India

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:40 pm

CP of India, New Lockdown Guidelines Ignore Suffering Masses: CPI

The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India (CPI) issued the following statement today (on April 15, 2020) on the new lockdown guidelines:

The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India finds that the fresh guidelines issued by the government of India on April 15, 2020, after extending the lockdown till May 3, totally ignores the suffering masses especially the migrant labour and daily wage-earners including para-medical staff in private hospitals. Mere lip service that no one be denied wages is not going to yield any desired result and boost any entrepreneur big or small to get engaged in business activities.

The Party feels that the 20-point guidelines issued by the government do not consider at all the problem of migrant workers and their inability to fetch food and other essential goods. The government should have extended all necessary help, including monetary one as done in most other countries so that both the workers including daily wage-earners and MSMEs get confidence to re-start normal life and work which are the most essential for the country at this time of grave crisis to fight COVID-19 successfully.

The government should immediately ensure adequate financial support for Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGS) so that the rural poor get work and timely payments.

The government must without any further delay declare a financial package, provide adequate medical equipment for protection and treatment, help states in getting adequate food supplies to distribute through PDS free to all needed. The Party demands the government to take all such necessary steps to mitigate the sufferings of the people due to lockdowns.

(Roykutty)

Office Secretary

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-India ... asses-CPI/

********************************************************************

CP of India, Trump Proves A Naked Imperialist Aggressor By Stopping Funds to WHO: CPI

Trump Proves A Naked Imperialist Aggressor By Stopping Funds to WHO: CPI



The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India (CPI) issued the following statement today (April 15, 2020) severely condemning US President Donald Trump’s halting of its share of funding to the WHO:

The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India severely condemns in unequivocal terms the US halting on April 14, 2020, of its share of funding to the World Health Organization. President Donald Trump had the cheek to accuse the global body of mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic. The US, the worst-hit country by far in the pandemic, also the organisation’s biggest funder alleged that “the WHO failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable.”

Reports say Trump further charged that ‘had WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death’.

The Party feels that at this time of global crisis in all sectors of activities and even to human life itself, Trump’s unilateral move of skin-saving for delayed shutdown action by pointing fingers at WHO smacks of being a naked imperialist aggressor against multi-lateral global agency, engaged in global public health activities.

(Roykutty)

Office Secretary

http://solidnet.org/article/CP-of-India ... o-WHO-CPI/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Mon May 18, 2020 11:54 am

Indian unions plan to go on nationwide strike on May 22
05/17/2020

Capital shows its face

Unions will go on strike May 22 to protest the suspension of labor laws. In their view, this violates international obligations under labor standards and human rights.

Image
Strikers in India

The strike will be held on the basis of a joint platform assembled from ten CTUs (Central Trade Union - United Labor Union), who decided to hold protests because of "anti-workers and anti-people protests of the government." This was reported last Friday by the labor organizations themselves. They also reported that they sent a statement to the International Labor Organization (ILO).

“The joint platform took note of the critical situation for the working people of the country during the lockout period and decided to intensify joint actions to solve this problem,” the communique says .

In total, 38 laws were suspended for 1000 days , only section 5 of the Wage Payment Act of 1934, the Construction Workers Act of 1996, the Compensation Act of 1993, and the Bonded Labor Act of 1976 remained in force.
Among those suspended are: On trade unions, On labor disputes, On occupational safety and health , On contract labor, On migrant labor, On equal remuneration, On maternity benefits, etc.

The leadership of several states - Gujarat, Himachal, Pradesh, Haryana, Odish, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Bihar and Punjab - decided to increase working hours from 8 hours to 12 hours. Assam, Tripura and several others are actively preparing for the same.

All this, in the opinion of the trade unions, makes people exist in conditions of slavery, the statement of labor organizations says.
Their requirements include, in particular, immediate assistance to workers who are stuck away from home, the general provision of food for people, and monetary support for all workers.

Plans to take part in the strike: Indian National Trade Union Congress, All India Trade Union Congress, Hind Mazdoor Sabha, Center of Indian Trade Unions, All India United Trade Union Center, Trade Union Coordination Center, Self-Employed Women's Association of India, All India Central Council of Trade Unions, Labor Progressive Federation, United Trade Union Congress . Thus, out of the 12 largest unions, 10 will take part in the strike.

https://www.rotfront.su/indijskie-profs ... yut-vyjti/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 26, 2020 10:24 pm

Millions of Farmers and Workers Protest Across India

Image
Farmers try to get past a barrier that prevents their transit, India, Nov. 26, 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @12Vishalsharma

Published 26 November 2020 (6 hours 4 minutes ago)

Citizens reject new regulations that affect labor rights and favor large agricultural entrepreneurs.


India witnessed on Thursday the march of thousands of farmers to New Delhi and a national strike to which 250 million workers were called.

The states of Kerala, Bengal, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh were the scene of massive demonstrations by farmers against laws that allow large traders to purchase products directly from farmers.

"Instead of guaranteeing prices and bringing security to the market, the Government has created new laws that benefit large companies involved in agricultural trade. This is not what farmers want," said Avril Saha, the secretary of the All India Kisan Sangarsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC).

Until now, farmers sold their harvest in wholesale markets regulated by the authorities. With the new laws, however, the government opens the door for contract farming and deregulation of crop prices.


On Thursday, the Indian Association of Bank Workers (AIBEA) also denounced the privatization of public banking and other laws against workers.

The day of social protests was marked by a strong police presence on the borders between states where the authorities placed barriers to prevent the transit of protesters to New Delhi.

The protests, which have been going on for weeks with road and rail transport blockades, were banned in the capital because of the coronavirus pandemic.

India is currently the world's second most affected country by the pandemic. Up to Thursday morning, its authorities had reported 9.2 million COVID-19 cases.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mil ... -0010.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:29 pm

Marxistindia, Huge Success of Countrywide Protests - PB Congratulates
11/26/20 3:52 PM
India, Communist Party of India [Marxist] En Asia Communist and workers' parties
The Polit Bureau congratulates the working class, peasantry and agriculture workers all over the country for observing very successfully protests against the anti-national, anti-people policies of the Central Government, particularly large scale privatisation and loot of national assests, abrogating labour laws and new agri laws.

The call of the central trade unions was for a nationwide general strike today. The kisan and agricultural workers organisations will continue with their protests tomorrow as well, in accordance with their call.

These successful protests are taking place despite severe repression, intimidation and largescale arrests across the country particularly in BJP ruled states. All the entry points on the highways connecting Delhi were heavily barricaded to prevent kisan and agricultural workers from reaching Delhi for their protest before parliament.

Wherever they were stopped with tear gassing or heavy water cannons in this cold wave conditions, the highways have been blockaded by the protesters.

The general strike called by the trade unions have received immense response all across the country. The strike in public sector undertakings were more effective this time than earlier. All major ports, PSUs like HAL, BHEL, BEML, BEL, steel plants in Vizag, Salem and Bokaro, coal and iron mines, electricity sector, public transport works, road transport including truck operators; construction workers, headload workers, beedi workers and scheme workers like anganwadi, Asha, mid-day meal workers struck work along with medical and sales representatives, sections of IT employees and central and state government employees all across the country.

Kerala witnessed a virtual bandh like situation with an estimated 1.6 crore workers and peasantry participating in the protests. Despite physical attacks on striking workers by the ruling TMC goons in West Bengal, the strike was a big success, total in the jute mills, private bus transport, steel factories and 80 per cent in cement, banking and insurance sectors, apart from government employees. In Tripura, despite the ruling BJP government’s attacks and its directions to keep all establishments open and functioning and resisting attacks by BJP’s anti-social elements, the protest turned into a virtual bandh.

