People's Democracy

AIKS, AIAWU Hold Convention On Alternative Agr. Policy 

UPHOLDING the Left Front government’s pro-peasant and pro-people policy on agriculture should be part and parcel of the propaganda campaign going on all over Tripura. This campaign is currently being run by the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) and All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU) to press for an alternative agricultural policy they had enunciated in 2003. Their aim is to rally behind this alternative policy the peasants and agricultural workers all over the country --- the sections whom the anti-peasant and anti-people policies being pursued since 1991 have hit hard.

This fervent message emerged from a massive and militant convention organised at Agartala on Saturday (January 22). The venue was the auditorium of Dasaratha Deb Memorial Cultural Centre and the programme was organised by the Sadar divisional committees of the two organisations in association with the Tripura Upajati Ganamukti Parishad (GMP). The aim was to report on the ongoing statewide mobilisation of peasants and agricultural labourers in favour of the Alternative Agricultural Policy 2003.

Above 400 delegates from all over the Sadar subdivision in West Tripura district attended the stirring convention which the reporting was done by Saroj Chanda, state president of the All India Agricultural Workers Union. The organisation’s state secretary Bhanulal Saha, Pabitra Kar and Tripura Upajati Ganamukti Parishad’s Biswamani Debbarma also addressed the convention.

In his reporting Saroj Chanda elaborated on the alternative agricultural policy document. The latter was originally enunciated in 1993 and updated in 2003 by the two all-India organisations as the basis for launching a countrywide movement against the union government’s drive for liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation.

Addressing the convention, Pabitra Kar contraposed the anti-people and retrogressive policies of several successive central governments on the one hand and the massive development programmes being implemented by the successive Left Front governments of Tripura in the teeth of tremendous odds. He pointed out that the Congress party and the INPT (overground political wing of the outlawed extremist organisation NLFT) have been continually opposing the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (ADC). One notes that the ADC is a vital constitutional body through which the Left Front government has been implementing its initiatives for all-round development including the development of backward tribals of Tripura.

The convention asked the peasants and agricultural workers of Tripura to plunge into a colossal campaign to ensure a massive mandate for the Left Front at the coming ADC elections. It said this is of vital importance in view of the standstill facing the development programmes in the ADC areas ever since the INPT usurped the ADC in connivance with the Congress party and with the help of the NLFT’s guns in the May 2000 polls. (INN)