India not a safer place for children

There is no question about it. India has changed. India is changing! Today’s new political slogan is ‘India Rising’.

But the other side of India’s brutal reality hit the nation during the same beginning period of the New Year. This was the barbaric case of 30 children, boys and girls of the poor, a lot of them from the low castes, sexually abused, brutalized, killed and their body parts likely sold in the New Delhi suburb called Noida, a new city where multinationals have put up their shops, malls and factories. (Outlook magazine offered a poignant editorial on the topic on January 15. http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20070115&fname=GSagarikaGhose&sid=1 )

Soon thereafter, stories started about missing children in India. Mumbai reported more than 4,000 missing children. Hyderabad estimated the figure of 8,000 missing children in Andhra Pradesh. More figures began to pile up. The Government, which was on the defensive, said that about 50,000 children were missing in India, but then the NGOs said that the number of missing children in India was closer to one million. ‘India Today’ a reputable magazine in India said that the NGOs were closer to the truth.

Think about it. The India that is rising has about one million missing children who are most likely sexually abused, dehumanized, killed, maimed, and body parts sold without any mercy and compassion. Most of these children would be from the Dalit community and other low castes. Most would be poor; many would be lured, and some would be kidnapped by hoodlums, criminals and those who deal in human trafficking and the sex trade.

60 million child labourers in India!

New Delhi: The numbers tell the sorry story - an estimated 60 million child labourers in India but only 670,000 violations of the law detected in eight years and just 22,588 convictions!

Behind the bland government numbers are the millions of young children working in roadside eateries, slaving away in glass factories, hunched up over carpet looms or sweeping and cooking in homes in blatant violation of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act.

The children are a visible proof of the failure to implement the law, the inbuilt lacunae in the legislation itself and the poor rehabilitation policies.

Although government figures put the number of child labourers in the country at 12.6 million, child rights activists say the number is closer to 60 million.

Fidel castro-biography

Fidel Castro, the illegitimate son of a successful Creole sugar plantation owner, was born in Cuba in 1926. He was a rebellious boy and at the age of thirteen helped to organize a strike of sugar workers on his father's plantation.

Both his parents were illiterate but they were determined that their children should receive a good education and Fidel was sent to a Jesuit boarding school. Although he disliked the strict discipline of the school, Fidel soon showed that he was extremely intelligent. However, except for history, he preferred sports to academic subjects. Fidel was good at running, soccer and baseball, and in 1944 was awarded the prize as Cuba's best all-round school athlete.

After he had finished his education Castro became a lawyer in Havana. As he tended to take the cases of poor people who could not afford to pay him, Castro was constantly short of money. Castro's experience as a lawyer made him extremely critical of the great inequalities in wealth that existed in Cuba. Like many other Cubans, Castro resented the wealth and power of the American businessmen who appeared to control the country.

In 1947 Castro joined the Cuban People's Party. He was attracted to this new party's campaign against corruption, injustice, poverty, unemployment and low wages. The Cuban People's Party accused government ministers of taking bribes and running the country for the benefit of the large United States corporations that had factories and offices in Cuba.

In 1952 Fidel Castro became a candidate for Congress for the Cuban People's Party. He was a superb public speaker and soon built up a strong following amongst the young members of the party. The Cuban People's Party was expected to win the election but during the campaign. General Fulgencio Batista, with the support of the armed forces, took control of the country.

Castro came to the conclusion that revolution was the only way that the Cuban People's Party would gain power. In 1953, Castro, with an armed group of 123 men and women, attacked the Moncada Army Barracks. The plan to overthrow Batista ended in disaster and although only eight were killed in the fighting, another eighty were murdered by the army after they were captured. Castro was lucky that the lieutenant who arrested him ignored orders to have him executed and instead delivered him to the nearest civilian prison.

Castro also came close to death in prison. Captain Pelletier was instructed to put poison in Castro's food. The man refused and instead revealed his orders to the Cuban people. Pelletier was court-martialed but, concerned about world opinion, Batista decided not to have Castro killed.

Castro was put on trial charged with organising an armed uprising. He used this opportunity to make a speech about the problems of Cuba and how they could be solved. His speech later became a book entitled History Will Absolve Me. Castro was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The trial and the publication of the book made Castro famous in Cuba. His attempted revolution had considerable support in the country. After all, the party he represented would probably have won the election in 1952 had it been allowed to take place. Following considerable pressure from the Cuban population, Fulgencio Batista decided to release Castro after he had served only two years of his sentence. Batista also promised elections but when it became clear that they would not take place, Castro left for Mexico where he began to plan another attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.

After building up a stock of guns and ammunition, Castro, Che Guevara, Juan Almeida, and eighty other rebels arrived in Cuba in 1956. This group became known as the July 26 Movement (the date that Castro had attacked the Moncada barracks). Their plan was to set up their base in the Sierra Maestra mountains. On the way to the mountains they were attacked by government troops. By the time they reached the Sierra Maestra there were only sixteen men left with twelve weapons between them. For the next few months Castro's guerrilla army raided isolated army garrisons and were gradually able to build-up their stock of weapons.

When the guerrillas took control of territory they redistributed the land amongst the peasants. In return, the peasants helped the guerrillas against Batista's soldiers. In some cases the peasants also joined Castro's army, as did students from the cities and occasionally Catholic priests.

In an effort to find out information about Castro's army people were pulled in for questioning. Many innocent people were tortured. Suspects, including children, were publicly executed and then left hanging in the streets for several days as a warning to others who were considering joining Castro. The behaviour of Batista's forces increased support for the guerrillas. In 1958 forty-five organizations signed an open letter supporting the July 26 Movement. National bodies representing lawyers, architects, dentists, accountants and social workers were amongst those who signed. Castro, who had originally relied on the support of the poor, was now gaining the backing of the influential middle classes.

Fulgencio Batista responded to this by sending more troops to the Sierra Maestra. He now had 10,000 men hunting for Castro and his 300-strong army. Although outnumbered, Castro's guerrillas were able to inflict defeat after defeat on the government's troops. In the summer of 1958 over a thousand of Batista's soldiers were killed or wounded and many more were captured. Unlike Batista's soldiers, Castro's troops had developed a reputation for behaving well towards prisoners. This encouraged Batista's troops to surrender to Castro when things went badly in battle. Complete military units began to join the guerrillas.

The United States supplied Batista with planes, ships and tanks, but the advantage of using the latest technology such as napalm failed to win them victory against the guerrillas. In March 1958, the United States government, disillusioned with Batista's performance, suggested he held elections. This he did, but the people showed their dissatisfaction with his government by refusing to vote. Over 75 per cent of the voters in the capital Havana boycotted the polls. In some areas, such as Santiago, it was as high as 98 per cent.

Castro was now confident he could beat Batista in a head-on battle. Leaving the Sierra Maestra mountains, Castro's troops began to march on the main towns. After consultations with the United States government, Batista decided to flee Cuba. Senior Generals left behind attempted to set up another military government. Castro's reaction was to call for a general strike. The workers came out on strike and the military were forced to accept the people's desire for change. Castro marched into Havana on January 9,1959, and became Cuba's new leader.

In its first hundred days in office Castro's government passed several new laws. Rents were cut by up to 50 per cent for low wage earners; property owned by Batista and his ministers was confiscated; the telephone company was nationalized and the rates were reduced by 50 per cent; land was redistributed amongst the peasants (including the land owned by the Castro family); separate facilities for blacks and whites (swimming pools, beaches, hotels, cemeteries etc.) were abolished.

Castro had strong views on morality. He considered that alcohol, drugs, gambling, homosexuality and prostitution were major evils. He saw the casinos and night-clubs as sources of temptation and corruption and he passed laws closing them down. Members of the Mafia, who had been heavily involved in running these places, were forced to leave the country.

Castro believed strongly in education. Before the revolution 23.6 per cent of the Cuban population were illiterate. In rural areas over half the population could not read or write and 61 per cent of the children did not go to school. Castro asked young students in the cities to travel to the countryside and teach the people to read and write. Cuba adopted the slogan: "If you don't know, learn. If you know, teach." Eventually free education was made available to all citizens and illiteracy in Cuba became a thing of the past.

The new Cuban government also set about the problem of health care. Before the revolution Cuba had 6,000 doctors. Of these, 64 per cent worked in Havana where most of the rich people lived. When Castro ordered that doctors had to be redistributed throughout the country, over half decided to leave Cuba. To replace them Cuba built three new training schools for doctors.

The death of young children from disease was a major problem in Cuba. Infant mortality was 60 per 1,000 live births in 1959. To help deal with this Cuba introduced a free health-service and started a massive inoculation program. By 1980 infant mortality had fallen to 15 per 1,000. This figure is now the best in the developing world and is in fact better than many areas of the United States.

It has been estimated that in his seven-year reign, Batista's regime had murdered over 20,000 Cubans. Those involved in the murders had not expected to lose power and had kept records, including photographs of the people they had tortured and murdered. Castro established public tribunals to try the people responsible and an estimated 600 people were executed. Although this pleased the relatives of the people murdered by Batista's government, these executions shocked world opinion.

Some of Castro's new laws also upset the United States. Much of the land given to the peasants was owned by United States corporations. So also was the telephone company that was nationalized. The United States government responded by telling Castro they would no longer be willing to supply the technology and technicians needed to run Cuba's economy. When this failed to change Castro's policies they reduced their orders for Cuban sugar.

Castro refused to be intimidated by the United States and adopted even more aggressive policies towards them. In the summer of 1960 Castro nationalized United States property worth $850 million. He also negotiated a deal where by the Soviet Union and other communist countries in Eastern Europe agreed to purchase the sugar that the United States had refused to take. The Soviet Union also agreed to supply the weapons, technicians and machinery denied to Cuba by the United States.

President Dwight Eisenhower was in a difficult situation. The more he attempted to punish Castro the closer he became to the Soviet Union. His main fear was that Cuba could eventually become a Soviet military base. To change course and attempt to win Castro's friendship with favourable trade deals was likely to be interpreted as a humiliating defeat for the United States. Instead Eisenhower announced that he would not buy any more sugar from Cuba.

In March I960, Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to overthrow Castro. The plan involved a budget of $13 million to train "a paramilitary force outside Cuba for guerrilla action." The strategy was organised by Richard Bissell and Richard Helms. An estimated 400 CIA officers were employed full-time to carry out what became known as Operation Mongoose. Edward Lansdale became project leader whereas William Harvey became head of what became known as Task Force W. The JM WAVE station served as operational headquarters for Operation Mongoose.

Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA Technical Services Division was asked to come up with proposals that would undermine Castro's popularity with the Cuban people. Plans included a scheme to spray a television studio in which he was about to appear with an hallucinogenic drug and contaminating his shoes with thallium which they believed would cause the hair in his beard to fall out.