Likewise, in BJP ruled states of Assam, Karnataka, Bihar and elsewhere the protests were a big success.

The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) strongly condemns the repression unleashed by the central and state governments controlled by the BJP.

The central government and PM Modi must now reconsider, in the face of such widespread anger and protest by India’s working people, annadatas, agricultural workers and workers in the unorganised sector, its anti-national and anti-working people policies that are ruining the livelihoods of crores of our people and imposing greater misery in the country.

The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) strongly demands that the central and BJP state governments surrounding Delhi stop this repression and permit our kisan and agricultural labourers to exercise their constitutional guarantees for peaceful protests against the retrograde agri laws tomorrow i.e. November 27.

http://solidnet.org/article/Marxistindi ... ratulates/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 30, 2020 3:20 pm

Image

Over 250 Million Workers Join National Strike in India
November 29, 2020 Editor2 India, Strike, union, Workers rights
26 November, 2020 Despite repression, a joint general strike by workers and farmers has shut down India. Over 250 million workers took part in the 26 November strike.

Indian trade unions condemned the arrests of workers’ and farmers’ leaders across the country as they demonstrate together in one of the biggest ever nationwide general strikes. Indian trade union leaders issued a clarion call to the government to repeal anti-worker labour codes and anti-farmer farm laws as a massive mobilization of industrial and agricultural workers and farmers across the country disrupted normal life across the country, in rural and urban areas.

All over the country, both public and private sector employees participated in the strike. The united front of the over 250 farmers organizations, All India Kisan Sangharsh Co-ordination Committee (AIKSCC), extended support to the trade union strike and the unions extended their support to the farmers’ “Chalo Delhi” (Go to Delhi) mobilization on 26 and 27 November. Farmers are protesting against recent anti-farmer laws which would withdraw the government’s minimum support price for farm products, with serious implications for farmers’ income and livelihoods.

Trade union leaders expressed concerns that, using Covid-19 as an excuse, the government has unleashed widescale repression. Police used violent means to attempt to stop hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers who are on their way to Delhi to demonstrate peacefully in the capital city on 26 and 27 November.

Sanjay Vadhavkar, general secretary of SMEFI and IndustriALL executive committee member said,

“Despite the severe police actions across the country, workers enthusiastically participated in the strike. The recent labour law changes, including the new codes on social security, wages and industrial relations, should be revoked as they fall short of protecting fundamental principles and rights at work.

“On many aspects they go against India’s commitments in the international human rights and labour rights forums. Mishandling of Covid-19 and anti-people economic policies pushed millions into misery. This strike and the joint action with farmers will send a strong message to government demanding workers’ and people-oriented policies.”

Valter Sanches, general secretary of IndustriALL Global union said,

“We condemn the violent means used to stop the democratic expression of dissent. IndustriALL stands in solidarity with the Indian trade union movement and commends their effort in forming a broad-based alliance with famers and agricultural workers against anti-people policies.

“Indian trade unions demands are genuine, especially in today’s situation with high unemployment and job losses, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic ravaging the world, and in particular India. The government should listen to the trade unions and hold genuine dialogue to resolve issues.”

The IndustriALL executive committee, which met online on Thursday 19 November, expressed its full support and solidary with general strike.

The joint trade union charter of demands:

Direct cash transfer of Rs 7,500 (US $101) to all families who earn less than the income tax threshold
10kg free ration per person every month to all in need.
Expansion of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to provide employment from the current 100 days to 200 days work in rural areas with enhanced wages, and extension of this programme to urban areas
Withdrawal of all anti worker labour code changes and anti-farmer laws
Stop privatization of public sector corporations, including those in the finance sector. Stop the corporatization of government-run manufacturing and services entities in railways, ordinance manufacturing, ports and similar areas.
Withdraw the draconian circular of forced premature retirement of government and public sector employees.
Provide a pension to all, restore earlier pension scheme and improve EPS 95.
The joint trade union platform includes central trade unions such as INTUC, AITUC, HMS, CITU, AIUTUC, TUCC, SEWA, AICCTU, LPF and UTUC.

https://orinocotribune.com/over-250-mil ... -in-india/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 11, 2020 2:35 pm

CP of India, Joint Statement - Memorandum
12/10/20 9:37 AM

December 9, 2020

Press Release

Due to restrictions of Covid protocol, only a five-member delegation is permitted to meet the Hon’ble President of India.

More than twenty political parties in the country have extended their support to the ongoing historic farmers’ struggles and asked for the repeal of the retrograde Agri-Laws and the Electricity Amendment Bill.

We are releasing the text of the memorandum submitted by the five-member delegation to the President of India for publication.

******************

To

The Hon’ble President of India

Dear Rashtrapati ji,

More than twenty different political parties, including many parties running state governments, have extended their solidarity with the ongoing historic struggle of the Indian peasantry and extended wholehearted support to their call for a Bharat Bandh yesterday, December 8, demanding the repeal of the retrograde Agri-Laws and the Electricity Amendment Bill.

These new Agri-Laws, passed in the Parliament in an anti-democratic manner preventing a structured discussion and voting, threaten India’s food security, destroy Indian agriculture and our farmers, lay the basis for the abolishment of the Minimum Support Price (MSP) and mortgage Indian agriculture and our markets to the caprices of multi-national agri-business corporates and domestic corporates.

We urge upon you, as the custodian of the Indian Constitution, to persuade “your government” not to be obdurate and accept the demands raised by India’s annadatas.

With regards,

Sd/-

Rahul Gandhi Sharad Pawar

(Indian National Congress) (Nationalist Congress Party)

Sitaram Yechury D. Raja

(Communist Party of India (Marxist) (Communist Party of India)

T K S Elangovan

(Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam)

*******************************************
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 05, 2021 3:52 pm

Farmers’ Protests in India: Fight of a People Against Neoliberalism’s Killing Machine
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 3, 2021
Saheli Chowdhury
Part I | Part II

Image
Photo by Gaon Connection.

Part I

As the demonstrations, strikes and blockades of the national capital of India by hundreds of thousands of farmers and their supporters continue for a month and counting, the stories of their plight and their resilience in the face of utter destruction have even caught the attention of international mainstream media.

The present sit-in demonstrations in New Delhi originated with the ‘March to Delhi’ by thousands of farmers from the north-western state of Punjab that started on November 26, coordinated with the largest strike in human history in which over 250 million participated. Originally called as a farming and industrial strike by trade unions and peasants’ organizations, it turned into a general strike by a people tired of the dire economic situation, increasing polarization along religious lines, and the disastrous fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Incidentally – but it is not a coincidence – November 26 is also the Constitution Day of India, as the constitution of the independent country was adopted on this day in 1949 with the lofty ideals of securing “justice, liberty, and equality” for all the citizens of the country.

