16 April 2007
The Socialist Labour League of India
will hold a public meeting Sunday, April 22, in Chennai, the capital of
the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, to discuss the need for workers in
India to draw the lessons of the Nandigram peasant massacre and adopt a
socialist-internationalist program.
Fourteen peasants were killed and at
least 70 injured on March 14, when West Bengal police opened fire on
peasants protesting government plans to seize 10,000 acres in the
Nandigram area for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to be run by the
Indonesian-based Salim Group. The Stalinist Communist Party of India
(Marxist)-led West Bengal state government sent 4,000 heavily armed
police to reassert government authority into the Nandigram area knowing
full well that a bloody confrontation might result.
Right wing bourgeois parties,
including the Trinamul (Grassroots) Congress and the Hindu-supremacist
Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) are seeking to exploit mass sentiment
against the pro-investor policies of the West Bengal government to
promote their own right-wing agenda.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist)
(CPM) and its Left Front allies bear full responsibility for creating
conditions in which these discredited right-wing parties can pose as
defenders of the toilers against a nominally “left” government that
seizes land on behalf of Indian and international capital. At the
national level, the CPM-led Left Front is today sustaining in power the
United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government, led by the
Congress Party. The UPA government is implementing a neo-liberal
socio-economic program that is having a devastating impact on the
working class and rural toilers and is pursuing a strategic partnership
with US imperialism.
The Socialist Labour League meeting
will examine how the CPM’s role as a henchman for Indian and
international capital is the end product of a decades-long degeneration,
in which the Stalinists restricted the working class to trade union
militancy and parliamentary maneuvers with the reputedly
anti-imperialist wing of the bourgeois political establishment.
In opposition to the policies of the
ruling elite and its political appendages—the CPM and the Left Front—the
working class must advance its own independent program to address the
social problems of working people and the landless and poverty-stricken
rural poor.
This program can only be realized, as
part of the struggle for international socialism, by mobilizing the
working class in alliance with the oppressed peasantry to establish
workers’ and peasants’ governments—in the form of the Union of Socialist
Republics of South Asia. The International Committee of the Fourth
International (ICFI) and its organ, the World Socialist Web Site,
advance this perspective.
The Socialist Labour League, which
supports the ICFI, urges socially conscious workers, youth and
intellectuals to attend the public meeting to discuss this perspective
and join the struggle to build a section of the ICFI in India.
Time : April 22, Sunday, 10 am
Venue: Small Seminar Hall, Periyar Thiddal, (Next to Thinathanthi office), Vepery, Chennai -600 007.
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