground. In his
concluding
speech, Narsayya Adam spoke of the grave injustice being
meted out by both the
central and state government to the working class and the
peasantry, especially
to all sections of unorganised workers, and called for a
big mass movement of
the working people in defence of their demands. As regards
the Shaheed Qurban
Husain and other housing schemes for different sections of
poor workers that
the party was championing, he warned that if they were not
sanctioned and
funded by the state government within three months, 25,000
people would
undertake a 500 km march from Solapur to Mumbai and would
all court arrest. Among
those who
addressed the rally were CPI(M) state secretary Dr Ashok
Dhawale, state
secretariat members Dr D L Karad and Mariam Dhawale, state
committee members M
H Shaikh and Sidhappa Kalshetty, and Solapur district
secretariat members
Venkatesh Kongari and Nalini Kalburge. STATE
COMMITTEE DECISIONS After
the state
committee paid homage to Dipankar Mukherjee and other
comrades from the state,
Sitaram Yechury reported on the Polit Bureau and Central
Committee decisions,
including the Polit Bureau’s stand on the presidential
election. This reporting
was followed by a lively question-answer session. The
state committee
planned out the struggle on the vital issue of food
security. It was decided to
begin the campaign immediately, print thousands of
leaflets at the district
level, involve the other two Left parties, CPI and PWP,
and organise large
district and tehsil level mass actions all over the state
from July 30 to
August 3, to coincide with the Delhi dharna. August 3
being the death
anniversary of Comrade Shamrao Parulekar and also the
birth anniversary of
Krantisimha Comrade Nana Patil, both of them outstanding
leaders of the
Communist Party and the AIKS, it was decided to culminate
the first phase of
the struggle on that day. The monsoons and agricultural
operations will,
however, be a limiting factor in this phase of the
struggle which, the state
committee felt, must be forcefully continued even at the
all-India level until
the major demands are achieved. The
state committee
decided to observe the birth centenary year of Comrade P
Sundarayya, so as to
strengthen and streamline the party organisation as per
the directives of the Central
Committee. The concrete decisions taken towards this end
were: 1) The
2013 party
renewal campaign will be conducted stringently on the
basis of the Central
Committee guidelines and the state committee discussion on
the 2012 state party
renewal report. 2). A
statewide
call was given for a Rs 50 lakh wholetimers fund, five
years after a similar
statewide whole timers fund call resulted in a collection
of nearly Rs 40 lakh.
3) It
was decided
to organise regular meetings of party wholetimers in each
district to discuss
their work and their living conditions, and to help them
to perform much better.
4) As
regards party
education, it was decided to organise a three-day state
party class for all
state and district committee members and wholetimers in
November 2012; one-day
classes of all branch secretaries in each district;
two-day classes for all party
members in each district, in which ‘What is Marxism’ and
‘Party Organisation’
will be the mandatory topics; and one state-level class
for each of the mass
fronts in the coming year. 5) A
two-month
concerted campaign will be undertaken in November-December
2012 for increasing
the circulation of the central and state party papers. The very
first
meeting of the new state secretariat and the state
committee, held on April
28-29, had discussed and adopted a 15-point One Year Plan
for Party
Development. The
state committee
discussed and decided upon the priority constituencies
that the party will
fight in the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections that are
both due in April
and October 2014 respectively. It directed the concerned
district committees to
begin preparations in these priority constituencies
immediately and in right
earnest. The
state committee
finalised the districtwise division of responsibilities
among state secretariat
and state committee members. It set up 18 different
subcommittees and fraction
committees, and appointed a convenor for each. It also
elected the editorial
board of the state party weekly Jeevanmarg, which
is being brought out by
the partly in four-colour format from January 1 this year. It was
decided to accord
priority to the student, youth and agricultural workers
fronts. The state
secretariat will organise a meeting of the leading
activists in each of these
fronts to help them grow. The priority districts will be
decided in the next
meeting of the state committee. REVIEW OF IMPLEMENTATION The
state committee
reviewed the implementation of the decisions taken in the
last meeting. The two
main decisions were the statewide agitation against
drought, in which over
33,000 rural poor participated; and the reporting of the
20th party congress
and the 20th state conference in general body meetings in
each district, which
has been completed in 23 districts. Only five remain. The
state committee
has published two attractive booklets – Political
Resolution and Organisational
Guidance of the 20th Party Congress (in which the
main decisions of the 20th
state conference at Akole are also included) and 20th
Party Congress
Resolution on Some Ideological Issues. Copies of
both these booklets were
given for sale to all districts in this state committee
meeting. It was
decided to
hold the next meeting of the state committee from October
10 to 12 at Talasari
in Thane district. October 10 is observed every year as
Martyrs Day in Thane
district, since it was on this day in 1945 that the first
five martyrs of the
famed Adivasi Revolt fell to the bullets of the British
police. There have been
60 martyrs in this district so far – victims of the
British, Congress and
BJP-Shiv Sena regimes. October 10 is also the day in 1996
on which the
legendary leader of the Adivasi Revolt, Comrade Godavari
Parulekar, was
cremated at Talasari in the presence of tens of thousands.
The new
and
spacious office of the CPI(M) Thane district committee,
called the Comrade
Godavari Shamrao Parulekar Bhavan, will be inaugurated on
that day by CPI(M)
Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury. The foundation stone
of this office was
laid on the same day two years ago by CPI(M) Polit Bureau
member and Tripura
chief minister, Manik Sarkar. On October 12, a massive
districtwide rally will
be held there to conclude the state committee meeting.