These schemes were rejected and instead Bissell decided to arrange the assassination of Castro. In September 1960, Richard Bissell and Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), initiated talks with two leading figures of the Mafia, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Later, other crime bosses such as Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante and Meyer Lansky became involved in this plot against Castro.

Robert Maheu, a veteran of CIA counter-espionage activities, was instructed to offer the Mafia $150,000 to kill Fidel Castro. The advantage of employing the Mafia for this work is that it provided CIA with a credible cover story. The Mafia were known to be angry with Castro for closing down their profitable brothels and casinos in Cuba. If the assassins were killed or captured the media would accept that the Mafia were working on their own.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had to be brought into this plan as part of the deal involved protection against investigations against the Mafia in the United States. Castro was later to complain that there were twenty ClA-sponsered attempts on his life. Eventually Johnny Roselli and his friends became convinced that the Cuban revolution could not be reversed by simply removing its leader. However, they continued to play along with this CIA plot in order to prevent them being prosecuted for criminal offences committed in the United States.

n 1961 Eisenhower retired and the problem of dealing with Castro was passed on to the new president, John F. Kennedy. The new president continued with Eisenhower's policy of trying to assassinate Castro. This became known as Operation Freedom and was placed under the control of Robert Kennedy.

In the three years that followed the revolution, 250,000 Cubans out of a population of six million left the country. Most of these were from the upper and middle-classes who were financially worse off as a result of Castro's policies.

Of those who stayed, 90 per cent of the population, according to public opinion polls, supported Castro. However, Castro did not keep his promise of holding free elections. Castro claimed the national unity that had been created would be destroyed by the competing political parties in an election.

Castro was also becoming less tolerant towards people who disagreed with him. Ministers who questioned the wisdom of his policies were sacked and replaced by people who had proved their loyalty to him. These people were often young, inexperienced politicians who had fought with him in the Sierra Maestra.

Politicians who publicly disagreed with him faced the possibility of being arrested. Writers who expressed dissenting views and people he considered deviants such as homosexuals were also imprisoned.

When John F. Kennedy replaced Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States he was told about the CIA plan to invade Cuba. Kennedy had doubts about the venture but he was afraid he would be seen as soft on communism if he refused permission for it to go ahead. Kennedy's advisers convinced him that Castro was an unpopular leader and that once the invasion started the Cuban people would support the ClA-trained forces.

On April 14, 1961, B-26 planes began bombing Cuba's airfields. After the raids Cuba was left with only eight planes and seven pilots. Two days later five merchant ships carrying 1,400 Cuban exiles arrived at the Bay of Pigs. The attack was a total failure. Two of the ships were sunk, including the ship that was carrying most of the supplies. Two of the planes that were attempting to give air-cover were also shot down. Within seventy-two hours all the invading troops had been killed, wounded or had surrendered.

At the beginning of September 1962, U-2 spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was building surface-to-air missile (SAM) launch sites. There was also an increase in the number of Soviet ships arriving in Cuba which the United States government feared were carrying new supplies of weapons. President John Kennedy complained to the Soviet Union about these developments and warned them that the United States would not accept offensive weapons (SAMs were considered to be defensive) in Cuba.

As the Cubans now had SAM installations they were in a position to shoot down U-2 spy-planes. Kennedy was in a difficult situation. Elections were to take place for the United States Congress in two month's time. The public opinion polls showed that his own ratings had fallen to their lowest point since he became president.

In his first two years of office a combination of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats in Congress had blocked much of Kennedy's proposed legislation. The polls suggested that after the elections he would have even less support in Congress. Kennedy feared that any trouble over Cuba would lose the Democratic Party even more votes, as it would remind voters of the Bay of Pigs disaster where the CIA had tried to oust Castro from power. One poll showed that over 62 per cent of the population were unhappy with his policies on Cuba. Understandably, the Republicans attempted to make Cuba the main issue in the campaign.

This was probably in Kennedy's mind when he decided to restrict the flights of the U-2 planes over Cuba . Pilots were also told to avoid flying the whole length of the island. Kennedy hoped this would ensure that a U-2 plane would not be shot down, and would prevent Cuba becoming a major issue during the election campaign.

On September 27, a CIA agent in Cuba overheard Castro's personal pilot tell another man in a bar that Cuba now had nuclear weapons. U-2 spy-plane photographs also showed that unusual activity was taking place at San Cristobal. However, it was not until October 15 that photographs were taken that revealed that the Soviet Union was placing long range missiles in Cuba.

President Kennedy's first reaction to the information about the missiles in Cuba was to call a meeting to discuss what should be done. Fourteen men attended the meeting and included military leaders, experts on Latin America, representatives of the CIA, cabinet ministers and personal friends whose advice Kennedy valued. This group became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Over the next few days they were to meet several times.

At the first meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, the CIA and other military advisers explained the situation. After hearing what they had to say, the general feeling of the meeting was for an air-attack on the missile sites. Remembering the poor advice the CIA had provided before the Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy decided to wait and instead called for another meeting to take place that evening. By this time several of the men were having doubts about the wisdom of a bombing raid, fearing that it would lead to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The committee was now so divided that a firm decision could not be made.

The Executive Committee of the National Security Council argued amongst themselves for the next two days. The CIA and the military were still in favour of a bombing raid and/or an invasion. However, the majority of the committee gradually began to favour a naval blockade of Cuba.

Kennedy accepted their decision and instructed Theodore Sorensen, a member of the committee, to write a speech in which Kennedy would explain to the world why it was necessary to impose a naval blockade of Cuba.

As well as imposing a naval blockade, Kennedy also told the air-force to prepare for attacks on Cuba and the Soviet Union. The army positioned 125,000 men in Florida and was told to wait for orders to invade Cuba. If the Soviet ships carrying weapons for Cuba did not turn back or refused to be searched, a war was likely to begin. Kennedy also promised his military advisers that if one of the U-2 spy planes were fired upon he would give orders for an attack on the Cuban SAM missile sites.

The world waited anxiously. A public opinion poll in the United States revealed that three out of five people expected fighting to break out between the two sides. There were angry demonstrations outside the American Embassy in London as people protested about the possibility of nuclear war. Demonstrations also took place in other cities in Europe. However, in the United States, polls suggested that the vast majority supported Kennedy's action.

On October 24, President John F. Kennedy was informed that Soviet ships had stopped just before they reached the United States ships blockading Cuba. That evening Nikita Khrushchev sent an angry note to Kennedy accusing him of creating a crisis to help the Democratic Party win the forthcoming election.

On October 26, Khrushchev sent Kennedy another letter. In this he proposed that the Soviet Union would be willing to remove the missiles in Cuba in exchange for a promise by the United States that they would not invade Cuba. The next day a second letter from Khrushchev arrived demanding that the United States remove their nuclear bases in Turkey.

While the president and his advisers were analyzing Khrushchev's two letters, news came through that a U-2 plane had been shot down over Cuba. The leaders of the military, reminding Kennedy of the promise he had made, argued that he should now give orders for the bombing of Cuba. Kennedy refused and instead sent a letter to Khrushchev accepting the terms of his first letter.

Khrushchev agreed and gave orders for the missiles to be dismantled. Eight days later the elections for Congress took place. The Democrats increased their majority and it was estimated that Kennedy would now have an extra twelve supporters in Congress for his policies.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the first and only nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The event appeared to frighten both sides and it marked a change in the development of the Cold War.

Castro remained dependent on the support of the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power on 15th October, 1964, but his successors, including Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev provided aid to his government. However, after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union in 1989 this economic help came to an end.

In 1991 Cuba suffered an economic crisis. Its outdated and unrepaired equipment meant that sugar and tobacco production fell. At the same time Cuba could no longer rely on former countries in Eastern Europe to buy its goods. Castro suffered great embarrassment when his own daughter sough asylum in the United States in 1994.

In 2005, the CIA reported that Fidel Castro was suffering from Parkinson's disease. Other rumours suggested that he had terminal cancer. The following year he underwent intestinal surgery and on 31st July, 2006, he transferred his political responsibilities to his younger brother Raúl Castro.

On 19th February, 2008, Fidel Castro announced he would neither seek nor accept a new term as either president or commander-in-chief of Cuba.

Indian Communists in Freedom Movement

Indian Communists in Freedom Movement: Yesterday and Today
(Talk given by Arindam Sen at Bhilai on 7 August 05)

Yes friends, I do believe our struggle for independence is far from over. In what sense, I'll tell you towards the end of the discussion. For now, I'll dwell on the role of communists in our freedom movement up to 1947. Let us first confront and settle a couple of questions our adversaries often level against us. Were the first Indian communists Russian agents out to disrupt the national movement? And is communism an alien and imported ideology that never struck roots in the soil of Hindustan - and never will?
These questions bring us to an examination of the genesis of communism in India .

Early years of communist intervention
Let us start from facts - recorded facts.

