ON June 24, the CPI(M) and AIKS held their 29th Victory Day public meeting at Pendhari village in the Tansa Lake area of Shahapur tehsil in Thane district. Over 2,000 adivasi peasants, including a large number of women and youth, attended with great enthusiasm.
A QUADRIPARTITE agreement was signed in New Delhi on January 16, 2020, for permanent settlement of Bru or Reang refugees, who were ousted from Mizoram and took shelter in different camps in Tripura. The four parties of the agreement are the union government, Mizoram government, Tripura government and leaders of the Reang refugees. The meeting for signing the agreement was presided over by the union home minister and the chief ministers of the two states and refugee leaders.
SATHANKULAM is a small town in Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu. Its Tamil name can be translated into English as ‘a pond where the devil resides’. The recent killings of a father-son duo in police custody tragically demonstrates that the epithet is not off the mark.
Below we publish reports from the states on the protests organised by the Left Parties demanding the central government to sharply reduce the excise duties on petroleum products, and reduce its prices. West Bengal
CPI(M) general secretary, Sitaram Yechury, wrote a letter to the chief election commissioner, Sunil Arora on June 29, objecting to the unilateral measures being taken by the Election Commission, altering electoral procedures, without consulting political parties.
Yechury wrote, “We are greatly disturbed by the media reports that the Election Commission of India (ECI) bypassing the established practice of consulting political parties, is unilaterally initiating measures to provide voters aged over 64 years, the use of postal ballots.”
THE US has bought up the entire stock of Remdesivir from Gilead, making it near impossible for this drug to be available anywhere else in the world. This has made all the more urgent that we break Gilead’s patent and issue compulsory license to Indian drug companies to manufacture the drug. The Indian Patent Act, 2005 in which the Left played a very important role, has clear provisions for compulsory licensing during a health emergency or an epidemic. Covid-19 is obviously both.
AS part of the Rs 20 lakh crore economic stimulus package announced by the government supposedly to boost the Covid-impacted economy, the finance minister declared that all sectors of the economy would henceforth be open for the private sector, and that public sector undertakings (PSUs) would work mainly in strategic sectors and would be privatised in others. One of the areas thrown open to the private sector was space.
CPI(M) Polit Bureau has issued the following statement on July 1, 2020 THE announcements made by the prime minister yesterday are totally inadequate to meet the crisis of survival and livelihood being faced by crores of our people. The provision of five kg of foodgrains and one kg of pulses is grossly inadequate to meet the survival needs of the people who have been deprived of their livelihood or food for over three months. 10 kg of foodgrain per individual per month for a period of six months is the minimum that needs to be ensured.
THE various peasant struggles led by the Communists, particularly the glorious Telangana armed people’s struggle brought to the fore issues concerning the stage of Indian revolution, the strategy that needed to be adopted and also the tactics to be pursued. These questions led to various discussions and debates within the Party.
AS per the CPI(M) Polit Bureau call for June 16, the Party in Maharashtra mobilised over 13,200 people at 203 centres in 60 tehsils of 21 districts on the four major demands directed against the Modi-led BJP central government. It was the largest mass action by the Party in the last three months of the Covid-19 lockdown and was covered by sections of the mainstream media in some districts and by the social media widely.