Make 9th August Country-wide massive Sit-ins a Great Success!
Let us Turn 2023 into a Year of Waves of Militant Struggles!
Intensify the Battle to Overthrow the Modi Regime in 2024 Elections!
The working class in India today is facing the worst ever attacks on their lives, livelihood and rights. Modi’s promise of ‘Achche Din’ (good times) proved to be a cruel joke on the working people. Now, after 9 years of Modi’s rule, the working people are being deceived again with jargons like ‘Amrit Kal’ and ‘New India’. The reality is that it is a state of permanent, undeclared emergency, Bulldozer Raj and the corporate Raj dictated by Modi’s friends like Adanis and Ambanis. The worst affected are the toiling masses. The latest figures show that the number of billionaires in India are rising manifold with 166 in 2022 from 102 in 2020 which is ironically the period of Covid-19 pandemic. More than 40 percent of the wealth produced in India is owned by just 1 percent of the population, while the bottom most 50 percent own less than 3 percent of this wealth.
India has completed 75 years after independence from the British. Since then, the Modi Regime has proved to be the most destructive regime the country has ever seen in terms of nation’s wealth and resources, democracy and constitution and secular fabric and rainbow diversity. Today, after more than 9 years of Modi’s rule, the country’s workers, peasants and all sections of toiling masses stand devastated.
What we now find as a hallmark of Modi’s 9 years regime is - record unemployment and price-rise along with the nose-diving economy, massive retrenchment, wage cuts, closures and lock-outs, diminishing wages, withering social security, skyrocketing poverty, pervading hunger, widening inequality, all-out contractualization of work force not even sparing jawans of the Army, privatisation, monetization (NMP) and all out, unbridled sell-out of nation as a whole. And to top it all, the most brutal attack on the working class in the form of enactment of 4 labour Code Acts along with 12-hour work-day and fixed term employment is bound to push the working class into slavery. The right to unionise and the right to strike are being snatched away. The legal right to social security and minimum wages is being grabbed away. The corporate stranglehold over the country is becoming much more obvious. This is the Modi’s ‘Vision 2047’ and the so-called dream of new India.
The entire legal and institutionalized social security system is being dismantled by closing down all welfare boards which are conspiratorially replaced by ‘e-Shram portal, a mirage of social security. Modi government ridicules social security as ‘freebies’, while it disburses billions of rupees as concessions to corporates.
From MGNREGA to various government schemes like ASHA, Mid-day Meal and Anganwadi- all welfare schemes are facing drastic cuts in budgetary allocations and are thus being eliminated.
Women workforce is being constantly pushed into informal and precarious work resulting in de-feminisation of the workforce. Women are forced to face sexual harassment and oppression at workplaces, in addition to discrimination in wages. Women workers are being forced to work in night shifts without any proper safety mechanism in place and thus exacerbating their miseries.
Modi government is on a selling spree. It is aggressively selling all assets and properties of the government and the public sector to its close corporate friends. Even the giant network of railways and the infrastructures like roads, ports and airports are not spared in the name of monetisation.
In this scenario of miseries, attacks and devastation, the Modi government and the BJP-RSS combine is hell bent on sharpening communal polarization to divert peoples’ attention from the basic issues and to dent the peoples’ unity emerging out of various struggles and agitations.
From street struggles to elections - the issues of common people are coming to the fore. The issues including unemployment, poverty, price-rise are making their presence felt. The working class is forcefully demanding increase in minimum wages, restoration of old pension scheme (OPS), increase in EPS, repeal of labour codes, halt to all-out privatisation and contractualisation and granting government employee status to scheme workers, etc. But the Modi government is responding only by aggravating communal polarisation. In Karnataka, Modi himself responded to these issues by calling upon people to raise the slogan of ‘Jai Bajrang Bali’. In view of 2024 Lok Sabha elections and many state assembly elections this year, the Modi regime and the BJP have proposed the divisive issue of Uniform Civil Code (UCC) to create communal polarisation.
But the people of Karnataka responded by ousting the BJP government from the echelons power in the state. The people of the state foiled the communal design of the BJP and the RSS. Now the entire country, the toiling masses should prepare themselves to smash the fascist agenda. The working class of the country must defeat the Modi government, the biggest enemy of working people in 2024 elections.
Towards this aim, the working class must intensify its struggles and at the same time, should build a strong and broader unity with the struggles of other sections of the toiling masses. Only the united struggles of working people can reverse these attacks as was demonstrated by the historic, year-long, farmers’ movement in the outskirts of Delhi.
Against the anti-worker, anti-people policies of disastrous Modi led BJP regime, AICCTU will launch a 15-day country wide campaign from 25 July to 8 August which will culminate into a country-wide massive sit-ins on 9th August, the day of the Quit India Movement, called by central trade unions. The platform of central trade unions has prepared an action programme for the year 2023 which will culminate in an all-India general strike and Bandh. The struggling farmer organisations are also extending wholehearted support to the movement.
Let us make these agitational programmes a big success towards overthrowing the Modi government to save democracy and to save our country.