The ongoing protests started way back in late September this year, after three controversial farm bills were passed in both houses of the Parliament, including in the Rajya Sabha (Upper House) where the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition led by BJP does not have majority, and the President gave assent to them, thus making them acts – The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020 (FAPAFS), the Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020 (FPTC) and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020 (EC). In spite of the contentions and high stakes surrounding the bills, they were passed in the Parliament in a very irregular manner – through a voice vote, although the Opposition demanded a recorded voting and counting of votes. These three acts aim to deregulate the agricultural sector and open farming and trade of agriculture produce to agribusinesses through contract farming.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declared that these new acts will “liberate” the country’s farmers and will ensure that agriculture becomes a more “remunerative enterprise” for them as they can bargain for better prices, but therein lie a number of problems. The three acts are very unbalanced in terms of power as they posit poor – and in many cases landless – farmers, a majority of them barely literate, against powerful national and transnational corporations. Another major problem is that nowhere in the acts is any assurance provided for ensuring the government-declared minimum support price (MSP) to farmers by those corporations; this on top of the fact that the MSP provided by the government itself is already flawed. Another concern regarding the new laws is the proposal of leasing lands from small farmers to agribusiness firms and pooling of such plots to convert them into large farms and cultivate them with modern technology. With land reform in India a largely incomplete task, it is feared that this will lead to large-scale landlessness and impoverishment of the countryside. According to last available census (2011), there are about 495 million landless people in India who are largely dependent on agriculture – working as farm labourers or share-croppers (cultivating in lands owned by others). If the abovementioned proposal is implemented, it will eviscerate whatever earnings and security these people can manage at present, leaving them entirely at the mercy of corporates. Hence it is not without reason that the country’s farmers are afraid that the new farm laws will usher in a new “Company Raj”, referring to the colonial times.

Adding to all this, by abolishing the upper limit on storage of essential commodities by individual distributors (businesses dealing with transport and distribution of food, medicine, and fuel, owners of storage facilities and the like) as mandated by the Essential Commodities Act (1955), the new amendment to that act will lead to the very dangers that the original act was adopted to avoid – hoarding, black-marketing, and food insecurity.

Nothing new under the sun

In June this year, when the government first publicized the said acts as an ordinance (thus bypassing the parliament, with the excuse that parliamentary sessions had been cancelled due to COVID), the Prime Minister declared the acts to be the need of the 21st century, and said that in view of the farming crisis, governments are entitled to try to find new ways to alleviate it. “If it had not happened in the past, why not try now?” he said, referring to contract farming which, according to the government, is a new way forward.

However, neither agrarian crisis nor contract farming are new things in India. Crisis in the agrarian economy is a historical facet of India, far older than the idea of Indian nationality itself. Throughout the monarchical periods in the country there was a continuous rural crisis because of drainage of wealth from the countryside and its concentration in the hands of a minority – the ruling elite – in the urban centers. This is also the core idea of neoliberalism. Even before India had opened its economy to neoliberalism in 1991, there was never any large-scale state support for agriculture, except nationalization of the fertilizers and pesticides industry (now mostly denationalized in favor of multinationals like Monsanto or Syngenta) and planning and support of the Green Revolution. The Zamindari Abolition Act of 1950 (to end the feudal structure of land ownership) was not implemented properly in most parts of the country, and extensive land reforms to give land title deeds to farmers was carried out only in a handful of states. And since the beginning of the neoliberal period, the general consensus of the administration is that free market is freedom and state support is slavery.

Similarly, contract farming has existed as long as the rural crisis, not only through bonded farmers or debt bondage in the feudal system but also with indentured farmers and farm laborers in the infamous Girmit system (distortion of the English word ‘agreement’) of the British colonial power. It was nothing but a “refinement” of slavery by which thousands of farmers were transferred – under false promises – from their homes to other parts of the country and also to other British colonies like Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago. In independent India, contract farming was introduced with state support in 1988 when the Pepsi Project was launched in Punjab with the objective to bring about a second Green Revolution through diversification of farming (moving away from cultivation of rice and wheat to vegetables and also cash crops). A joint venture of Pepsi, Voltas and the Punjab Agro Industries Corporation (a state enterprise), the project disillusioned most of the farmers associated with it and even its initial supporters by the mid-1990s. Yet, after all that, in 2002 the then government of Punjab launched a state-sponsored contract farming scheme through the Punjab Agro Foods Corporation (PAFC), which ended in failure and was scrapped in 2012. Prof. Sukhpal Singh of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Hyderabad wrote about the Pepsi Project, which is true for all corporate agribusiness projects in general: “…there was hardly any incentive for growers to stay with the company as they bore the entire risk while it was the companies that had the insurance against them [risks like crop losses to droughts, floods, pest infestations]…While the contract gave the company the right of refusal to pick up a contracted produce, growers were liable to be penalized if they defaulted from their commitment…Could a contract that was loaded against the growers promote partnership between them and the company and serve the very purpose of the project?”

The fact that such contracts are made on a very unequal playing field is borne out by testaments of farmers from various states who have suffered losses from contract farming – from the contracting agribusiness firms falsely downgrading the produce (branding the produce ‘of low quality’) to cheat farmers of their income, to farmers earning a fraction of the market price because the predetermined payment agreed upon in the contract was much lower than the market price during the harvest season, to farmers being unable to take the contractors to court in case of disagreements because the contracts expressly forbade it. In my own state, West Bengal, after the removal of upper limit to storage of food crops by individual distributors (same thing proposed by the new amendment to the Essential Commodities Act), owners of storage facilities bought rice and potatoes from farmers at meagre prices and later, during procurement by the state government for the public distribution system, sold those crops to the government at MSP, thus denying the real farmers from receiving government benefits. The new farm acts would only legalise these things on a national level. Also, farmer leaders are afraid that in case of losses, defaulting farmers may be forced by agribusiness companies to sell their land – the new farm laws would “liberalise” farmers from their livelihood, or turn them into bonded labourers in their own lands.

While proposing the farm bills, the government claimed that the majority of the small, marginal and landless farmers of the country, who constitute about 86% of the country’s farmers (close to 126 million people), find agriculture unviable because most of the times the prices of their produce do not even cover the cost of production. However, this did not just happen for no reason. On the contrary, says journalist P. Sainath, former editor for rural matters of the English language newspaper The Hindu and founder of the rural news website People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), who has been covering news of rural India for forty years and is considered a reference on rural matters, the destruction of the agrarian economy has been deliberate: “If agriculture has become unviable, (it is because) we have spent a lot of time and effort making it unviable.”

He is totally correct. Since the economy was deregulated in 1991 and markets were opened up for multinational corporations to sell seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and agricultural equipment at prices they fixed, agriculture became unsustainable for small and marginal farmers and landless farmers who constitute the bulk of the country’s farming population. The credit system from public banks available to the farmers was increasingly diverted to the corporate financial institutes that came with large interest rates on the loans they provided, resulting in farming families accumulating huge loans that they were unable to pay back, and when they were pressurized to return the unpaid loans, they had nothing to do but to turn to moneylenders – who are also the powerful village and small town middlemen owning storage facilities and transport networks. All these have resulted in rising indebtedness and economic ruin of the traditional farming communities and decimated the agricultural sector of the country over the last thirty years. Even by the government’s own report, although about 60% of the country’s working population are in farming and allied occupations, the share of the agricultural sector in India’s GDP was only 16.5% in 2019, and farmers’ incomes have remained stagnant or have declined in most parts of the country (Taking into account the fall in the value of the currency over the years, it may be safely said that real incomes have declined). From 1991 to 2011 (the last year when national census was published) the population of full status farmers – persons engaged in agriculture for a minimum of 180 days a year – fell by 15 million, and we do not know how many more got added to that number since then. These people – many with entire families – migrated to the urban centers, looking for jobs that weren’t there. Depression caused by economic hardship has forced close to 330,000 farmers to take their own lives, according to data provided by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), with last year seeing over 10000 suicides by farmers. However, these numbers are grossly underestimated and fraught with several problems. It has been alleged that governments – both at the center and in a number of states – have changed the definition of farmer and the methodology of counting after 2013 because the numbers had become embarrassing. Some states, West Bengal for example, have started not to mention the occupations of people who have taken their lives; some others use the all-encompassing term “daily wager” to aggregate all daily wage earners without specifying their occupations. Finally, suicides of women farmers are severely underreported in these data, because although women from farming families do more than two-thirds of the job in the fields, most of them are not considered ‘farmers’, as only about 8% of women farmers possess land titles, and most of these women themselves report themselves as ‘housewives’. Hence, discussions on the plight of women due to the rural distress get centered around widows of male farmers, fatherless daughters, mothers who have lost sons, and rarely about women as farmers themselves.