"The downfall of Tsardom has ushered in the age of destruction of alien bureaucracy in India too", commented the Dainik Basumati, then a leading nationalist daily from Calcutta, just ten days after the event. "Our hour is approaching, India too shall be free. But sons of India must stand up for right and justice, as the Russian did" – declared the Home Rule League's pamphlet Lesson From Russia, published from Madras in late 1917. And so on and so forth, exclaimed the exuberant Indian nationalists, finding a new inspiration, a new path in the great November revolution. It was from among them that the first batch of Indian Communists emerged. They came mainly from two backgrounds: (a) the Congress mainstream, e.g. SA Dange of Bombay, Singaravelu M Chettiar of Madras etc.; and (b) national revolutionary organisations, e.g. MN Roy who had been a responsible cadre of Anushilan Samity and Yugantar, Virendranath Chattopadhyay and Bhupendranath Dutta (younger brother of Narendranath Dutta, better known as Swami Vivekananda), both leading members of the "Berlin Committee", Ghadarites operating from the USA, such as Ratan Singh and Santokh Singh and so on. Many who were serving the nationalist cause in other ways also played a pioneering role, such as Muzaffar Ahmed of Calcutta, then a co-editor of the literary-political magazine Navyug (the other editor was the revolutionary poet Kazi Nazrul Islam), and Ghulam Hussain, a professor from Peshawar who become a whole time TU organiser.
The process continued, and in the mid-1930s AK Gopalan, EMS Namboodiripad, P. Sundaraya, Saijad Zaheer and others came over to the CPI from the socialist wing of the Congress known as the Congress Socialist Party (CSP). A few years earlier Bhagat Singh's transition from petty bourgeois revolutionism to revolutionary Marxism had been stopped short by his martyrdom (the last book he re-read before going to the gallows was Lenin's What Is To Be Done?). But practically all his surviving colleagues including the young Ajoy Ghosh joined the party; so did most of Surya Sen's comrades after the Chittagong uprising.
Now for the second question.
Communism, like concepts of modern nation state, representative democracy and modernism in general, is no doubt of European origin. But in scope and orientation it was, and will always be, a universal ideology. In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, when freedom fighters in India and other backward countries like China and Vietnam were looking beyond their national frontiers for the correct path, Marxism too was developing beyond its initial European paradigm to embrace the conditions of those colonial and semi-colonial countries. Marx had left behind some deep insights on the conditions and revolutionary potentials of these countries including India , but it was Lenin who played the key role in this evolution. In a series of articles and pamphlets like Backward Europe and Advanced Asia (1913) and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), he gradually developed a holistic vision of national liberation struggles as an integral part of international socialist revolution. The theory was enriched in the Second World Congress (1920) of the Comintern (Communist International or CI) with active involvement of emerging communists from backward countries, most notably MN Roy. Roy 's cooperation and comradely controversy with Lenin produced the famous co-documents known as "Colonial Theses" and "Supplementary Theses", and these laid a foundation on which the communists in India developed, brick by brick, their theory of Indian revolution.
These two processes – an advanced section of nationalists reaching out for Marxist theory and the latter developing into an inspiration and guide to the national liberation movement across the globe – were fused into a real movement only when the internal conditions got ripened. That happened in 1922-23, when in a matter of just one year all the four early communist groups of our country sprang up in the four major industrial cities of Calcutta , Bombay , Madras and Lahore . They emerged locally without any interconnections or any grand plan, and came together in the founding conference of the CPI held in the industrial city of Kanpur on 25-28 October 1925. Here it should be mentioned that a "CPI" in exile was formed in Russia in 1920-21, but having no roots in the masses of India , this event remained just a footnote in the annals of communist movement of our country.
Now what was so special about the period starting with mid-1922, which saw a sudden spurt in organised communist activity? It was in 1922 that Gandhi called off the non-cooperation movement at its peak. This generated in all nationalist circles angry debates and a search for an alternative path, for a way out of the leadership crisis, and the quest led the most radical freedom fighters to the crimson path heralding a new dawn on earth, as we have noted above.
At a particular confluence of national and international factors was thus born, on the soil of India , the communist wing of the national liberation movement. The great hallmark of this radical alternative to Gandhism was that from the very outset it strove to combine the twin tasks of national liberation from imperialist yoke and social liberation of the toiling masses from feudal and capitalist exploitation and oppression.
That the British rulers recognised communists as their most dangerous enemies was evident from a series of conspiracy cases - Peshawar , Kanpur , Meerut and others - hatched against them during 1920s and early 1930s. The most famous was the last named. Panicked at the high tide in workers' struggles, rapid spread of WPPs, (see below) the revival of mass anti- imperialist movement provoked by the Simon Commission, the revolutionary activities of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, and the coming closer of communists and a section of the nationalist leadership, the government struck back in 1929 with a chain of repressive measures. Most important among these were: the Meerut conspiracy case, the Public Safety Bill and Trade Disputes Bill, and the prosecution of and death sentences to Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. In March 1929, 31 labour leaders (including 3 Englishmen) from Calcutta , Bombay , and other parts of the country were rounded up. They were brought to Meerut for the conspiracy case. The accused communists made very good use of the courtroom for the spread of their ideology, aims and objectives. The British move to drive a wedge between communists and nationalist leaders also proved futile. Nehru, Gandhi and many others visited the Meerut jail while the accused communists also sent messages to the satyagrahis in different jails supporting their just struggles for political status. From the dock communists vigorously exposed the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of British rule in India and their 'civilised' legal system. Not only did workers all over the world launch agitations against the trial and conviction, even men like Romain Rolland and Prof. Albert Einstein raised their voices in protest against the trial.
The Workers' and Peasants' Party (WPP), a sort of people's party, was organised jointly by communists and other revolutionary democrats and utilised by the former as a means of circumventing police restrictions on communist activities and as a united front organ. It sprang up in different provinces under different names, but generally as left blocks within the Congress. The different provincial WPPs were brought under a common platform and common name and knit into an all-India party in 1928. The party witnessed very rapid expansion. But all propaganda and agitation began to be conducted in the name of WPP. For all practical purposes the communist party was becoming an appendage of its own creation – the WPP and, in the process, getting politically assimilated in the Congress. The need of the hour was to fight out this liquidationist danger, re-emphasise the primacy and ideological purity of the communist party, and to continue the WPP as a broad democratic, anti- imperialism platform and a legal cover for the underground party. Unfortunately, such higher experimentation was not taken up. The CPI dissolved the WPP in 1929, and under the influence of the Comintern, entered upon a five-year phase of 'left' sectarianism. During this period, the CPI attacked the Congress as a whole, and its left leaning leaders in particular (Bose and Nehru), as deceivers of the masses and traitors to the national cause. But this was not counterbalanced by the other aspect of the Comintern guideline – building a revolutionary peasant struggle. In effect, the party got itself largely isolated from the mainstream of national movement even as it failed to expand its mass base beyond a section of the working class.

Before and During WW I
By the year 1935, however, the CI changed its line and the CPI, ideologically and organisationally much consolidated than before, plunged once again into the mainstream of freedom movement. The communists started joining the Congress and the Congress Socialist Party (wherever the latter had its units) on individual basis. Through the CSP the communists also secured, by 1939, as many as 20 seats in the AICC and many leadership posts at provincial levels.
With war clouds gathering overhead, the CPI in early 1938 came up with a "Peace Policy" for India and opposed the British campaign for army recruitment with the slogan:
Yeh jung samrajyashahi – Hum na denge ek pai na ek bhai.
Within about a month, the party organised the world's first anti-war strike in Bombay involving some 89000 textile workers and several thousand workers in match and leather factories, hotels etc. A 30,000 strong rally was also organised in Nagpur . In October itself, the Politburo in a policy statement called for "revolutionary utilisation of the war crisis for the achievement of National Freedom", i.e., for "transformation of imperialist war into a war of national liberation". This they sought to achieve by intensifying mass actions of workers and peasants and by "break[ing] through the shackles of Gandhian technique".
By contrast, the Congress adopted a bargaining posture: offering support to belligerent Britain in return for immediate election of a responsible central government and promise of a constituent assembly for independent India after the war. At the Wardha and Ramgarh sessions (October '39 and March '40), communist members of the AICC such as Somnath Lahiri tried to make the Congress adopt a movemental course, but in vain.
The war situation saw a large-scale spurt in militant peasant struggles, with the communists playing a lead role in some of them. They also organised "hunger marches" and other militant activities of the rural poor in several parts of Madras province, Andhra, Malabar, Bengal etc., where traders and zamindars were forced to provide grain to the hungry either free or at "fair price". The most well known among the peasant struggles of the early war years took place in Kayyur and adjacent areas of Malabar. Four policemen and two Kisan activists died in separate clashes on and immediately after 15 September 1940 , the anti-repression day. The struggle against illegal evictions, forcible extractions, hiked rent etc. had been going on for some time, which led to the arrest of several communist organisers on 25-26 March 1941. On the protest day (28 March), enraged peasants killed two policemen. Beastly repression followed, four of the arrested were sentenced to death and 16 to life imprisonment. The communist peasant heroes embraced martyrdom on 29 March 1943 , crying out "Down with fascism! Down with imperialism! Long live the Communist Party of India!"
Kayyur thus emerged as a glorious symbol of peasant militancy that was clearly anti-feudal and anti-imperialist at the same time, with the lowest rungs of the rural people playing a frontal role. Thus for full two years since the outbreak of World War II, the CPI conducted anti-war, anti-British agitation with increasing militancy. Particularly commendable was its leading role in intensifying workers' struggles against spiraling prices and on political issues. But all along, the party laboured under a fatalist ideology of helpless dependence on the Congress. The deep-rooted belief was that "the movement for freedom can acquire national dimensions and be really effective only when it is led by the Congress" – as a late 1939 PB statement had it. The reason cited was that, given the party's small organisation, it was not possible to "break through the stalemate by ourselves issuing a `call' for nationwide direct action..."Thus, nationwide action backed by an all-India organisation (which only the Congress possessed) was considered to be the only available course. That there could be another option - one of area wise consolidation and planned expansion of the party's political base among basic masses – never occurred to the party leaders. Nor did they have the courage of conviction that this way a small force could rapidly grow into a big one in the given favourable situation. The party therefore virtually surrendered its claim to leadership in the freedom movement without a fight.
The ideological defeatism was, of course, sought to be covered up with all kinds of phraseology. Thus the above-mentioned PB statement asserted that "the proletarian hegemony in the national anti-war movement has to be achieved not outside and independent of the Congress, but through it..." Proletarian hegemony depending upon the Congress! And that too at a time of open and obvious rightist consolidation in the Congress leadership! Curiously enough, communist leaders nurtured an illusion about the Congress even as they recognised that "with the growing explosiveness of the situation, the national leadership will grow more and more anti-struggle, its tactics will grow more and more disruptive of national unity"!
Don't you find a striking similarity here with the current political positions of the CPI and CPI(M) ? Well, such verbal critique of the bourgeois leadership actually served to camouflage the actual political tailism of the communist leadership, as they do now. As for the Congress, the communist obsession for unity was not at all shared by it. The provincial Congress ministries of 1937-39 suppressed workers' and peasants' movements to the full satisfaction of the British authorities. During 1939-41, thus, the CPI line was characterised by militant anti-imperialism mixed up with dependence on the Congress for unleashing a nationwide movement. But the situation changed drastically with the German aggression on the Soviet Union (SU) in June 1941.
For full five months after the attack on SU, the party maintained that "the only way in which the Indian people can help the just war which the Soviet people are waging, is by fighting all the more vigorously for their own emancipation from the imperialist yoke... We can render really effective aid to the Soviet Union only as a free people." Premised on the understanding that "the relation between India and Britain does not change", this position propagated by General Secretary PC Joshi and other underground leaders like Namboodripad, Adhikari and Sundarayya sought to combine the national and international tasks and reflected the people's mood. But several other leaders confined in Deoli jail such as Dange, Ahmad and Ranadive, who were the first to receive a CI directive for a change of tack, argued that Indians should support the British war efforts in defence of the SU. After a bitter inner-party struggle, by end of 1941, the CPI finally adopted the People's War line.

