People's Democracy

Comrade MB Centenary Celebrations In AP

DESPITE all the hype being created about the latest ‘Namo-Raga’ tune by the corporate media, the next central government is going to be yet another coalition government and it will be shaped only after the elections, asserted CPI(M) Polit Bureau member and Party leader in Rajya Sabha, Sitaram Yechury. He said this has been the history in our country post-Emergency period, from the first Janata Party government to the latest Manmohan Singh government and it is going to be repeated in the coming elections too.

Addressing a seminar on the occasion of Makineni Basavapunnaiah centenary celebrations in a jam-packed auditorium in Khammam town on 30th January 2014, Yechury charged vested corporate interests of engineering the hype to project the coming elections as a fight between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. The recent victory of Aam Admi Party in Delhi underlines the fact that the people of the country are eagerly looking for an alternative to the Congress and BJP. People are fed up with the brazen corruption and pro-corporate policies of both the Congress and BJP. The CPI(M) is committed to work for providing such a policy-based  alternative at the centre and it is already working towards that end.

Paying rich tributes to Comrade Makineni Basavapunnaiah, Yechury said MB, as he was fondly called by all, lived his entire life practicisng Marxism in a scientific and revolutionary manner. He always stuck to Lenin’s enunciation of Marxism’s living essence as ‘concrete analysis of concrete conditions’. MB was always clear that Indian communists must chalk out Indian path of revolution instead of trying to mechanically adopt either Soviet or  Chinese path. His supreme understanding of the dialectical relationship between strategy and tactics was unparalleled.

CPI(M) central secretariat member V Sreenivasa Rao spoke on the topic ‘Social Security and Communal Harmony’. He said dalits, weaker sections, women, minorities are feeling most threatened today in the country due to the policies being pursued by the ruling classes. He detailed how dalits are being squeezed out of educational and job opportunities due to largescale privatisation. The reservations are today no longer meaningful to dalits, he felt citing that only 4 per cent of IT employees are dalits. Reservations in practice are only for the rich who can buy any medical or engineering seat by throwing money.

The lot of dalits can be improved only when their basic problems of landlessness is tackled. Therefore the Left parties must concurrently take up the questions of caste and class and rally these sections for the larger struggle of Socialism. He exposed the main intention of corporates in actively backing Modi by saying that they feel Modi can browbeat any opposition to neo-liberal policies. He called for actively working to defeat this design in the coming elections.

CPI(M) central committee member Thammineni Veerabhadram spoke on the topic ‘Left in the Present World’ in the post lunch session. With capitalism plunging into what appears to be a prolonged economic crisis, there is an urgent need for all Left forces to unite on a broad based programme. Re-building the Left is the need of the hour, he said. Prominent political analyst and MLC Professor K Nageshwar also spoke on the topic ‘Economic Policies and its impact on People’.

CPI(M) Khammam district secretary P Sudershan presided over the seminar that was attended by over thousand activists, intellectuals, teachers, students and people from all other walks of life.

(INN)