AN APPEAL ON THE SEPTEMBER 5 MAZDOOR-KISAN RALLY
The September 5 rally of workers, peasants and agricultural labourers would be an unprecedented event in the nation’s history. Until now there have been separate rallies of workers or of peasants or of agricultural labourers in the country, but never a joint rally of all these classes, certainly not on this scale in the capital city. This would be the first such effort.
The coming together of these classes is not just an important political project. Their economic destinies have got closely linked under neo-liberalism. The agrarian crisis unleashed by neo-liberalism through the withdrawal of State support from peasant agriculture, which has already claimed more than three lakh lives over the last two decades through a spate of suicides, has also driven numerous people from the countryside to search for jobs in the urban areas. Such jobs being non-existent, they have swollen the ranks of unemployed and underemployed workers and thereby contributed unwittingly to a worsening of the real wages and conditions of work of all segments of urban workers including even those who are said to belong to the organized and unionized segment.
An alliance of all these classes who are the joint victims of neo-liberalism is the primary instrument for overcoming the neo-liberal order. It is also therefore the primary instrument for overcoming the conjuncture which sustains the forces of communal-authoritarianism that currently rule the country. This alliance is the means for the ultimate defeat of this sinister trend.
For turning this alliance, for which neo-liberalism has created an objective potential, into an alliance-for-itself which consciously begins to play the role of an agency for change, the September 5 rally is a significant step. We appeal to all who are interested in building an India free of exploitation and discrimination on caste, communal, and gender lines, to join this rally which marks a new beginning, and to support it in every possible way, including also by supporting the immediate demands of these classes that are listed in the attached document.
Prabhat Patnaik, K Satchidanandan, Vivan Sundaram, M K Raina, Ram Rahman, Madangopal Singh, Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, N K Sharma, MMP Singh, Sohail Hashmi, PK Shukla, D N Jha, Arjun Dev, Lata Singh, C P Chandrashekhar, Zoya Hasan, Gauhar Raza, Dinesh Abrol, Jayati Ghosh