Big blunder of 1942
Consistent with the one-sided and erroneous People's War line, the party opposed the Quit India Movement (QIM) in 1942. Here it is necessary to note that this movement was not intended for a real headlong clash with the Raj, but as a pressure-tactic to persuade the latter, already threatened by the advancing Japanese, to negotiate transfer of power to the exclusion of the Muslim League. This is why, in the words of Nehru in Discovery Of India, "neither he [Gandhi-A.S.] nor the CWC issued any kind of directives..." and made "no arrangements for the functioning of the Congress after they had been removed from the scene". According to S. Gopal, the biographer of Jawaharlal Nehru, "It was almost as if the Working Committee wished to escape to prison and to avoid decision" at the crucial hour. But after the arrest of Gandhi and others, precisely because there was no leader left free to check the spontaneous popular upsurge, soon the QIM became, in the words of Lord Linlithgow, "by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security" (Cable to Churchill). From behind the bars, of course, MK Gandhi repeatedly condemned the 'violence', asked the militants including Congressmen to "surrender to the police" and continued the efforts to restore goodwill with the Raj through emissaries like GD Birla. Both the Muslim League and the RSS-Hindu Mahasabha (HM) denounced the movement in most savage terms, with leaders of the HM such as Shymaprasad Mukherjee, participating in the repression as members of provincial ministries.
Whatever the role of Gandhi and others, the CPI no doubt committed a major mistake by opposing the QIM. As the Second Party Congress held in February 1948 pointed out, "This total underestimation of the role of imperialism in the period of People's War made us lose sight of the task of exposing imperialism and fighting it within the framework of support for anti-fascist war".
But this was too little too late. Even if there was some theoretical justification for the initial opposition to the Quit India resolution of the Gandhiites, subsequently the party leaders should have grasped the revolutionary potential of the anti-British upsurge and come forward to lead it while simultaneously carrying on anti-fascist agitation and preparations against Japanese aggression. At least after the Soviet victory in Stalingrad , the party should have abandoned its exclusive anti-fascism and reincorporated anti-imperialism in its line of action. But that was not to be. Mao Zedong's friendly message to the CPI CC, dated 5 April 1943 , fell on deaf ears:
"We believe that under the concerted efforts of the Communist Party of India and the Indian people, a way will certainly be found out of the present difficult situation so that both the objects – to vanquish Fascism and strive for Indian independence – will be attained."
In the absence of the dialectical approach and political flexibility required for such readjustment of policy, the CPI stuck to the erroneous PW line till the end of war. We the Indian communists do make unconditional self-criticism for the blunder, but here it must be pointed out that allegations of communists acting as police agents or accepting money from the British during the PW phase are absolutely baseless. On the contrary, the government released the communist prisoners and granted legal status to the CPI (in July '42) with much hesitation and reluctance; even in August-September – at the height of PW activism, that is – the official assessment was that "It is primarily a nationalist party working for Indian independence... It is clearly impossible to expect communists to adopt a wholly loyalist attitude..." It was also noted that "they profess to be averse to the acceptance of financial or other assistance from government in their pro-war campaign and they seem determined not to submit to official control or direction in any sphere of their activity..."
Secondly, mistakes notwithstanding, the PW phase was a period of wholesome growth for the CPI. The party put to good use its first ever opportunity to work legally and recovered much of its lost goodwill through dedicated relief work for the Bengal famine in and after 1943. It set up or expanded the frontal organisations among women, students, workers, peasants and most notably among art-and-literature activists. The IPTA, launched in May 1943, attracted a veritable galaxy of talents like Salil Chaudhury, Debabrata Biswas, Sambhu Mitra, Balraj Sahni, Kaifi Azami, KA Abbas, and so on. Literary figures like Manik Bandopadhyaya, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Bishnu De, Samar Sen joined or became close friends of the communist party. All this bears testimony to the trust and respect enlightened Indians reposed in the party for its honest courage to move against the tide with a noble ideal (in this case the internationalist duty of saving human civilisation from fascism) and its glorious track record of sacrifices in the cause of the motherland.

During the Post-War Upsurge
The years 1945 - 1947 saw a veritable popular uprising against British rule in India , even as the Congress and the Muslim League were busy negotiating with the Raj a mutually acceptable scheme for transfer of power. Communists played undoubtedly the most prominent role in this upsurge. The Tebhaga, Punnapura-Vayalar and Telangana uprisings organised by them are so well known that we hardly need details here. No less active were the party's TU and student wings and in many cases they came forward as ardent champions of militant communal unity against imperialism. Thus in November 1945, Calcutta saw students, tram workers, municipal employees and others under communist influence joining followers of FB (which was remarkable in view of prolonged CPI-FB clashes over the assessment of Subhas Bose) and Muslim League in a trend-setting city upheaval against the INA trails. The militant political and communal unity was soon to be experienced again in February next year when Calcutta exploded against the seven-year rigorous imprisonment meted out to Abdul Rashid of the INA. Barely five months after the August 1946 riots in Calcutta , Hindu and Muslim tram workers united under communist leadership to launch a successful 85-day strike. The day of launching the strike, that is 21 January 1947 , Calcutta saw the communist-led "Hands off Vietnam " demonstration by students against the use of Dum Dum airport by French warplanes. During the great RIN mutiny, the CPI, with the cooperation of the CSP, called a solidarity hartal in Bombay on 22 February 1946 . Despite opposition from both the Congress and the Muslim League, the strike accompanied by barricade fights was highly successful, and could be crushed by the army only at the cost of hundreds of casualties on both sides.
All these fine episodes, however, suffered from one fundamental weakness. They were isolated initiatives taken by local cadres and ranks, with the central leadership doing nothing to plan, execute or coordinate them on an all-India plane. The party headquarters, advantageously situated in Bombay , never tried to lead the RIN mutiny although the rebellious ratings were quite eager for that. Nor did it have any plans to spread and heighten the demonstrations against INA trials taking place in different parts of the country. The all-India leadership hardly tried to guide Tebhaga and Punnapura-Vayalar struggles from a primarily economic plane to a higher political plane; in Telangana the Central Committee's intervention was belated, confused and largely negative. In a situation variously described as "the edge of a volcano", "almost revolution" and so on, the CPI leadership was thus running after the events. There was no political resolve to combine all these revolutionary currents - with the peasant rebellions as the axis - into a concerted all-India upsurge for overthrowing the British imperialists and Indian reactionaries.
That the party's point of departure was not proletarian political independence but petty bourgeois reformist tailism, becomes self-evident when one takes a look at the documents of this period. The June 1947 resolution entitled "Mountbatten Award and After", for instance, made a correct assessment of the award, noting that it was "the culmination of a double-faced imperial policy which while making concession to the national demand to transfer power, sets in motion disruptive and reactionary forces to disrupt the popular upsurge, obstruct the realization of real independence, throttle the growth of democracy and destroy the unity and integrity of India." And yet, the partners in this conspiracy, the Congress and the Muslim League, were eulogised as "national leadership", and later on, all support was pledged to the governments run by these parties.
This sort of critical tailism was one of the two fundamental reasons why the Indian communists, for all their sacrifices, failed to establish leadership over our freedom movement and carry it to consummation; the other being the lack of serious, sustained, painstaking effort to build revolutionary peasant struggles as the mainstay of freedom movement, as the bulwark of proletarian hegemony over the Indian struggle for independence.

Communists in the Second Freedom Movement
The net result of this crucial failure was that the hard won harvest of people's prolonged battles was highjacked by vested interests masquerading as liberators and on 15 August 1947 a divided India became not a truly independent but only a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country. The struggle for real liberation from foreign and domestic exploitation and oppression continued, albeit on a new plane. Since early 1990s, it has reached a particularly intense phase in the Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation (LPG) environment, rendered all the more complicated by hard and 'soft' communalisms.
What role are communists playing in this struggle?
Communists no longer belong to a single party: the tailist-opportunist tendency and the dynamic-revolutionary tendency within the undivided CPI have since crystalised into social democratic and revolutionary communist wings respectively. The former has earned the trust of the ruling classes and emerged as natural rulers in three States; at the national level it supports a Congress-led Government that is selling out our (residual) economic, political and military (witness the recent Indo-US military pact) sovereignty and presiding over systematic repression on workers, peasants and others who dare to fight back. The latter, a small force reflecting the unfavourable balance of class forces at national and international levels, is growing independently with people' struggles and striving for a broader mobilisation of forces, under the banner of Left Confederation, in the movement for total emancipation. Such in barest outline are the dialectics and dynamics of communist role in the second freedom movement. Even as the debate between the two wings continues, come let us all unite in this great struggle. On the morrow of the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima Day, which our party has celebrated as anti-imperialist day, and on the eve of 9th August, the Quit India Day, let us roar out in one voice:
Imperialist powers and lackeys quit India !
Annul the Indo-US military pact!
Forward to Freedom, Democracy, Socialism!

Four decades after his death, Che Guevara, the icon, lives on

'Che' returns to Buenos Aires




BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara returned to Buenos Aires Tuesday, his defiant expression immortalized in a towering bronze statue.

Guevara left the capital as a young doctor in 1953 to travel the continent and join the Cuban Revolution, becoming a political icon plastered on T-shirts and posters worldwide.

Now, a 3-ton (3 metric ton), 13-foot (4-meter) bronze replica of his image will tower over a plaza in the town of Rosario, his birthplace, topped with his famed starred beret.

But first, the statue toured the streets of Buenos Aires, swinging past his former university and ending at the Obelisk, a symbol of the Argentine capital.

"Finally, the city where he studied medicine, which was home to the most important dreams of his youth, sees him arrive again," said Eladio Gonzalez, director of the Ernesto Che Guevara Museum that helped promote the project.

Local artist Andres Zerneri used 75,000 bronze keys, donated by 14,000 Argentines over two years, to cast the statue.

The bronze replica arrives in Rosario Wednesday, ahead of an 80th anniversary celebration of the famed revolutionary's birth on June 14.

Guevara was executed in Bolivia in 1967 after promoting revolution there.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION TO CURB HIKE IN FUEL COST IN INDIA

The profits enjoyed by private oil companies in the country have increased along with increase in oil prices. Due to the selective policy of the Government, private sector companies both in upstream and downstream are enjoying windfall profits arising not due to extra business acumen or competitive business approach but due to the high global crude price.

With crude oil prices now exceeding $ 100 per barrel, it is necessary that windfall gains be recovered from all the private and joint venture oil producing companies like M/s Cairns, Reliance, Essar etc extracting oil and gas in India. When these contractors participated in the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP), none of them could have envisaged crude oil prices beyond $ 30 per barrel. It would be a failure on Government’s part to allow upstream contractors additional gain of $ 70 per barrel - $ 80 per barrel without any extra work. Many other countries have gone ahead and re-negotiated their contracts with a threat of imposing windfall taxes on such profits.

It is time that Government of India takes charge and recovers unintended gains from upstream contractors.

