CPIM Launches Jail Bharo campaign in Bihar

CPI-M activists staged demonstration to launch their state-wide Jail Bharo (Fill-the-Jail) Campaign in Patna on August 30, 2010 in support of their demands that included security, relief, land reforms and price rise.

It is to be noted that 83 per cent of the dalits and 66 per cent of the backwards are landless and it is they who could benefit most from the recommendations. Those championing the cause of social justice for dalits and backwards are making common cause with the feudal lords who are bent upon thwarting any attempts at land reforms in Bihar.

Since then, Bihar has witnessed a bizarre spectacle of bourgeois leaders floating a forum called Kisan Panchayat and spewing venom against Nitish Kumar and Bandopadhyay. In their rally at Patna on May 9, leaders of the RJD, LJP and JD(U) warned the Nitish government against implementing the Bandopadhyay report or face the consequences. This has brought the land reforms agenda to the fore and now it is the Catch 22 situation for Nitish Kumar. He can neither reject nor accept the commission’s recommendations. The BJP, partner in the Bihar government, has openly opposed land reforms, threatening to pull out of the government if land reforms were implemented. 

But the Left parties have taken up the issue. A campaign has been launched all across Bihar for the implementation of the commission’s recommendations. As part of this campaign  the Left took out Bhoomi Sudhar Jagran Jathas simultaneously from Darbhanga and Begusarai from May 14 to June 14. The month long campaign launched under the joint banner of Kisan Sabha (affiliated to the All India Kisan Sabha) and Khetihar Mazdoor Union (affiliated to the All India Agricultural Workers Union) in Bihar culminated in a massive turnout of peasants and agricultural workers, including rural women, at Patna on June 14. On this occasion, they saluted the memory of martyr Comrade Ajit Sarkar who fell to the bullets of landlords’ goons on this very day in the year 1998.

It is to be noted that the Kisan Sabha, Khetihar Mazdoor Union and other organisations have come together to fight for implementation of the Land Reform Act and the recommendations made by Bandopadhyay commission in this regard. As reported in these columns earlier, the Bandopadhyay commission has brought up the land reform agenda to the fore and has put the Nitish government in a fix. But the latter has meekly surrendered before the feudal forces who have ganged up under the banner of Kisan Mahapanchayat. The Left parties and particularly the CPI(M), Kisan Sabha and Khetihar Mazdoor Union has jointly decided to carry on the struggle for land reforms.

The June 14 rally of peasants and agricultural workers in the state capital marked the height of mobilisation of the rural poor for the possession of government, bhudan and ceiling surplus land. They came from the fields of Bihar where they have been relentlessly fighting against the evictions and all sorts of machination by the police-landlord-land mafia nexus. In the nineties, the CPI(M) and Kisan Sabha had liberated thousand of acres of land and since then the rural poor are in possession of those lands. The month long campaign has generated a new hope among the landless and the homeless people of Bihar who constitute around 90 per cent of the state’s population.

(courtesy :View Patna)