Moreover, the rural crisis is not limited to agriculture only, it is much more than that. As P. Sainath has explained multiple times, the entire agrarian economy is suffering a profound crisis. After agriculture, the largest employer in India in terms of the number of workers is the handicrafts and handlooms sector constituted by weavers, potters, carpenters, honey collectors and other allied occupations, and agriculture-related occupations in small towns like brick-kilns, stone quarries, and cottage industries, the last one being predominantly run by women. This too is a rural sector and is intimately related to the farming sector, farmers being the primary consumers of these industries. When the agricultural sector was deliberately dismantled under neoliberal directives and farmers went bankrupt and left farming in droves, the primary market of these occupations was lost and the entire rural economy collapsed. Those who were engaged in these allied occupations and took their lives were never included in the data of farmer suicides; a fact that has led some to estimate that the data provided by NCRB represent only about 26% of the actual number of people who have committed suicide under stress from the rural economic destruction.

This collapse was quite an open secret but was carefully guarded and camouflaged by a subservient media for years until COVID-19 exposed it. When the Prime Minister announced a nationwide lockdown on March 24 and gave a country of 1.37 billion only four hours to prepare for an indefinite period of uncertainty (at that time lockdown was declared for 21 days but was later extended several times), panic rose and migrant workers all over the country began their long march back to their villages. As thousands of people – including women, children and elderly – were walking hundreds of kilometers or taking whatever transportation they could including trucks and trailers (public transport was shut down), their plight attracted the consternation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and even the mainstream media had to report it and the rural crisis entered the general urban middle-class consciousness.

Initially the government had adopted stern measures to prevent the movement of migrant families back to their places of origin although many of them had been expelled from their rented homes, most had no savings to speak of, and the government had not arranged any meaningful help to alleviate their distress. After news of deaths of migrants due to exhaustion, hunger or illness in different parts of the country led to huge uproar, the national government arranged some special trains from May 1 so that migrant families could return to their native regions, although the trips were neither free nor subsidized – in many cases the migrants themselves had to pay the fares, while in other cases some state governments, social organizations or citizens’ groups paid them. Then, in the Parliament’s monsoon session in September, the government caused even more outrage by declaring that they had no information on migrant deaths and hence no compensation would be paid to the victims’ families; however it was admitted that over 10 million people had returned from cities to their villages. Even this number is debatable, according to journalist P. Sainath, because the method of collection of migration data (used in the census) including the definition of migrants is flawed, as rural to rural migration, seasonal migrants (during harvest seasons) and ‘footloose migrants’ (people who are always on the move, doing odd jobs here and there) are never considered properly. It is as if these people do not exist, neither for the purpose of the census nor in the government’s COVID-19 response. He does not mince his words while detailing the human cost of India’s COVID response, especially the disastrous effect of the unplanned lockdown on the migrants, India’s poorest of the poor: “The media and the urban middle classes are agonized and all asking this question – ‘Oh, why are they going back to their villages? You know, we’re all such lovely people here how could they possibly think of leaving us?’ While the question they should have asked is – Why did they leave their villages in the first place?” Trying to answer that question brings us back to the destruction of the agrarian economy.

But the story of rural destruction is not entirely about despair and demoralization. From neoliberalism’s killing fields some historic protests have arisen over the years, organized by farmers and agricultural workers and their allies including trade unions, women’s organizations and students’ organizations. Almost two decades ago, during 2002-03, widespread rural discontent due to economic crisis was instrumental in the formation of the first United Progressive Alliance government (UPA-I) in 2005 that had to adopt measures like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) promising an average of at least 100 days work a year in rural areas for each worker who signed up for that scheme (no state has been able to reach that mark till date) and the Forest Rights Act recognizing the rights of traditional forest dwellers, in order to mitigate the rural crisis. However, these measures were only small relief in a neoliberal economic structure. In the second decade of this century, the turning point in farmers’ movements arrived in June 2017 with the formation of All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), a platform that now includes over 300 organizations of farmers and agricultural workers. Since then AIKSCC has organized a number of prominent large-scale farmers’ movements in the country, including marches to the national capital. The largest mass engagement movement since independence was undertaken by AIKSCC through the four-phase Kisan Mukti Yatra in 2017 which concluded with a million farmers protesting in Delhi in November 2017 – an event that saw an unprecedented level of solidarity and coalition among farming and non-farming communities and bridging of the urban-rural divide. In March 2018 the AIKSCC organized one of the most iconic farmers’ agitations in recent times – the seven-day long Kisan Long March from Nasik to Mumbai in the state of Maharashtra, the state that has experienced the highest number of farmer suicides in the country. The march attracted the attention of a number of mainstream media outlets (that usually ignore or denigrate working class movements) as the march saw massive participation of women and tribal farmers, many of whom walked barefoot. The concluding demonstration in Mumbai drew wide support from diverse sections of the city’s society including the famous Dabbawallahs of Mumbai (people who supply afternoon lunch and snacks to workers in thousands of offices in the city and its suburbs), employees of banks and other offices, and women from even upper middle-class households. The same year, in November, thousands of farmers joined the Kisan Mukti March (Farmers liberation march) and reached Delhi demanding a 21-day special parliamentary session to discuss the agrarian crisis, another agitation that received huge intersectional support (Unfortunately the government was able to divert attention towards Pakistan and national security issues as the Pulwama terror attack occurred within less than three months after this). Apart from these, there have been several protests in various states with local demands. And now, the latest round of protests in Delhi, with over 300,000 farmers and agricultural workers belonging to about 500 organizations and their supporters blocking all roads to the national capital and more people arriving every day, is an addition to that tradition.

Image
Women raise slogans during their protest against the farm laws in Bathinda, Friday, Oct. 16, 2020. Credit: PTI Photo

Part II

The present situation

The protests began on September 23 as thousands of farmers and agricultural workers of Punjab started blocking railways and major roads in protest against the three farm bills that had been presented in the Parliament at that time. Protests also started in the neighboring state of Haryana spearheaded by the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), one of the leading organizations of AIKSCC, which the state administration tried to repress severely, even imprisoning leaders on false charges. Two months later, on November 26, farmers from Punjab started their “March to Delhi”, and on the way they were to be joined by protestors from the neighboring states. As they tried to enter Haryana they were stopped by police barricades on the bridge between the two states, and tensions escalated as Haryana police used tear gas and water cannons on the farmers on the cold winter morning. The farmers, who had come equipped with tractors, trucks and road-rollers, finally managed to break through the barricades and continue on their way. As they reached the outskirts of Delhi, where the first rallies of farmers and farm workers from Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh had arrived, they again faced police, paramilitary, barricades, barbed wires, trenches, tear gas and water cannons, causing some to comment that Delhi was appearing more heavily guarded than the India-Pakistan border. The Home Ministry even wanted the state government of Delhi to turn over the stadiums under its jurisdiction to be converted to temporary jails to detain the protesting farmers, which was turned down, with the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal declaring that “the farmers are not terrorists”. Finally, after a lot of tussle and threats, the protestors were allowed to start their demonstrations at “designated sites”. Since then, hundreds of thousands of farmers and their allies have been blockading all major roads to Delhi, braving the cold wave that has gripped entire northern India, and their numbers are swelling every day as new people are joining. There are women and children also, though much smaller in number compared to the men.