Similarly, private sector refineries have been allowed to keep margins for refining cost exceeding $ 15 per barrel while public sector companies struggle to meet their financial requirements. For example, for a private refinery like Reliance, which exports a major portion of its products, the profit has increased by 26 per cent during the quarter October-December 2007 and 35 per cent during January-March, 2008 as compared to the same period during the last financial year. By design the Government has dragged down the public sector companies while private sector companies have been allowed to flourish. It is necessary that the Government impose a windfall tax on private refineries, who do not contribute to meet the oil subsidy bill.

Why No Windfall Profits Tax?

A windfall profits tax is a tax on profits that ensues from a sudden windfall to a particular company or industry. In 1980, in the United States, federal legislation was passed that levied such a tax on oil companies because of the profits they earned as a result of the sharp increase in oil prices brought about by the Arab oil embargo. Since then, the tax has not been re-enacted. However with oil prices once again reaching record levels there is renewed pressure on the U.S. government to bring back the tax. Amid low oil prices, the tax was ended in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan. Recently, on May 7, 2008, a Democratic Senator introduced a Bill “The Consumer-First Energy Act of 2008”, which would create a tax on "windfall profits" on the major oil companies.

The government should impose a “windfall” profits tax on private/joint venture oil producing companies and private stand alone refineries earning huge profits through import parity policy of pricing.

In no case can the UPA government pamper the private oil companies to make windfall profits and at the same time increase the price of petrol and diesel and burden the people further when they are suffering from steep price rise of essential commodities.

Reduce Customs and Excise Duties

This alongwith the reduction of customs duty on crude oil and reduction in excise duty of petroleum products without any ad valorem content should help to meet the situation arising out of the steep rise in world oil prices and providing relief to the oil marketing companies.

· Reduction of customs duty on crude oil from 5 per cent to nil. The duty collected on this account is likely to be more than Rs. 15000 crore this year, which if nullified would give considerable relief to the OMCs.

· Creation of a Price Stabilisation Fund by using the money collected through cess by the government on crude oil produced by ONGC and Oil India, the two oil producing PSUs (Rs. 2,500/MT) for supporting OMCs. This cess amounts to more than Rs. 7,500 crore approximately per annum.

· Reduction in excise duty of products. The duty should be specific without having any ad valorem content.

CONGRESS AND THE MEDIA-A TRUE REPORT

Left Parties Statement:

On Shortage of Uranium Fuel

The Government is currently conveying a picture that the Indian Nuclear Energy program is short of fuel and only the India US Nuclear Deal can bail India out of this shortage. Shri Pranab Mukherjee, Convenor of the UPA-Left Committee on the nuclear deal, made such remarks while stating the case for seeking the IAEA Board’s approval for the India-specific safeguards agreement.

There is no doubt that India is currently experiencing a shortage of uranium compared to what its requirements are for running its PWR's. The question is, is this shortage due to actually running out of nuclear fuel as it is being projected or due to a temporary shortage, created either through a lack of proper planning or deliberately in order to push a high cost import based nuclear energy sector?

Since the days of Homi Bhabha , it is a well-known fact that India has limited resources of natural uranium. India has 61,000 tonnes of uranium ores in its soil, which can sustain a total PHWR capacity of 10,000-15,000 MW, against our current installed capacity of only 4,100 MW. We quote below the statement of Shri B.Bhattacharjee, the then Director, BARC (November, 2003, Issue No.238 of BARC Newsletter)

“Our present generation of PHWR utilizes only 0.5% of total uranium fuel and our modest uranium reserves may not support more than 15,000 MWe installed capacity through the existing PHWR route. That is why our committed nuclear power of about 20,000 MWe by the year 2020 calls for induction of Fast Breeder Reactors(FBRs) to contribute about 2000 MWe and Advanced Heavy Water Reactors to contribute about 3000 Mwe.”

Neither the DAE nor the Government has given the nation any explanation of how this current shortage has come about, when we have known reserves in the country to sustain a nuclear energy programme of at least 10,000 MW. Knowledgeable experts feel that the current uranium shortage has been created through allocation of insufficient funds to the uranium mining sector by the Planning Commission and the Finance Ministry since about 1990. Added to this was the lacklustre management of the Uranium Corporation in the past, working uranium mines having been closed down and actions taken to overcome environmental opposition to uranium mining being weak and ineffective.

It is pertinent to note that according to DAE, India's plan was to raise the nuclear energy to 20,000 MW by 2020 and to 25% share of the country's needs by 2050 and all this was planned with indigenous fuel resources. Suddenly, we have a plan for changing the route of nuclear energy away from the one developed earlier, which calls for large-scale import of Light Water Reactors and import of uranium. It needs to made clear that such a plan that depends on imported fuel has neither been discussed nor been placed before the people. Even the Integrated Energy Plan produced by the Planning Commission envisages -- as a most optimistic scenario -- nuclear energy to reach 29,000 MW by adding a limited number of Light Water Reactors to the 20,000 MW envisaged earlier by DAE. For none of this, a serious shortage of nuclear fuel has been projected either by DAE or the Planning Commission.

While the shortage of uranium is a serious issue for which the Government owes the country an explanation, what is disturbing is to paint the temporary shortage as a permanent scarcity in order to push the India US Nuclear Deal. That this shortage is a temporary one can be seen from the attached Press Release dated 20/08/07 of the Nuclear Power Corporation itself. We understand that with opening of new mines and the new ore processing facility at Jaduguda, re-opening of the open cast mine there, this shortage is expected to be overcome by 2008. In case this is not true, the country would like to know what has gone wrong from the earlier estimates of the Nuclear Power Corporation as stated in its above Press Release?

Government may clarify what it is doing to address the gap between demand for uranium and supply. Has the government fixed the responsibility for this serious deficiency in government operations? How long will it take before the plant capacity factors of current PHWRs start coming up and reaching close to 90% once again?

Government should also explain why the plan expenditure of the Department of Atomic Energy has been reduced by Rs. 188 crores between Budget Estimate 2007-08 and 2008-09?

The current shortage of uranium is certainly NOT because the India-US deal has not come through, since the 10,000 MW plan was finalised purely on the basis of proven Indian uranium reserves, long before any deal with the US was in the horizon! A temporary mismatch between the national uranium supply and demand cannot be the basis to plunge the country into an India-US deal with far reaching adverse implications.

Ten per cent growth amid the dance of death

To revive Indian agriculture from the abyss of low growth and mass suicides, farmers desperately need an income commission as a social security net
Forty years after the dawn of the green revolution, Indian agriculture is once again at crossroads. With agriculture becoming unremunerative over the years, and with input-output ratio faltering, growth in agriculture has decelerated. When forests are destroyed, soil fertility is diminished or water table plummets to dangerously low levels, the rural poor often have no option but to migrate to towns and cities in search of jobs. Such inequitable development is leading to serious social disintegration.
For a country that emerged from the throes of a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence, to be subsequently able to build up food-grain reserves, sustainable agriculture was the unmistaken path to equitable growth, development and national food security. The green revolution technology, which ushered in ‘food self-sufficiency’, however, came with enormous environmental costs. Monoculture, mechanical ploughing, soil erosion, the extension of crops into forests and the use and abuse of chemicals have contributed to the second-generation environmental impacts that the intensively farmed lands of the country are still grappling with.
The green revolution has not only gone sour, it has collapsed. The unexplained number of massive and relentless farmer suicides is testimony to the entire equation going wrong. However, the fundamental issue of destruction of sustainable livelihoods is not being addressed at all.
Village after village across the country are turning into a cesspool of deprivation and mounting indebtedness arising from the blind adoption of intensive farming systems that the government promoted. You don’t come across villages that are not facing a real crisis in sustainability—yields declining drastically, soil gasping for breath, and farmers being pushed out of agriculture. No wonder, villages are being put on sale in many parts of the country.
It isn’t the spate of farmer suicides, on an upswing and still counting, that makes Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admit the magnitude of the agrarian crisis that prevails. The unforeseen slump in agriculture growth rate—slipping between one and two per cent—in turn, has decisively affected the industrial growth rate, which restricted quantum jumps in the national economy. This is what concerns the prime minister.
In what appears to be a desperate move to prop up agricultural growth, the prime minister has, time and again, called for reversing the declining trend in investment in agriculture. Among the measures mentioned are stepping up credit flow to farmers, strengthening future trading and contract farming, creating a ‘single market’ for agricultural produce and providing the latest technology to farmers. Strikingly similar to the faulty Vision 2020 that the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, had unsuccessfully applied (he was consequently routed out in the last elections), the prime minister’s approach is also aimed at compounding the existing crisis in farming.
There is urgent need to draw a national framework under which location-specific alterations and adaptations need to be tried. What is needed is a fresh approach that takes ground realities into consideration before embarking upon any policy imperatives. Unfortunately, the prime minister is fostering on the nation a faulty farm strategy that has failed in the US and Europe, resulting in the eviction of farmers over the years. In the US, only seven lakh farmers now remain on the farm. In Europe, every minute one farmer quits agriculture.
The strategy for reviving agriculture in India has to be different. Citing the reasons of ‘price rise’ and ‘globalisation and liberalisation’, the Left-backed UPA government has spelled out terms of references for the sixth pay commission. Nearly 42 lakh central government employees and two crore state government employees will receive a salary bonanza that will cost the state exchequer more than Rs 1,00,000 crore a year. However, for the 11 crore farming families, all that is being promised is more credit—doubling farm credit in the next three years.
What remains unexplained is that why is the farmer expected to live on credit while the rest of the society is blessed with a fixed monthly income?
No wonder, the suicide dance continues. More than 1,200 farmers in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra have committed suicide (till November 30, 2006) after the prime minister’s Rs 3,750-crore relief package was announced on July 1, 2006. In other parts, the rural landscape remains equally depressing—mounting rural indebtedness, unmanageable glut at the time of harvest and swelling rural to urban migration. With agriculture turning into a highly losing proposition, more than 40 per cent of the farming population has expressed the desire to quit and migrate to urban centres.
Look at the latest report of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). The average income of a farm household in 2003 stood at a paltry Rs 2,115. Compare it with the monthly salary of a peon in government service—an average monthly packet is at least five times more than what a farmer gets. While government employees look forward to a fixed monthly income packet every month and get the benefit of annual increment as adjustment for general price rise, the farmer is left high and dry, at the mercy of the moneylender or the banker.
To make it still worse, farm income all over the world has remained static between 1980 and 2003. Adjusting for inflation, a recent UNCTAD report states that the prices of all major commodities showed a declining trend. The report stated that between 1997 and 2001, the combined price index for all commodities fell by 53 per cent in real terms, thereby “commodities lost more than half their purchasing power in terms of manufactured goods”. In India, the impact has been much more severe. Recurring farmer suicides are a reflection of that.
For nearly 60 per cent of the population, as much as 85 per cent of its earnings comes from crop cultivation and wages earned by family members from employment generation programmes. What is more startling is that over the years, the farm earnings of marginal and poor farmers have dropped to less than that of a daily wage labourer in many parts of the country.
Farmers in Uttar Pradesh have the lowest income—Rs 1,630 per month. Farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Orissa are only a trifle better. The highest farm income was recorded in Jammu & Kashmir—Rs 5,500 a month, followed closely by Punjab and Kerala. Subsequent studies by the union ministry of agriculture point to declining farm incomes in the past five years. Ironically, the sharp decline in farm incomes is happening at a time when urban areas are witnessing an upswing.
Farm income over the years has eroded. Let us accept that, like everyone else, farmers, too, need an adequate monthly take-home package that takes care of their family needs and leaves them with a little surplus to sow the next crop. While government clerks (for that matter, government employees) continue to get the benefit of unwarranted pay hikes, annual increments, medical allowances, paid holidays and financial loans at the drop of a hat, the farmer remains out of bound for all these bounties.
Surviving against all odds, and despite the low earnings, farmers have worked hard to ensure national food self-sufficiency. A healthy and vibrant farm sector will only benefit the national economy. Probably the only way to ensure the economic viability of the farm sector is to either enlarge the scope of the sixth pay commission to include farmers or to set up a separate pay commission for the farmers. Based on minimum land-holdings, and de-coupled from production, there is immediate need to ensure farmers get an assured income.
Like the minimum support price, which was applicable in reality to a few crops, the National Farmers Commission should be entrusted the task to work out a minimum farm income for the farmers. Irrespective of productivity, and depending upon the agro-climatic conditions in which a farm is situated, a formula that entails a ‘minimum take-home’ income for a farmer has to be worked out. Based on that, the government should ensure each farmer gets a monthly remunerative income.
For a country that has been listed by the World Bank as the 12th richest nation in the world, with its GDP touching Rs 35,34,915 crore in 2005, this is the least that needs to be attempted to provide the ailing farm sector a reprieve. For a country that boasts of $160 billion of foreign reserves, wiping out every tear on the farm should be top priority. There is no other way to pull agriculture out from the tragic abyss of the prevailing crisis.
An agricultural scientist, Devinder Sharma is an author and policy analyst specialising in global food and agriculture.

