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Red Rally in Saffron Citadel

A massive tidal wave of red rallyists stormed into Varanasi on 26 October with the slogan ‘We wouldn’t let Varanasi become another Ayodhaya’, warning the Kalyan Singh-led BJP government at Lucknow from reviving the saffron conspiracy. More than 30,000 CPI(ML) rallyists entered Beniabagh, despite the district administration’s earlier efforts to deny permission, and successfully held one of the biggest rallies ever in the city.

One is reminded of another historic day, five years back in January 1993, just after the Fifth Party Congress and in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition. Tens of thousands led by CPI(ML) had gathered in Varanasi with the same slogan. That day the demonstrators had been stopped from marching into Beniabagh where a public meeting had been planned. The police had cracked down heavily and arrested thousands including many Party leaders. The rally marked the loud and forceful proclamation of one of the central messages of the Sixth Party Congress that concluded the previous day, viz. the revolutionary communists will take the revived saffron challenge head on with renewed and redoubled vigour. Though it was an all-India rally, the original planning was to have only a small rally with mainly mobilisation from nearby areas owing to the absence of a larger rally ground in this highly congested city. Despite all the main organisers attending the Congress sessions, the spontaneous rank and file mobilisation, mainly from the Saffron-infested eastern Uttar Pradesh and adjoining districts of Bihar, was so overwhelming that the whole city was drowned in red.

Ambrish Rai, UP Standing Committee member, welcomed the rallyists. Akhilendra Pratap Singh, who chaired the public meeting, then introduced the foreign guests. He then introduced the new CPI(ML) General Secretary, Vinod Mishra, who had been reelected for the fifth time in the Congress, amidst a long and loud applause from the rallyists. One by one members of the new 39-member Central Committee were introduced to the rallyists.

The leaders of the foreign delegations, Madhav Nepal from CPN(UML), John Percy from DSP, Australia, Klaus Wallenstein from MLPD, Germany, Dirk De Block from PTB, Belgium, and Kalpana Wilson from SASG, Great Britain, then greeted the rallyists with their short speeches.

Addressing the rally, CPI(ML) General Secretary, Vinod Mishra, reiterated the Party’s commitment to halt the advance of communal forces in UP. In this regard he said that communalism can be combated not through the manipulations of a governor but only through a broadbased mobilisation of the common people of the state and bringing together all democratic and progressive forces to a common platform.

Politics in Uttar Pradesh, he said, was in the grip of a devil’s triangle formed by the casteist politics of BJP, SP and BSP. None of these parties have an agenda for the problems of common people. Instead they have only divided society and heightened animosity between various sections of society in the state along caste lines. The state could only be saved by bringing it out of this triangle.

On the question of Ram Mandir, he said, Kalyan Singh may have renewed the call for building the temple but before that the entire BJP leadership had an explanation to give. He said, our Party wanted to know what happened to the crores and crores of rupees collected by the leaders and cadres of BJP from all over the country and abroad in the name of Ram Mandir. He called upon the people of Uttar Pradesh to demand an explanation for this scam. Emboldened by their victory in UP, the BJP was dreaming of coming to power at centre. He said that the BJP should stop building castles in the air because the secular and democratic common masses would not let communal fascism thrive in this country. Referring to Govindacharya’s remark that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was just a mask that the BJP used, he remarked that if the mukut shiromani (crown) itself was a mukhota (mask) then whenever this party would get close to power it would give rise to more Vaghelas. He called upon the cadres to gear up preparations to give a crushing blow to the private armies in Bihar, specially the Ranvir Sena. In the face of extreme provocations and brutal attacks by the Sena in the last 2 years, he said, the common people had a right to organise and defend themselves even by taking up arms and no law of any democratic land could prevent them from doing so. In this respect, he said that the Party would avenge for every attack that the Sena makes on our people.

On the national situation, he said that the country was faced with a crisis where all institutions of the state were fighting against each other — the judiciary, legislature, bureaucracy, Election Commission etc. This symbolised a crisis of the entire system and not merely of few individuals or parties. In such a situation there is a need for a radically different and unconventional political alternative. The champions of social justice were today thoroughly discredited and the socalled champions of dalits, the one-time diehard opposers of manuvad had gone into the lap of the number one manuvadi party, the BJP. In such a case, there is a vacuum in the state. Com.Mishra said that a new social polarisation was required to fill this vacuum and CPI(ML) had taken up this challenge. For this he gave a call to form a broad front of all democratic and progressive forces. After all, he said, if at all there was any party which had the moral right to lead the fight against corruption, communalism and criminalisation of politics, it was CPI(ML) alone for no one could cast any aspersion against it for compromising on any one of these issues at any point of time.

Recalling the heroic sacrifices made by the martyrs in the last 30 years of CPI(ML)’s existence, right from the founder of the Party, Com.Charu Majumdar, he said that each drop of blood shed had given rise to ten more fighters. It was the responsibility of all in the Party to fulfill the dreams of these martyrs.

Lenin’s dream of socialism establishing itself world over by the end of this century hasn’t come about and his Soviet Union has also collapsed. Many had in fact predicted after the collapse of Soviet Union that the Left in India will also follow suit. But in the last five years of scams and unprecedented corruption if at all any ideology has established its moral highground, it is the communist ideology. The man on the street would also admit that the Left is the only honest force Left in the country. The last five years, he said, had also seen a rapid growth in the Party and its acceptance among the masses. Hence, Lenin’s dream will not die and the revolutionary communists here in India led by CPI(ML) would certainly establish socialism in the 21st century.

A set of resolutions were also passed in the rally. The brutal way in which the Indonesian government was crushing the PRD-led mass movement was strongly criticised and solidarity was expressed with the revolutionary movement of the Indonesian people. The rally sharply condemned the efforts to terminate the political asylum of Prof.Jose Maria Sison, the founder of the Philippines Communist Party, by the self-proclaimed liberal democratic government of Netherlands acting under the pressure of the governments of America and Philippines and demanded the Dutch government not to terminate the political asylum of Prof.Sison and his wife. Some of the other resolutions passed strongly criticised the clamour to scrap the SC/ST Act and the campaign to subvert and dilute the act by the communal-reactionary and feudal forces and demanded the immediate withdrawal of the Government Order (GO) connected with it, condemned Lal Krishan Advani’s efforts to save the Tatas in the Tata-ULFA episode which has brought out the true face of BJP’s nationalism and demanded a high-level judicial enquiry into the unholy ULFA-Tata-BJP nexus and condemned the killing of innocent farmers in police firing by the Bansi Lal’s HVP-BJP government.

The gathering was also addressed by Nagbhushan Patnaik and Ram Naresh Ram. At the end Raja Bahuguna thanked the rallyists.

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