Saturday, October 12, 2013

Brinda Karat meets victims of Rewa firing

CPI(M) Politburo member Brinda Karat addressed six meetings around the Jaypee Cement factory in Rewa district on Thursday where four persons suffered gunshot wounds after allegedly being fired upon by Jaypee Cement personnel in Baijnath village last week. One of the alleged assailants have been taken into custody.

Ms. Karat congratulated the villagers on their resistance to Jaypee’s alleged attempts to grab their land. “ JP [Gaur — the founder of the Jaypee group] and his thugs dared to beat up a pregnant woman so badly that she had to be hospitalised. The local BJP MLA (Abhay Mishra) is behind them. This aim of this criminalisation of politics is to grab the land of the poor,” she told the people of Baijnath.

Geeta Kushwaha, a pregnant woman, was in hospital after being assaulted by security guards of Jaypee Cement on October 3. She told this paper that her home on ancestral lands claimed by Jaypee was destroyed and her belongings seized by the company. “They continued to hit me and fired at us even after we had fallen down,” she said.

Ms. Karat urged voters to vote for the CPI(M), which before delimitation used to represent the Sirmour assembly constituency. The area now falls under the Semariya constituency, from where the party's state committee member Rohit Tiwari is contesting. “(Chief Ministers) Shivraj (Chouhan) and (Narendra) Modi wear glasses with which they can only see Jaypee and Adani and not the poor. Shivraj’s politics have been defined by land grab. The dreams they see are nightmares for the people,” she said.

The area around the Jaypee Plant has periodic tremors due to explosions in the limestone quarries that dot the area. Though a large number of the peasants have grown prosperous by switching from cereals and pulses to vegetables, they live under the constant fear of reprisals by Jaypee Cement with whom they have several land disputes.

In 2007, a youth named Raghavendra Patel was killed when Jaypee guards opened fire on a demonstration for work in the factory. Another youth named Abhishek Mishra, also involved in the movement against land grab, was found dead in July this year after being picked up by the police. The deceased youth have earned the titles of martyrs and two panchayats in the area are now ruled by the CPI(M).


In the martyr villages of Garhwa and Vihari, Ms. Karat met families of the deceased. “Jaypee behaves like a feudal lord,” she told this paper. “While continuing to serve the corporate interests, Shivraj gives little other than propaganda. This is no different from Modi who keeps saying that he was a chaiwallah. If he was one, then he has betrayed his class.”

Ms. Karat added that it was premature to talk of a third front now. "It will depend on the performance of the secular non Congress parties in next year's Lok Sabha polls," she opined. In MP, the CPI(M) has allied with the Samajwadi Party, CPI and, the Rashtriya Samanta Dal. (Courtesy : The Hindu, Photo: Ashutosh Singh)

Unacceptable Judgment in Laxmanpur Bathe case

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement:
 
The acquittal of all the accused in the Laxmanpur Bathe case by a division bench of the Patna High Court is an unacceptable judgment. The lower court had sentenced sixteen of the accused to death and given life sentence to ten others. To now give them the “benefit of doubt” when there is no doubt that fifty eight dalits were massacred in the village raises questions about the verdict.
 
Is it just a coincidence that in other such cases also where dalits have been killed by upper caste private armies the accused have been acquitted?
 
The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) demands that the Bihar State Government appeal without delay against this flawed judgment.
 
It also reiterates its earlier demand to appeal against the judgment of the Patna High Court which had acquitted Pappu Yadav in the murder of CPI(M) MLA, Ajit Sarkar, even though he was found guilty by the lower court.

Anti-Communal Convention in Ranchi, Jharkand

 
The four Left parties, the CPI(M), CPI, AIFB and RSP, organised a state-level anti-communalism convention in Ranchi on October 1. The Jharkhand Vikas Morcha also participated.

Inaugurating the convention, Central Committee member Mohd.Salim said that the 'raga' of 'NaMo,NaMo' on one side and the praising Rahul Gandhi as the ideal leader of the country on the other are both being sponsored by the corporate houses. He said that there is need to be wary of these dark forces and fight them unitedly. People do not want to fight against each other, but the exploiting classes create communal tensions in order to serve their own interests, he observed.

The resolution placed in the Convention by CPI State Secretary Bhuvaneshwra Prasad Mehta underlined the fact that the current communal incidents were not spontaneous, but were being created by the communal forces as part of a planned conspiracy in view of the Lok Sabha elections of 2014. The resolution was supported by CPI(M) State Secretary G.K.Bakshi, Secretariat member Prakash Viplav, Khagendra Thakur of CPI, State Secretary of FB Janardan Pandey, State Secretary of RSP Radhakant Jha, Marxist Co-ordination Committee member Mithilesh Singh and General Secretary of Jharkhand Vikas Morcha Gautam Sagar Rana.
 
The Convention appealed to all the peace-loving, secular citizens of the state to unite against these communal forces and fight them ideologically and politically.

 
The Convention demanded that the state government should be extremely cautious on the issue of communalism and make adequate arrangements for the safety of the ordinary public, especially in the festival season.