True face of India and hindutuva poltics of BJP

TRUE FACE OF INDIA AND HINDUTUVA POLITICS:

Any crackdown on illegal immigrants abroad or restricting quotas to Indians are a major concern to India’s politicians. The latest statistics from US Department of Homeland Security shows that the numbers of Indian illegal migrants jumped 125% since 2000! Ever wondered why Indians migrate to another countries but no one comes to India for a living? Here are some Indian facts:
Poverty Graph
India accounts for 40 % of the world’s poor (more than in the whole of Africa) and its fiscal deficit is one of the highest in the world. India ranks way down at 96 among 119 developing countries included in the Global Hunger Index (GHI). Ref: IFPRI Country Report on India
Around six out of 10 Indians live in the countryside, where abject poverty is widespread. 34.7 % of the Indian population lives with an income below $ 1 a day and 79.9 % below $ 2 a day. According to the India’s planning commission report 26.1 % of the population live below the poverty line. [World Bank’s poverty line of $1 a day, but the Indian poverty line of Rs 360 a month, or 30 cents a day].
The Current Account Balance of India
“A major area of vulnerability for us is the high consolidated public-debt to GDP ratio of over 70 percent … (and) consolidated fiscal deficit,” says the Governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Mr. Yaga Venugopal Reddy.
According to CIA world fact book, the Current account balance of India is -10,360,000,000 (minus) while China is the wealthiest country in the world with $ 249,900,000,000 (Plus) . India listed as 152 and China as no.1 [CIA: The world fact book]
Human Development vs GDP growth
The Human Development Report for 2007-08 released by the UNDP ranked India 128 out of 177 countries, working it out through measures of life expectancy, education and income. Malaysia ranked 63 and listed at under High Human Development category. The report found that India’s GDP per capita (purchasing power parity) is $3,452, far below Malaysia’s $10,882. China listed as 81. Read the statistics from UNDP website.
Population:
According to the Indian census of 2001, the total population was 1.028 billion. Hindus numbered 827 million or 80.5 %. About 25 per cent (24 million) of those Hindus are belonging to Scheduled Castes and Tribes. About 40 per cent (400 million) are “Other Backward Castes”.
15 per cent Hindu upper castes inherited majority of India’s civil service, economy and active politics from British colonial masters. And thus the caste system virtually leaves lower caste Hindus in to an oppressed majority in India’s power structure. Going by figures quoted by the Backward Classes Commission, Brahmins alone account for 37.17 per cent of the bureaucracy. [Who is Really Ruling India?]
The 2004 World Development Report mentions that more than 25% of India’s primary school teachers and 43% of primary health care workers are absent on any given day!
Living conditions of Indians
89 percent of rural households do not own telephones; 52 percent do not have any domestic power connection. There are daily power cuts even in the nation’s capital. The average brownout in India is three hours per day during non-monsoon months, 17 hours daily during the monsoon. The average village is 2 kilometers away from an all-weather road, and 20 percent of rural habitations have partial or no access to a safe drinking-water supply. [Tarun Khanna, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization]
Around 60 per cent people are not having access to financial institutions in India. This figure is less than 15 per cent in developed countries. (NABARD) According to the National Family Health Survey data (2005-06), only 45 per cent of households in the country had access to improved sanitation.
Education
India has over 35 per cent of the world’s total illiterate population. [UNESCO Education for All Report 2008] Only 66 per cent people are literate in India (76 per cent men and 54 per cent women)
About 40 million primary school-age children in India are not in school. More than 92 % children cannot progress beyond secondary school. According to reports, 35 per cent schools don’t have infrastructure such as blackboards and furniture. And close to 90 per cent have no functional toilets. Half of India’s schools still have leaking roofs or no water supply.
Japan has 4,000 universities for its 127 million people and the US has 3,650 universities for its 301 million, India has only 348 universities for its 1.2 billion people. In the prestigious Academic Ranking of World Universities by Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong, only two Indian Universities are included. Even those two IITs in India found only a lower slot (203-304) in 2007 report. Although Indian universities churn out three million graduates a year, only 15% of them are suitable employees for blue-chip companies. Only 1 million among them are IT professionals.
Health
India today allocates lower than one per cent gross domestic product (GDP) to health. According to United Nations calculations, India’s spending on public health as a share of GDP is the 18th lowest in the world. 150 million Indians are blind. 2.13 per cent of the total population (21.9 million) live with disabilities in India. Yet, only 34 per cent of the disabled are employed [Census 2001] India has the single highest share of neonatal deaths in the world, 2.1 million.
107,000 Leprosy patients live in India. 15.3 % of the population do not survive to the age of forty. Serpent attacks kill as many as 50,000 Indians while the cobra occupies a hallowed place in the Hindu religion. Heart disease, strokes and diabetes cost India an estimated $9 billion in lost productivity in 2005. The losses could grow to a staggering $200 billion over the next 10 years if corrective action is not taken quickly, says a study by the New Delhi-based Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.
There are only 585 rural hospitals compared to 985 urban hospitals in the country. Out of the 6,39,729 doctors registered in India, only 67,576 are in the public sector and the rest either in private sectors or abroad, pointing towards the severity of the problem.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in India. India accounts for one-fifth of the global TB incident cases. Each year about 1.8 million people in India develop TB, of which 0.8 million are infectious cases. It is estimated that annually around 330,000 Indians die due to TB. [WHO India]
Economy under the siege of Elite Hindus
In India, wealth of 36 families amounts to $ 191 billion, which is one-fourth of India’s GDP. In other words, 35 elite Hindu families own quarter of India’s GDP by leaving 85 % ordinary Hindus as poor!
The dominant group of Hindu nationalists come from the three upper castes ( Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas ) that constitute only 10 per cent of the total Indian population. But, they claim perhaps 80 % of the jobs in the new economy, in sectors such as software, biotechnology, and hotel management.
Corruption
According to TI, 25 % of Indians paid bribe to obtain a service. 68 % believe that governmental efforts to stop the corruption as ineffective. More than 90 % consider police and political parties as the worst corrupt institutions. 90 % of Indians believe that corruption will increase within the next 3 years. “Corruption is a large tax on Indian growth, It delays execution, raises costs and destroys the moral fiber.” says Prof. Rama Murthi. Transparency International estimates that Indian truckers pay something in the neighborhood of $5 billion annually in bribes to keep freight flowing. According to Rahul Gandhi, only 5 per cent of development funds reached their intended recipients due to hierarchical corruption in the country! [Financial Times]
Discrimination against Dalits
Crime against Dalits occur every 20 minutes in India. Every day 3 Dalit women are raped, 2 Dalits are murdered and 2 Dalit houses are burnt down! These figures represent only a fraction of actual incidents since many Dalits do not register cases for fear of retaliation by the police and upper-caste Hindu individuals. Official figures show that there are still 0.343 million manual scavengers in India from Dalit community. More than 165 million Dalits in India are simply abused by their Hindu upper castes for their birth! . [HRW Report2007]
Human Rights
When it comes to Human Rights issues in India, it is not ratified the UN Convention against Torture, its citizens do not have the opportunity to find recourse in remedies that are available under international law. The victims are trapped with the local Hindu caste system, which in every aspect militates against their rights.
India has a very poor record of protecting the privacy of its citizens, according to the latest report from Privacy International (PI). India scored 1.9 points, which makes it an ‘extensive surveillance society’. A score between 4.1 and 5.0 (the highest score) would mean a country “consistently upholds human rights standards”. PI is a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations. [Fake encounter killings are rampant in India. This extra judicial killings are inspired by theological texts of Brahmins like Artha Shastra and Manusmriti which teaches espionage and torture methods. Every such killing of an innocent person, branded a terrorist, has encouraged the killer cops to target socially excluded communities like dalits, tribals and minorities.
According to the National Human Rights Commission, as on 30th June 2004, there were 3,32,112 prisoners in Indian jails out of which 2,39,146 were under trial prisoners. That’s more than 70 %. India’s jails hold a disproportionate number of the country’s minority Muslims, a sign of discrimination and alienation from the Hindu majority. The bar association in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, has refused to represent 13 Muslim suspects accused bombing courthouses in 2005 . A large part of police officers, Indian attorneys and judges appear regularly on the events organized by notorious Hindu militant groups. Prison statistics of Indian Jails can be seen from National Crime Record Bureau, here
Minorities
About 20 %, or 200 million, are religious minorities. Muslims constitutes 138 million or 13.4 5, Christians 24 million or 2.3 %, Sikhs 19 million or 2 %, Buddhists 8 million or 0.8 % and Jains 4 million or 0.4 %. “Others” numbered 6.6 million or 0.6 %. According to Mr. Tahir Mahmood, an Indian Muslim journalist, “The 2.3 % Christians in the Indian population cater to 20 % of all primary education in India, 10 % of all the literacy and community health care, 25 % of all existing care of destitute and orphans, 30 % of all the handicapped, lepers and AIDS patients etc”.
Discrimination against Minority Muslims
Recently, Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee report admitted that 138 Million Muslims across India are severely under-represented in government employment, including Public Sector Units. Ironically, West Bengal, a communist ruled state reported 0 (zero) percent of Muslims in higher positions in its PSUs! It has found that the share of Muslims in government jobs and in the lower judiciary in any state simply does not come anywhere close to their population share. The only place where Muslims can claim a share in proportion to their population is in prison! (Muslims convicts in India is 19.1%, while the number of under trials is 22.5%, which exceed their population ratio) . A note sent on January 9 by the army to the defence ministry in 2004 says that only 29,093 Muslims among a total of 1.1 million personnel — a ratio of 2.6 %, which compares poorly with the Muslims’ 13.8 % share in the Indian population. Officially, Indian Army don’t allow head count based on religion.
A Muslim child attends school for three years and four months, compared to the national average of four years. Less than two percent of the students at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology comprise of the Muslim community. According to the National Knowledge Commission member Jayathi Ghosh, ‘there is a need to re-orient official strategies for ensuring better access of Muslim children to schooling outside the madrasas which cater to only four per cent of children from the community.’
Discrimination in Media
Hindu upper caste men, who constitute just eight per cent of the total population of India, hold over 70 % of the key posts across newsrooms in the country. The so-called twice-born Hindu castes dominate 85 % key posts despite constituting just 16 % of the total population, while the intermediary castes represent a meager 3%.
The Hindu Other Backward Class groups, who are 34 % of the total population, have a share of just 4% in the Indian newsrooms. Muslims, who constitute about 13 % of the population, control just 4 % top posts while Christians and Sikhs have a slightly better representation. But the worst scenario emerges in the case of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes /Aborgines (STs): Based on CSDS study, 2006. Ref: The Hindu, June 05, 2006
Discrimination in Judiciary
India’s subordinate courts have a backlog of over 22 million cases while the 21 high courts and the Supreme Court have 3.5 million and 32,000 pending cases (2006). In subordinate courts, over 15 million cases are filed and an equal number disposed of annually by about 14,000 judges! Every year a million or more cases are added to the arrears. At the current speed, the lower courts may take 124 years for clearing the backlog. There were only 13 judges for every million people.
Recently a parliamentary committee blamed the judiciary for keeping out competent persons of downtrodden communities from “through a shrewd process of manipulation”. Between 1950 to 2000, 47% of Chief Justices and 40% of Judges were of Brahmin origin!. Dalits and Indian aborigines are lesser than 20 out of 610 judges working in Supreme Court and state high Courts. “This nexus and manipulative judicial appointments have to be broken, it urged”. [Parliamentary standing committee report on Constitutional Review, Sudarshan Nachiappan]. Among 12 states with high-Muslim population, Muslim representation in judicial sector is limited to 7.8%. (Justice Sachar Report).
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, only 31 per cent criminal trials are completed in less than a year. Some take even more than 10 years. According to its study, Crime in India 2002, nearly 220,000 cases took more than 3 years to reach court, and about 25,600 exhausted 10 years before they were completed. The term of the Liberhan Commission, formed 14 years ago to probe the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya and originally given a mandate of three months, has been extended again!
Discrimination against Children
According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, India has the highest number of street children in the world. There are no exact numbers, but conservative estimates suggest that about 18 million children live and labor in the streets of India’s urban centers. Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta each have an estimated street-children population of over 100,000. The total number of Child labor in India is estimated to be 60 million.
The level of child malnutrition in India is among the highest in the world, higher even than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, says the report ‘Extent of Chronic Hunger and Malnutrition in India’ by the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. While around 25 percent children globally were underweight, in India the number was 43 percent. A quarter of all neo-natal deaths in the world, (2.1 million) occurred in India, says UNICEF Report 2007 . More than one in five children who die within four weeks of birth is an Indian. Nearly fifty percent of Indian children who die before the age of five do not survive beyond the first 28 days.