Despite provocations, the protests continue to be peaceful. At all the protest sites in and around Delhi, the protesting farmers have built “cities within a city”, complete with tents, community kitchens, food banks, solar panels, water geysers to combat the cold, toilets, libraries, and other necessities and amenities of life. There are also primary medical clinics run by real doctors, and an ambulance service. All this has been the result of community organizing as NGOs, local residents, students’ organizations, organizers of local gurdwaras and mosques have participated in the construction of these “cities” and are providing help and funding, like they had done for the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protestors last year and earlier this year. Sikh organizations from around the world have provided funds too, according to various reports. The farmers had already come equipped with stocks of food to last two months, six according to some reports, and their stocks are continuously being replenished by their allies both in the city and in their native places. There continues to be huge police presence around the protesting farmers’ camps, trying to “separate” the city from these “cities” and to “maintain law and order”. However, according to some reports, local residents carrying food or clothing for the protestors are being allowed to drive upto the edge of these “cities”.

On December 8 a national strike was called by trade unions and social organizations in solidarity with the protesting farmers. Recently, farmers have also started a relay hunger strike at various protest sites around Delhi. Farmers and agricultural workers of far-flung states in the south and the east who have been unable to go to the national capital due to curbs on movement for the pandemic, have been organizing in their home states. By now hundreds of protests have occurred all over the country. In the southern state of Kerala, organizations pertaining to the platform of AIKSCC started a protest on December 12, to be continued indefinitely. On December 16, over 50,000 farmers rallied to Kolkata, the state capital of West Bengal, in support of the farmers protesting in Delhi, and the rally was joined by students’, women’s and youth organizations and the Left parties of the state. On December 20, close to 2000 farmers from Maharashtra under the banner of AIKS started a march to join their counterparts in Delhi. On December 26 they were stopped at Shahjahanpur at the Rajasthan-Haryana border by the Haryana state police, and since then they have been organizing a sit-in demonstration on the highway.

The demonstrations have not been without losses, either. Until the time of writing this, thirty-three protestors lost their lives due to cold, exhaustion, illness and accidents, including a religious leader who took his own life as he “failed to tolerate the plight of the farmers”. Homage was paid to them all over the country on December 20. These incidents have only strengthened the resolve of the protestors.

The government and the BJP, for their part, have tried to undermine the protests and malign the protestors by calling them ‘anti-nationals’, ‘terrorists’, ‘separatists’, and declaring that the protests have been ‘infiltrated by the far-Left’ and ‘paid by Pakistan’, like they did in case of all previous protests in the country, but this time these moves have been mostly ridiculed. Trying to fracture the protests along religious lines has failed too. The subservient media also has drawn the ire of the protestors for peddling government propaganda, with demonstrators at multiple sites displaying posters naming and shaming the media houses. Some volunteers have started a bilingual biweekly newspaper named “Trolley Times” to cover the protests (trolley means modified tractors).

Until now, multiple talks between the protest leaders and the government have failed, as the government continues to stubbornly cling to the farm laws and only wishes to tolerate some “amendments” to them, while the protesting farmers demand a complete rollback. The general secretary of the AIKS and a leader of the organization in West Bengal, Hannan Mollah, who is present in Delhi, has expressed his irritation over the “insincerity” of the government and its “complete refusal to listen to the country’s farmers”. “They are probably thinking that if enough time passes we will get tired and the protest will dissipate,” he said. “But this time we are not returning until our demands have been met.” Several demonstrators at different protest sites have expressed similar sentiments. “We will remain here until 2024 (time for the next parliamentary election) if the need arises,” reiterated a protestor at a site at the Delhi-Haryana border.

State governments headed by non-BJP parties, for their part, have tried to adopt positions against the farm laws. A number of states have declared that they will not implement the laws, citing the constitutional provision that agriculture is a state subject. The government of Punjab became the first in the country to pass bills against the laws at the state legislative assembly. The Legislative Assembly of Delhi passed a resolution against the laws in a special session of the assembly on December 17, during which the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tore copies of the laws in a show of solidarity with the protestors. The government of Kerala tried to convene a special session of the state legislature to adopt a resolution against the said laws, but the governor of the state (who is a representative of the central government in essence) has denied permission for it. It is expected that the government will pass a resolution in the regular session scheduled for January if unable to convene a special session. Along similar lines, the Supreme Court of India, on December 17, refused to allow the central government to evict the protestors, declaring that the right to protest peacefully is a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution of the country.

The demands and the reasons

The demands articulated by the protestors are simple: repeal of the three farm laws and the amendment to the electricity law (that seeks to remove subsidies to electricity used for agricultural purposes), and assuring the minimum support price (MSP) to farmers as recommended by the National Commission of Farmers – better known as the Swaminathan Commission (after the renowned agro-scientist who headed it). The commission had presented its report in 2004 but none of the successive governments has discussed it in the Parliament. The ruling party and the national government have flip-flopped, failed, and outright lied about the implementation of the MSP. In fact, the MSP issue has been a catalyst for the current protests. In 2014, on the campaign trail for the parliamentary election, BJP (at that time in the Opposition) had promised that if they came to power they would implement the major recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission within twelve months. Within twelve months of coming to power, they informed the courts that those recommendation could not be implemented because that would lead to “distortion in market prices” [of crops]. In 2016 the then Agriculture Minister denied ever having made any promise like that; in 2017 the government discarded the Swaminathan Commission in favor of the “Madhya Pradesh model” (a model that led to huge protests and police firing on protestors in the state in 2017), and in 2019 the then Finance Minister lied and said that the government had already implemented the MSP recommendation. What they did implement was nothing but a manipulation of the original recommendation. On top of that, only a tiny fraction of the country’s farmers – 6% according to government data – receive that MSP.

There is also a demand for convening a special session of the parliament dedicated to the agrarian crisis, similar to what was demanded by the Kisan Mukti March two years ago. Another demand that is expected to come up in the course of the movement is the waiver of farm loans and making a better agricultural credit system available to farming families – preferably through public or cooperative banks, because in this case also the government does not have a good record. When agricultural debt waiver schemes were announced, those came with a lot of conditions that deprived most farmers from accessing the schemes, while the bulk of the compensations went to banks and agribusinesses and not to the agriculturists themselves.

At the Kolkata rally on December 16, a middle-aged man, a potato farmer from Hooghli district (famous for potato cultivation and also infamous for farmer suicides in recent years), expressed his apprehensions to me: “The PM says that we can sell our produce to anyone anywhere in the country. Very well. Now tell me, who has both the money and the means to do that? I don’t own a truck, not even a matador (smaller vehicle for carrying goods). Neither am I able to rent one, it costs a lot – and then you know the price of petrol (gasoline), diesel – rising every day. If I get the news that some company is buying potato at a high rate in Tamil Nadu (state in the extreme south), can I take my product and go there? No. But the cold storage owner can – and it will be he, and people like him, who will benefit from the new laws. He will buy potatoes dirt-cheap from us, and go and sell it at higher prices elsewhere, because he has the means to do that.” This is exactly what P. Sainath means when he says that the new farm laws will only strengthen the grip of the middlemen on Indian farmers, and is exactly what is already happening in West Bengal, Bihar and many other states.

A friend of mine, a college student who hails from a family of rice cultivators in East Bardhaman district (called the ‘granary of Bengal’ for its role in rice production, and the region worst affected by farmer suicides in the state), adds to this: “It will be very much like the Jio thing (referring to the telecommunications company Reliance Jio owned by the billionaire Mukesh Ambani). Just like they first achieved a near monopoly by offering cheap rates (on calls and internet), and now that they have the market under control, they are increasing prices and even dictating the country’s telecom policies, similarly the corporates will offer good rates on crops for two-three years and then they will control even what we eat.” He is not wrong, especially given the fact that Reliance already engages in contract farming in parts of the country and has expressed support for the new farm laws, together with the Adani Group that wishes to “tap into the country’s agribusiness potential”. With their declarations the reality that it is the corporations that are running the government is exposed by now, which led farmers and others to brand the current government ‘Ambani-Adani government’ and call for a boycott of products of those companies.

