As thousands of agriculture and industrial workers and farmers started travelling to Delhi for a rally on Wednesday on the call of the All India Agriculture Workers Union (AIAWU), Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), about 300 academics, actors, writers, journalists and defence veterans pledged their support to the protest. They said the government was “blindly pushing ahead with its discredited policy of providing gifts to the corporates by cutting corporate taxes, selling off public sector assets at throwaway prices, dismantling protective labour laws, writing off huge corporate loans, and inviting predatory foreign capital into the country’s key and strategic industries hitherto reserved for the public sector”. “Corruption has seeped into every sphere of social life,” they added.
One of the organisers of the rally and eminent economist Prabhat Patnaik told The Hindu that the rally was the coming together of agriculture labourers, industrial workers as well as peasants. “These three are fundamental, basic classes of our society. Therefore, their coming together itself is a matter of historic significance. The Centre’s strategy has been to provide material welfare to the well-to-do and use religious communalism as a way of dividing the oppressed. These three classes are the most oppressed classes and they are coming together on their material demands and it will be overturning the discourse the Hindutva forces have been placing on them,” Prof. Patnaik said.
When asked why such protests were not helping the Opposition electorally, he said the idea behind such a protest was not “necessarily simply for votes”. “It is to bring these classes together to defend their material interests and to prevent their impoverishment which is being imposed by the neoliberal policies of this neo fascist government. Whether this will pay electoral dividend or not, is quite immaterial. The change in discourse is important,” he said and added that any political fallout of such a rally would arise only over a period of time. “The BJP is committed to an agenda which is against the interest of workers and peasants,” he said pointing out to the reluctance of the Centre to enact a legislation to ensure minimum support price.
The appeal to support the rally has been signed by eminent academics, poets, writers, literary critics, lawyers, scientists, artists, actors, filmmakers, journalists and others from across the professional spectrum and from different parts of the country. Apart from Prof. Patnaik, prominent names in the list of signatories are Irfan Habib, Sumit Sarkar, N.Ram, Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak Shah, Manoranjan Mohanty, K.M. Shrimali, Utsa Patnaik, K. Satchidanandan, P. Sainath, Jayati Ghosh, C.P. Chandrasekhar, Harsh Mander, Admiral L. Ramdas, Teesta Setalvad, Anand Patwardhan, Saeed Mirza, Shaji N. Karun, and Sashi Kumar.