Discrimination against Women
According to the 2001 census, female literacy in India is 54.16 % against male literacy of 75.85 %. Most of the working women remain outside the organized sector: A mere 2.3 % women are administrators and managers, and 20.5 % professional and technical workers.
There are an estimated 40 million Hindu widows in India, the least fortunate of them shunned and stripped of the life they lived when they were married. It’s believed that 15,000 widows live on the streets of Vrindavan, a Hindu holy city of about 55,000 population in northern India. Many widows - at least 40per cent are said to be under 50 - are dumped by their relatives in religious towns and left to live off charity or beg on the streets. Their plight was highlighted in Deepa Mehta’s award-winning film Water, which had to be shot mainly outside India because of Hindu extremist opposition to the production.
Nearly 9 out of 10 pregnant women aged between 15 and 49 years suffer from malnutrition and about half of all children (47%) under-five suffer from underweight and 21 % of the populations are undernourished. India alone has more undernourished people (204 million) than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined. Nearly 20 % of women dying in childbirth around the globe are Indians. Six out of every 10 births take place at home and untrained people attend more than half of them. 44 % of the Indian girls were married before they reached the age of 18. It added, 16 % of girls in the age group 15-19 years were already mothers or expecting their first child and that pregnancy is the leading cause of mortality in this age group.
On an average one Indian woman commits suicide every four hours over a dowry dispute. During Indian marriage, women should bring jewellery, cash and even consumer durables as part of dowry to the in-laws. If they fail, the victims are burnt to death - they are doused in kerosene and set fire to. Routinely the in-laws claim that the death happened simply due to an accident.
Rape is the fastest growing crime in India. Every hour Indian women face two rapes, two kidnappings, four molestations and seven incidents of cruelty from husbands and relatives [National Crime Records Bureau Report 2006]
Fetus Killing
Women to men ratio were feared to reach 20:80 by the year 2020 as female fetus killing is rampant. Ten million girls have been killed by their parents in India in the past 20 years, either before they were born or immediately after, told Indian Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury to Reuters. According to the 2001 census, the national sex ratio was 933 girls to 1,000 boys, while in the worst-affected northern state of Punjab, it was 798 girls to 1,000 boys. The availability of ultrasound sex-determination tests leads to such mass killings in India.
Around 11 million abortions are carried out in India every year and nearly 80,000 women die during the process, says a report from Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecological Societies of India (FOGSI)
Human Trafficking
Out of the 593 districts in India, 378 or 62.5 % are affected by human trafficking. In 2006, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) sponsored study conducted by Shakti Vahini, found that domestic violence, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty; unsafe migration and child marriage are the major reasons for the increasing rate of illegal human trafficking.
95 % of the women in Madhya Pradesh in commercial sex are due to family traditions. So are 51.79 % in Bihar,’ said the study. While 43 % of the total women trafficked are minors, 44 percent of the women are into flesh trade due to poverty. Of the total women who are into sex work in the country, 60 % are from the lower and backward class, which indicates the pathetic living condition of the communities. In Madhya Pradesh, a political bastion of Hindu right wing party, 96.7 % of the women sex workers are from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.
India has 4 million prostitutes nationwide and 60% of the prostitutes are from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes or other backward caste. UNAIDS says over 38% of those living with HIV in India are women.
High Crime Rate and Communal Riots
India reported 32,481 murders, 19,348 rapes, 7,618 dowry deaths and 36,617 molestation cases in 2006. As far as states are concerned, NCRB has found that Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest number of crimes (1,94,711) followed by Maharashtra (1,91,788), Andhra Pradesh (1,73,909), Tamil Nadu (1,48,972) and Rajasthan (1,41,992) during 2006. According to National Crime Records Bureau, there was 1822602 riots in 2005 alone. [ Incidence Of Cognizable Crimes (IPC) Under Different Crime Heads, concluded, Page 2] NCRB website
On average there are more than 2000 cases of kidnappings per year in India. Under India’s notorious caste system, upper caste Hindus inherited key positions and controls all the governmental branches. Violence against victims largely goes unpunished due to the support of upper caste crooks.
Economic Crimes
Economic Crime continues to be pervasive threat for Indian Companies, with 35 % of the organizations reporting having experienced fraud in the past two years according to PwC Global Economic Crime Survey 2007. Many incidents of fraud are going unreported. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ India findings:
* Corruption and Bribery continues to be the most common type of fraud reported by 20 % of the respondents;
* The average direct financial loss to companies was INR 60 Million (US $ 1.5 million) during the two year period. In addition the average cost to manage economic crime in India was INR 40 Million (US $ 1 Million) which is close to double that of the global and Asia Pacific average;
* In 36% of cases companies took no action against the perpetrators of fraud;
* In 50% of the cases frauds were detected by chance. [PWC Report 2007]
Armed Conflicts in India
Almost every state has separatist movements, many of them armed. A large number of Muslims were killed in the past few years across the country and the numbers are on a steady rise. On top of that India has become a paraya for its neighbours. None of its neighbours appreciate their closeness to India and they all blame it for meddling in their affairs.
63 per cent of India’s new budget will go to the military, police, administration and debt service (2008-09). The military might of centric Hindu elites in Delhi isolated people of Jammu & Kashmir and the northeastern states. It is difficult for any community to feel part of a larger country when the armed forces of the country are deployed to silence them.
According to an Indian official report , 165 of India’s 602 districts — mostly in states like Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh — are “badly affected” by tribal and dalit violence, which government termed as “Maoist terror”. India’s military spending was recorded at US $21.7 billion in 2006 and it planned to spend $26.5 billion during 2008/09 financial year. 85 percent of the Army’s budget is spent on the enormous manpower of 1,316,000, which is the fourth largest in the world.
In 2005, Business Week reported that India became Israel’s largest importer of weapons, accounting for about half of the $3.6 billion worth of weapons exported by the Jewish state.
Booming industry of Terrorism Experts and Security Research Institutes
With the emergence of Hindutva fascist forces and their alliance with neo cons and zionists, India witnessed a sharp increase in the number of research institutes, media houses and lobbying groups. Together they create fake terror stories with the help of intelligence wing, employ their own terror mafia, manipulate explosions in areas of tribals, dalits or minorities. India, incidentally, has bought military hardware and software from Israel worth over $7 billion since the 1991 Kargil conflict. By creating conflicts in this poor country, Brahmin spin masters get huge commission from the sale of weapons to government forces. To them, ‘National Interest‘ simply means ‘Brahmin Interest’. Their lobbying power bring more wealth to their families as jobs, citizenship of rich countries and educational opportunities abroad.
The Defence Offset Facilitation Agency estimating the expenditure on the sector at USD 100 billion for next five years. At least 38 court cases relating to arms agreements are still pending against bureaucrats and military officers. Hindu fascist forces currently enjoy upper hand in media, civil service, judiciary, defence and educational streams of Indian society. Sooner or later, 25,000 strong democratic institutions in India will be collapsed and the country will be transformed to a limited democracy like Turkey or Israel.
Suicides of Farmers and collapse of Agricultural sector
In the last two years, more than 218,000 people across India committed suicide mainly due to poverty, family feud, strained relationship with loved ones, dowry harassment and health problems. In a research by the Indian National Crime Records Bureau, it was noted that suicide cases in the country were registered at 118,112 and over 100,000, in 2005 and 2006, respectively.
Most of those who committed suicide were farmers, and the victims took their lives either by hanging or consuming poison. Aside from farmers, women also topped the list of people in India with suicidal tendencies. Since 1998 about 25 000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because they could not repay their debts. These debts, however, have largely accumulated because these farmers were severely overcharged by their money-lenders asking for up to 32% of interest.
76 per cent of the nation’s land is belonging to 23 per cent of population. More than 15 million rural households in India are landless. Another 45 million rural families own some land, less than 0.10 acre each, which is hardly enough to make them self- sufficient, let alone generate a profit. 340 million people in India are dependent largely on agricultural wage labour, $1 or less a day.[Rural Development Institute (RDI), Washington]
70 per cent of the Indian population still directly depends on agriculture, but growth in this sector declined from a lackluster 3.8 per cent to an even more anaemic 2.6 per cent last year.
Unemployment
Recently, a national report on the employment situation in India has warned that nearly 30 percent of the country’s 716 million-strong workforce will be without jobs by 2020. Government of India doesn’t have the resources or political will to find jobs for such a large population.