At the same time, many scholars and activists have pointed out that when the largest capitalist economies like the United States and countries of the EU provide billions of dollars in subsidies to their agricultural sectors, why should the agricultural economy of India be liberalized to corporate interests? In the present situation the farm laws that are needed should have looked very different from the ones that the government has delivered.

But what about the pandemic? Are the protestors – by now numbering a few hundred thousand – sitting on roads in and around Delhi for a month and will be sitting indefinitely, not afraid of contracting the infection and dying? “We are already dying,” retorted some protesting farmers to the Delhi police personnel who had tried to warn them of COVID. “If we do not die of the virus we will surely die of poverty.” Many have expressed similar sentiments, hailing the current uprising against the farm laws as a battle for the lives of common Indians. It may sound extreme, but it is true as the new acts would also lead to widespread food insecurity, for they are very likely to disrupt the already weak public distribution system (PDS), according to apprehensions expressed by the renowned economist Prabhat Patnaik and D. Raja, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI). India has consistently slid down the Global Hunger Index (in spite of neither experiencing war nor economic sanctions) and is placed much behind its poorer neighbors in the subcontinent. Calculations of food availability and consumption data show that both per capita food consumption and per capita food availability have decreased during the neoliberal era, falling below the same for 1960s or ‘70s, prompting some economists to conclude that India is living through an invisible famine. The recently released National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data paints a dismal picture of chronic malnutrition and wasting in especially women and children, and it has to be kept in mind that the data of the survey was collected before the pandemic; the next phase of the survey (to be conducted in 2021) is expected to show a worse image. Moreover, in the last few decades India has experienced an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a minuscule corporate elite, with the top 10% of the population owning 77% of the national wealth. In 2017, 73% of all wealth generated in the year went to the richest 1%, while the poorest half of the country (67 million people) had only 1% increase in their wealth. All this results in the situation that close to 800 million people have to depend on the public distribution system – “rations” as it is called in India – for food grains and edible oil (number provided by the government of India in its first pandemic package). This system has already been dismantled continuously over the last three decades. With the proposed dilution of the government’s procurement markets (APMCs) as mentioned in the new farm laws, it is feared to collapse entirely.

This fear is not an exaggeration, say the people suffering acutely from the situation. “We, the growers, are also consumers of food,” explained a coordinator of the AIKSCC in my district, South 24 Parganas (West Bengal). “A single person cannot cultivate all types of crops. Many of us do not even cultivate food grains (main constituent of our diets) or vegetables; some grow cash crops which are not even food (like cotton), so most of us are net purchasers of food items in the market. We are the ones being harmed both ways – we get next to nothing on our produce as most of the times we are forced to sell at a loss, and then when we try to buy what we need the high prices send most things out of our reach.”

The rural crisis is no longer limited to the countryside, it has become a social crisis now, a national crisis. Hence, as P. Sainath says, “It is time for non-farmers to stand up” – to stand with the farmers of the country.

Saheli Chowdhury is a millennial from West Bengal, India, studying physics for profession but with a passion for writing. She is interested in history and popular movements around the world, especially in the Global South. She works for Orinoco Tribune.

SC/OT

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/01/ ... g-machine/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 20, 2021 2:13 pm

Image
A 'Nihang' holds the Tricolor during farmers' tractor rally as part of their ongoing protest against the new farm laws, at Dankaur in Gautam Buddha Nagar District, Thursday, Jan. 07, 2021. PTI

The patriots

Posted Jan 20, 2021 by Prabhat Patnaik
Human Rights , Inequality , Labor , State Repression India Newswire Corporate-Hindutva alliance , Farmers , Food Crops , Modi government
Originally published: Telegraph India (January 13, 2021) |
We are witnessing a bizarre situation. One comes across instances where consumers want growing of food crops for supplying to the public distribution system, while producers, lured by the apparent gains of shifting to cash crops, are reluctant to do so. The government has to mediate between these conflicting interests. But in India at present, the farmers have no desire to shift from food crops, even as consumers want food crops to be supplied through the public distribution system. There is no conflict of interest among them that the government has to mediate between. And, yet, it is imposing a shift on farmers from food to cash crops that would destroy the public distribution system.

Such a shift is precisely what the agricultural legislations aim to bring about. Government economists defending the laws have been emphasizing the benefits of such a shift. The government here is not mediating in a conflict of interests among the people; it has, apparently, its own interest, which it is imposing on the people, on farmers and consumers alike, against which the farmers are agitating in the bitter cold of Delhi. It is a bizarre case of government versus the people at large, not people versus people.

Likewise, the farmers are unanimous in rejecting contract farming; and, yet, the government is pushing contract farming through these bills, ostensibly in the farmers’ interest. Again, it is a case not of the government responding to the demand from any section of the people; it has apparently its own interest which it is imposing on the people.

But what could be its own interest? While it is obvious that its own interest coincides with the interest of corporates and international agribusiness, the government’s answer would be that it is upholding the ‘national interest’. Corporate interest is thus identified with ‘national interest’. This has been the hallmark of the Narendra Modi regime, and it is symptomatic of the Corporate-Hindutva alliance of which Modi is the architect and which keeps him in power.

The bizarreness of the situation is this: even right-wing governments justify their pro-corporate policies by claiming to defend the interest of some section of the people. Margaret Thatcher’s attack on trade unions was defended by her as a means of controlling inflation that trade unions allegedly caused and that hurt large masses of the people. But in India we are seeing the unilateral and gratuitous imposition of a set of measures that no segment of the people has ever demanded, measures that portend the dismantling of the public distribution system, which is opposed by people at large, and against which vast numbers are vehemently protesting; all this just to promote corporate interest. This is unprecedented in a democracy.

The government will claim that since it won the 2019 parliamentary elections, it has the mandate to bring in the ‘reforms’ it wants. But this is erroneous for several reasons. First, it is wrong in principle: winning an election does not give the government the mandate to do whatever it likes. Second, this is especially so because the 2019 elections were not fought on the issue of ‘agricultural reforms’. In fact, these reforms never figured in the ruling party’s electioneering, which focused on the Pulwama attack and the Balakot air-strikes. Third, there has been a commoditization of politics where even having a majority in the legislature has lost much significance.

Fighting elections itself has become extraordinarily expensive. Causing defections from the opponents before elections has become common and is also expensive. And no matter who wins the election, defections are engineered from other parties for a price to get the required majority to form the government. For all these reasons, the party with the largest amount of money has a clear edge over the others; and since the corporates are the main source of such money, forging an alliance with them becomes essential for coming to power for which they have to be offered a quid pro quo. Hindutva forces, with their communal-polarizing agenda and corporate financial backing, can exercise hegemony in such a world of commoditized politics. The quid pro quo offered to them includes, inter alia, control over peasant agriculture.

While corporates as a whole gain from such ascendancy, one segment among them, an upstart segment, usually gains more than the other, more established, segments. Daniel Guérin (Fascism and Big Business) had shown that in Germany in the 1930s, a segment of monopoly capital, engaged in producing armaments and producer goods, had become special beneficiaries of the corporate alliance with the Nazis compared to the older segment engaged in textiles and consumer goods. In Japan, new houses, the shinko zaibatsu, benefited more than older houses like Mitsui from the fascistic regime that came to power in 1931, with which the corporates had close relations. While contemporary India is different from 1930s Germany or Japan, a similar privileging of a segment of new corporate houses can be detected here too. This is attracting the special ire of the farmers.

