Dear comrades, Through you, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP-1930, the Philippine Communist Party) sends its warmest fraternal greetings to the 21st Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Your 21st Congress is held when India is in the grip of a grave political and economic crisis, with the main rightwing party – the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi – having grabbed central power with the reported unlimited use of money and the suppression of voting rights of opponents in the elections. The power grab by the Hindutva nationalists was made possible with the all-out help of Indian corporate monopolies and their imperialist allies. Western propaganda presented the power takeover by the BJP as a triumph of a supposed “campaign-against-corruption”, hiding the fact that the BJP’s programme of privatisation and deregulation – the subversion of the public economic sector in favour of the capitalist monopolies and oligarchs – is the very essence of gross and widespread systemic corruption. The severe economic hardships of the working peoples due to the global capitalist crisis got exacerbated in India by the brahmanist corporate dictatorship of the Modi regime. Even now, the Modi regime is starting to unravel, with reports of its refusal or failure to give sufficient compensation and relief to the small farming sector hit by crop damages, despite the growing number of suicides by debt-ridden peasants. Indeed, the austerity programme imposed worldwide by imperialist monopoly capital and its local political allies, such as the Modi regime in India, can only leave the peasants and workers unattended and repressed, but hopefully more class conscious and militant in their struggles. We are hoping that through the activities of the CPI(M) and other communist and Left forces in India, more militant struggles can be rallied against the Modi regime’s vile drive to destroy India’s secular fabric by polariSing the Indian masses along religious lines, and to abandon India’s non-aligned orientation. We are confident that through its 21st Congress, the CPI(M) will be able to determine the best ways and means to strengthen the unity of all Left and democratic forces – which unity can rebuff and reverse the Modi regime’s programme to subvert India’s public economic sector and social welfare system, and which unity can renew the Indian people’s hope and confidence in a socialist alternative. We wish every success to CPI(M)’s 21st Congress, and to all the forthcoming activities of the CPI(M) in defense of secularism and national unity – for peace, freedom and socialism. Finally, we are hoping for closer fraternal cooperation between our two parties in the spirit of anti-imperialist solidarity. With communist greetings, ANTONIO E. PARIS General Secretary