Retail trade employs 8 percent of India’s population, the largest employer after agriculture. There are more than 12 million small retailers in India, 96 percent of whom are small mom-and-pop stores, each occupying less than 500 square feet, creating the highest retail-outlet density per capita in the world. [Tarun Khanna, Yale]
Call centers and other outsourced businesses — such as software writing, medical transcription and back-office tasks — employ more than 1.6 million people in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s. Heart disease is projected to account for 35% of deaths among India’s working-age population between 2000 and 2030 says World Health Organization study. That number is about 12% for the United States, 22% for China and 25% for Russia.
Internal Migration and influx to the cities
Mumbai, the commercial capital of India is projected to grow into a city of about 21.9 million by the year 2015 and currently is plagued by vast poverty due to influx from villages. There are 5 million living on the street every night, covered only in newspaper, ” says Dr. Werner Fornos, president of the Global Population Education think tank and the former head of the Population Institute in Washington, D.C.
India is spending more than $400 million (£200m) to polish Delhi’s image as a first-rate capital, a difficult task for a city that seems to exist between the first and third worlds. A third of the capital’s 14 million-plus people live in teeming slums. According to crime statistics of 2006, Delhi continues to be the undisputed ‘crime capital’ of the country for the past 5 years in a row. 35 mega cities in India collectively reported a total of 3,26,363 cognizable crimes in 2006, an increase of 3.7% over 2005. Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore together accounted for more than one-third of all crimes reported in Indian cities having a population of over a million people, for the second year in a row.
India, a closed country
India’s share in world tourism map, was hovering between 0.38% to 0.39% for number of years. Irrespective of its huge area and beautiful nature, the foreign exchange earned from tourism was merely $2.61 billion (2006). India, scored only 4.14 out of seven in The WEF’s recently released Travel and Tourism Competitive Index (TTCI2007). Among 124 countries listed, Switzerland ranked highest while India was placed at 65th rank, which is far below of Malaysia (ranked 31). India was also listed at the bottom of ‘developing and threshold countries’, which listed Tunisia at 34th place.
Indian immigration doesn’t welcome foreigners to visit India . [VISA requirements, T&T index, India ranked 106, while Malaysia ranked 15] . VOA facilities are not available to anyone. The easier entry to India virtually limited to countries with considerable Hindu population like Mauritius or Nepal. The Hindu elite leaders of the country always concerned about India’s physical boundaries and its holy cows rather than the life of its 85 % poor people. To them, the national interest means their own economical or political interests.
Indian Embassies are rated as the worst service providers around the globe. They are notorious for ‘red tapes‘ and ‘ corruption friendly service‘ a complaint repeatedly quoted by Non Resident Indians itself.
Global Warming effects in India
Water tables are dropping where farmers are lucky enough to have wells, and rainfall has become increasingly unpredictable. Economic loss due to global warming in India is estimated between 9-25%. GDP loss may be to the tune of 0.67%. Prediction of loss of wheat is more. Rabi crops will be worse hit which threatens food security. Drought and flood intensity will increase.100-cm sea level rise can lead to welfare loss of $1259 million in India equivalent to 0.36% of GNP. Frequencies and intensities of tropical cyclones in Bay of Bengal will increase. Malaria will be accelerated to an endemic in many more sates. 20% rise in summer monsoon rainfall. Extreme temperatures and precipitations are expected to increase. [Sir Nicholas Stern Report] India got the most foreign aid for natural disaster relief in two decades obtaining 43 such loans of $8,257 million from World Bank alone beating down even Bangladesh and has the 2nd highest loan in the world.
Transportation
Despite the much touted economic boom, only 0.8 percent of Indians own a car most are on foot, motorbikes, or carts. And of all the vehicles sold in India from April to November of last year, 77 percent were two-wheelers – motorcycles, mopeds, or scooters. China has built over 34,000 km of expressways, compared to less than 8,000 km in India. According to Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM), nearly 42o million man hours are lost every month by the 7 million -odd working population of Delhi and NCR who take the public transport to travel to work because of traffic congestion during the peak morning and evening hours. India is having only less than 1% of the world’s vehicle population.
Road Safety
India accounts for about 10 percent of road accident fatalities worldwide and the figures are the highest in the world. Indian roads are poorly constructed, traffic signals, pedestrian pavements and proper signage almost nonexistent. The other reasons are encroachments, lack of parking facility and ill-equipped and untrained traffic police, corruption and poor traffic culture. An estimated 1,275,000 persons are grievously injured on the road every year. Social cost of annual accidents in India has been estimated at $ 11,000. The Government of India’s Planning Commission has estimated there to be 15 hospitalised injuries and 70 minor injuries for every road death.
According to NATPAC, The number of accidents for 1000 vehicles in India is as high as 35 while the figure ranges from 4 to 10 in developed countries. An estimated 270 people die each day from road accidents, and specialists predict that will increase by roughly 5 percent a year. Accidents also cause an estimated loss of Rs 8000 million to the country’s economy. About 80 per cent of the fatal and severe injury occurred due to driving faults. According to World Bank forecasts India’s death rate is expected to rise until 2042 if no remedial action being taken. The number of road accidents in China dropped by an annual average 10.8 per cent for four consecutive years from 2003, despite continuous growth in the number of privately owned cars.
Doing Business in India
It takes 50 days to register a property as compared to less than 30 days in China, and less than 10 days in the United States and Thailand. Average cost of a business start-up is over 60 percent of per capita income, much higher than any of the comparator countries.
India has the highest cost of electricity among major industrialised and emerging economies ($0.8 per kwh for industry as against $0.1 kwh in China), result of the highest transmission and distribution losses in the world, or in other words a quarter of the gross electricity output. Transport costs are very high in India. It accounts for 25% of total import costs as against only 10% in comparator countries. [World Bank Report on India]
Foreign remittance from Non Resident Indians
In 2006, India received the highest amount of remittance globally from migrants, 27 $Billion. Around 20$ billion of this came from the Gulf expatriate workforce. Together, GCC countries are the largest trading partner of India and home of 5 million of Indian workforce. Indian government expects overseas Indians to pump in about US$500 billion into the FOREX reserves of the country in the next 10 years, making them the single largest source of foreign receipts.
Nearly three million people in Africa are of Indian ancestry, and the top three countries having the largest population of Indians are South Africa, Mauritius and the Reunion islands. They also have sizeable presence in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania in the east and Nigeria in the west.
Foreigners Living in India
Historically, about 72 % of the current Indian population is originated from Aryan race. Prominent historians and Dravidians consider Aryans as foreign invaders to India. The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was postulated by eminent Oxford scholar Max Muller in 1882 and later advanced by several western and Indian historians.
Under the current scenario, potential migrants or ‘invaders’ to India include few ‘hired or weird’ Pakistani bombers, villagers around India’s border with Bangladesh, Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka and Indian import of Nepali prostitutes. 92 year old, Indian Painter Maqbool Fida Hussain lives in Dubai after death threats from Hindu militants. According to Hindu extremists Bangladeshi story teller Taslima Nasrin passed all the tests for an Indian citizenship. Italian born Sonia Gandhi , the Christian widow of Rajiv Gandhi is still considered as a foreigner by Hindu elites while Pakistan born Hindu, Lal Krishna Advani is ‘legally and morally fit’ to become India’s next Prime Minister.
Quit India!
Sixty years ago Indians asked the British to quit India. Now they are doing it themselves. To live with dignity and enjoy relative freedom, one has to quit India! With this massive exodus, what will be left behind will be a violently charged and polarized society.
Hindutva’s fake National Pride on India
A 2006 opinion poll by Outlook—AC Nielsen shows that 46 % of India’s urban class wants to settle down in US. Interestingly, in the Hindutva heart land of Gujarat, 54 % of people want to move to US.
Even Parliament members of the Hindutva party are involved in human trafficking from India. Recently police arrested, Babubhai Katara, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP, who was part of such a racket. He received 20,000 US $ per person for US migration from victims.
When Indians are fleeing around the world to find a job, how can this hindutva idiots can claim on “National Pride of India”?
India is the World Bank’s largest borrower, In June 2007 it provided $3.7bn in new loans to India. Due to the fake ‘India Shining’ propaganda launched by Hindutva idiots, foreign donors are reluctant to help the poor people in this country. According to figures provided by Britain’s aid agency, the total aid to India, from all sources, is only $1.50 a head, compared with an average of $17 per head for low-income countries. [Financial Times]
Gridlocked in corruption, greed, inhumanity and absolute inequality - of class, caste, wealth, religion - this is the Real INDIA. Hindutva Idiots, Your false pride and actions make our life miserable.
CONCLUSION:
These problems can be tackled by uniting the working class people.Make them struggle against casteist,pro capitalistic politicians & capitalists and make India a revolutionary country.