Modi prepared the ground for identifying corporate interest, especially the interest of this nouveau segment, with the national interest by calling the corporates “wealth creators”. He meant the ‘nation’s’ wealth. By this description alone, he raised amassing private wealth into a national service, and those who amassed such wealth into privileged members of the ‘nation’ whose interest deserved the highest priority. It followed that all segments of the population must be made to accede to the demands of these upstart corporates; it is in the interest of the population itself, as wealth-amassing by these corporates supposedly benefits all.

The Modi government has thus inverted the concept of the ‘nation’, from an entity identified with the people to one identified with the corporates, especially the nouveau corporates. The agriculture bills give expression to this inversion.

This, however, constitutes a betrayal of our anti-colonial struggle. The concept of the ‘nation’ that had developed in Europe in the wake of the Westphalian Peace Treaties in the seventeenth century had been imperialist, non-inclusive (it had located an “internal enemy”), and, supposedly, deserving of apotheosis by the people who were only supposed to make sacrifices for it. By contrast, anti-colonial nationalism in countries like India was a very different sui generis, phenomenon. It saw the nation as being inclusive, of which secularism was an integral part; and it saw the raison d’être of the nation in improving the lives of the people. The concept of the nation implicit in the Modi government’s understanding is the very opposite of this and is closer to the aggrandizing concept of Europe whose logical culmination was fascism.

The peasants gathered around Delhi are opposing the Modi government’s world-view in every respect. They are upholding secularism, as is evident from the fact that Hindu, Sikh and Muslim peasants are standing shoulder to shoulder. They are, in their opposition to corporate encroachment on agriculture, denying the identification of the ‘nation’ with a bunch of corporate houses. By standing up for the public distribution system, they are seeing the raison d’être of the nation as consisting in serving the people. The peasant movement is reclaiming the concept of the nation from the Modi government that had hijacked it.

Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

https://mronline.org/2021/01/20/the-patriots/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 27, 2021 2:16 pm

Image

Kerala communists serve the people, look to youth and women
Posted Jan 26, 2021 by W. T. Whitney, Jr.

“Kerala, a state in India, is a bizarre anomaly among developing nations … Kerala has a population as big as California’s and a per capita annual income of less than $300. But its infant mortality rate is very low, its literacy rate among the highest on Earth … Though mostly a land of paddy-covered plains, statistically Kerala stands out as the Mount Everest of social development”–Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author

At 21 years of age, Arya Rajendran is barely eligible to vote. Nevertheless, she is now the mayor of Kerala’s capital city Thiruvananthapuram, population 2,585,000. She is a second-year student at All Saints College. She concentrates in math.

Rajendran told a reporter that,
“From the time I remember my childhood, I was going to Balasangham.… I am now the State President for Balasingham. I am also the Students Federation of India state committee member. My parents are branch committee members of CPI(M). And we firmly believe in what the party stands for.” Balasingham is the youth organization of the Communist Party of India, Marxist–the CPI(M).
In early December, Arya Rajendran was the candidate of Left Democratic Front (LDF) as voting took place in Mudavanmughal ward for the city council. She won 2,872 votes, 549 more than the candidate for the United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition led by India’s National Congress political party. The CPI(M) is by far the largest force in the LDF, which also includes the Communist Party of India (CPI) and smaller leftist parties.

In city-wide voting, LDF candidates won 51 of the city council’s 100 seats. The council chooses the city’s mayor, and the CPI (M) district committee named Arya Rajendran as the LDF candidate for that office. Gaining the votes of 54 council persons on December 28, Rajendra became India’s youngest mayor.

The LDF government in Kerala in 2009 determined that women shall make up at least 50% of elected officials at every level of government. The CPI(M) in Kerala recently took steps to encourage young people to run for political office. One women, 22 years old and a candidate in the in the local elections, stated that,
In Thiruvananthapuram, 66 per cent of CPI(M)’s candidates are women. Five of them are below 25 years of age. This is a party with a difference.
The CPI(M)–led government in Kerala is riding on a wave of good will following success in organizing life-saving relief after massive floods in 2018 and dealing with outbreaks of the lethal Nipah virus in 2018 and 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic recently.

Communist–led governments have held power intermittently in Kerala since 1957. That year the CPI gained political control through electoral victory–one of the world’s first socialist political parties to do so–and was immediately removed by India’s central government because of turbulence associated with land reform efforts.

Even so, the CPI retained a strong presence in Kerala during the 1960s. From then on, however, the new CPI(M) has regularly won state elections as the dominant partner in the LDF coalition. Leadership of the state has alternated between the CPI(M) and India’s National Congress Party, leader of the UDF coalition. The current LDF government, in office since 2016, will gain a new term if the LDF is victorious in state-assembly elections set for May, 2021.

CPI dissidents formed the CPI(M) in 1964. They were protesting both CPI collaboration with the Congress Party, viewed as serving business interests, and CPI affinity with the Soviet Union. In concert with Chinese Communists, the CPI(M) objected to the Soviet Union’s turn to “peaceful coexistence” with capitalist powers.

The CPI(M) held power in West Bengal state from 1977 until 2011 and in the small state of Tripura intermittently from 1978 until 2018. The Party claimed a national membership of 10,000,520 in 2018.

Kerala governments headed by the CPI(M) instituted social and economic reforms starting with equitable use of land and continuing with improved access to healthcare and education and programs of social rescue. Reforms introduced by LDF governments stayed mostly intact during periods of the opposition coalition being in power

Communist reformers in Kerala had the advantage of rudimentary social reforms already in place prior to national independence in 1947. The principalities of Travancore and Cochin,converted into Kerala state in 1956, had avoided some of the depredations of British colonialism, and officials there had collaborated with missionaries and eventually with international aid agencies.

The new Kerala government quickly integrated illness and preventative care into a single health services agency. It prioritized planning capabilities, attended to urgent healthcare needs in rural areas, and gradually built a system of primary health care that’s been crucial to Kerala’s healthcare achievements.

Kerala’s Centre for Development Studies, established in 1970 and assisted by the United Nations, has guided efforts of government planners, politicians, healthcare providers, and educators. Teachers and researchers there did much to shape what’s known as the “Kerala model” of development, which implies: high “material quality of life” despite low per-capita income, “wealth and redistribution programs,” and “High levels of political participation and activism among ordinary people.”

Kerala’s government in the mid-1990s decentralized planning and policy-making for healthcare and education; many responsibilities were transferred to local political authorities. According to a report released in 2014, “In 2011, Kerala attained the highest Human Development Index of all Indian states.” Markers included:

*Infant mortality rate of 12 per 1,000 live births in Kerala vs. 40 per 1,000 live births in India

*Maternal mortality ratio of 66 per 100,000 live births in Kerala vs. 178 per 100,000 live births in India

*Male literacy–96% in Kerala vs. 82% in India; female literacy–92% in Kerala vs. 65% in India

U.S. Communist, author, and veteran trade unionist Beatrice Lumpkin, was a math teacher. She recently extolled the performance of K. K. Shailaja, Kerala’s Minister of Health and Social Welfare, as she took on the COVID-19 Pandemic. The minister is a member of the Central Committee of the CPI(M) and formerly a physics teacher.

Ms. Lumpkin recalls that she “was invited to attend the conference of mathematics teachers in Kerala,” adding that,
To reach Kerala, I overnighted in Mumbai to change planes. In Mumbai, I saw many families living on the sidewalk, with at most a lean-to over their heads. It was a school day, but school-age children were on the sidewalk, with their families… In my two weeks in Kerala, I walked and rode all around the streets of the Kerala capital city of Thiruvananthapuram and never saw anyone living on the streets. In answer to my question my hosts said, ‘You don’t see any homeless because we had a land reform in Kerala. Everybody owns a piece of land, no matter how small.’
https://mronline.org/2021/01/26/kerala- ... and-women/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: India

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 30, 2021 12:49 pm

Image

Protests by Indian farmers in a global perspective

by Utsa Patnaik *

It is not just Indian companies that are the potential beneficiaries of the new agriculture laws; foreign agribusiness is also a danger
The peasants' movement for the withdrawal of the three laws on agriculture - by which they are directly affected, but which were imposed without consulting them - has reached its second month of mobilization [1] . It is an event of historical significance. It is not just a question of the minimum price of support, but of the survival of the entire public grain supply and distribution system. Without ensuring the profitability of cereal production in northern India - the country's granary - the continuity of this system cannot be guaranteed, which, despite its drawbacks, continues to provide a minimum of food security to large sections of our country. population.

A revival of the dynamics of the colonial era
Northern industrial countries, notably the United States, Canada and the European Union (EU), cannot produce the tropical and sub-tropical crops that their consumers demand, while they have mountains of surplus cereals and dairy products. , the only goods that their land is suitable for producing for climatic reasons. Goods for which they have to find export markets. Over the course of more than two decades, they have exerted relentless pressure on developing countries to give up their public supply systems, insisting that they purchase cereals from advanced countries and, in the meantime, convert the area devoted to staple food crops to advantage of cultivation, under contract, of those for export claimed by the industrial countries that cannot produce them.

Numerous developing countries, ranging from the Philippines in the mid-1990s to Botswana over the next decade, have succumbed to similar pressures; paying the price when cereals, rapidly destined for ethanol production in the US and the EU, have seen their prices tripled within a few months starting from the end of 2007. In thirty-seven countries that have just become dependent on imports, riots have taken place for food, with their respective urban populations pushed into ever greater poverty.

The food security of the developing world is too important an issue to be left to the global market, but the constant attack on its public grain stocks, safeguarding that security, does not stop. India barely managed to pull back from the brink a decade ago: supply prices rose substantially after practically stagnating during the six years preceding the 2008 price spike; and cereal production in Punjab, with the improvement of economic profitability, has again grown from almost stagnant levels. But grain uptake has not improved much due to the exclusion of many effective poor from ration cards reserved for those below the poverty line, while unemployment caused by the demonetization of 2016[2] followed by the 2020 pandemic, has reduced aggregate demand, to date, to an all-time low.

A case of unfair trading practices
Our farmers have been absurdly exposed to unfair trading practices, as well as the volatility of global prices that has thrown them into incurable debt and suffering - in one Punjab village there were at least 59 peasant widows driven to suicide. Trade with the North is uneven as advanced countries converted their price support measures into massive subsidies in the form of direct cash transfers to their farmers in the mid-1990s; transfers which, in a blatantly selfish manner, have inscribed as 'not subject to reduction commitments' in the text of the Agreement on agricultureof the WTO. India, along with other developing countries, signed the deal with little clear on the implications of the fine print. As for the US, direct cash transfers to their 2.02 million farmers, equal to half or more of the country's annual agricultural output, account for only 1% of its budget. In India it would take more than 50% of the central government's annual budget, if only to give a quarter of the annual value of agricultural production to our 120 million farmers, which would be economically unsustainable as well as an administrative nightmare.

A question of reasonable price
The peasants have made it abundantly clear that they do not want alms; all they claim is a reasonable price for the basic crops they produce for the nation to cover living costs and conditions on a modest level. In Indian circumstances, the price support system is in fact the only practicable one. Although the depletion of aquifers in Punjab is a real problem, the solution consists in introducing more advanced agronomic practices such as the Rice Intensification System - which allows to save water resources - certainly not in reducing its production. You don't cut your head off to cure a migraine.

It is precisely the support prices for crops have been deliberately subjected, by the advanced countries, to arbitrary and absurd calculation rules within the Agreement on agriculture . The US complained to the World Trade Organization in May 2018with regard to India which, since the 'reference price' for calculating the support was the global average of a 1986-88 harvest, which they converted into rupees at the then prevailing exchange rate of 12.5 rupees per dollar, the Indian support price per quintal - in reference to rice and wheat - in 2013-14 should have been at most 235 and 354 rupees respectively! The actual support prices were 1348 and 1386 rupees and the difference, over 1000 rupees per quintal, was multiplied by the entire 2013-14 production of rice and wheat, reaching 77% and 67% of their production values . This, the US claimed, constituted support provided in gross violation of the 10% allowed.

Two months later the US sent new requests to India. All sorts of dishonest and absurd rules have been introduced into the Agriculture Agreement in order to fool the unwary developing countries. Our farmers are among the cheapest producers in the world, and support prices in 2013-14, at the prevailing exchange rate of 60.5 rupees per dollar, were well below global prices, i.e. of actual support was negative.

A correct evaluation
The current squeeze in global demand means that wheat and rice prices are at historic lows, agricultural subsidies in advanced countries are at their highest, and the anxiety to unload their grains on our markets has intensified. Our mobilized peasants have correctly identified domestic businesses as potential beneficiaries of the new liberal legislation they oppose, yet foreign agribusiness companies represent an equally great danger.

Farmers who have already experienced agricultural contracts with foreign agribusinesses in Punjab and Haryana therefore clearly state that they do not intend to deal with powerful and faceless private companies, which are falling short of contracts on quantities and prices when they do most. comfortable. Despite all its inefficiency and late payments, they prefer to sell to government agents at the stipulated minimum support prices. They are absolutely right when they see in the deregulation of the markets, imposed by the new laws, as well as in the entry of private companies - which will be Indian, but also foreign - a drastic weakening of the entire public system of supply and minimum support prices.

The push for 'green energy'
Numerous Indian intellectuals argue that importing subsidized cereals from the North would benefit poor consumers here. They forget that there is a growing push to support 'green energy' in advanced countries, which pushes for a further conversion of cereals into ethanol; therefore, initially low-priced cereal imports, if allowed today, will not only ruin our farmers, but will soon leave room for a scenario with price peaks and urban misery, such as that already experienced by developing countries forced to dependence on imports. Anyone who cares about our farmers and their hard work, as well as poverty-stricken consumers, must support their claims against local and global capitalist elites .

1) The three laws advanced by the government chaired by Narendra Modi, which according to Prabhat Patnaik ' for the first time since independence would allow the massive intrusion into agriculture of the most unbridled capitalism ', have triggered a massive and constant mobilization, with the participation also of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ; mobilization that continues , despite the Indian Supreme Court having ' temporarily blocked the implementation' of the measures '.

2) In November 2016, the Indian government announced that 86% of the national currency (all 500 and 1000 rupee banknotes) would no longer be legal tender, citing the fight against tax evasion, counterfeiting and to the terrorism that would feed on the latter. Economist Jayati Gosh, along with colleagues CP Chandrasekhar and Prabhat Patnaik, argued that demonetization, in addition to failing to achieve its stated goals, had severe effects on the economy and material conditions of a large part of the population ( https: / /thewire.in/books/demonetisation-decoded-extract ).

* Utsa Patnaik is an emeritus professor at Jawaharal Nehru University

Original article published in The Hindu on December 30, 2020

Translation and notes by Zuseppe Sini

https://ottobre.info/2021/01/29/le-prot ... a-globale/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply