As the Mazdoor-Kisan Sangharsh Rally takes place in Delhi today, a group of notable citizens and intellectuals have issued a statement urging people to join the massive rally of agricultural labourers and workers as they unite. The Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), and All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU) have all called for the demonstration. They claim that the current government’s policies are purely intended to favour the corporate sector while ignoring the interests of the working class, drawing attention to the significant fall in the lives and livelihoods of working people in both urban and rural areas.

The full statement reads as follows:

We the undersigned extend our full support to the Mazdoor-Kisan Sangharsh Rally in Delhi on 5 April 2023 and appeal to the people from all walks of life to spread its message and participate in it. The condition of the working people has deteriorated to an unprecedented level due to the notorious economic onslaught unleashed by the current government. Declining wages, rising prices of essential commodities, raging unemployment, falling returns for farm produce, abysmal agricultural wages, ever deepening agrarian distress resulting in precarious migration of millions, and floundering welfare schemes systematically curtailed by the government, are pushing marginal families into severe poverty. The distress caused by the economic crisis is leading to suicides by thousands of wage workers, farmers and other sections of the toiling masses. Meanwhile, basic entitlements like education and healthcare are being increasingly privatised, pushing them beyond the reach of common people.

What is equally shocking is the government’s refusal to address this crisis engulfing almost all sections of the people. In fact the government is blindly pushing ahead with its discredited policy of providing gifts to the corporates by cutting corporate taxes, selling off public sector assets at throwaway prices, dismantling protective labour laws, writing off huge corporate loans, and inviting predatory foreign capital into the country’s key and strategic industries hitherto reserved for the public sector. Corruption has seeped into every sphere of social life.

In order to divert attention from these policies, the ruling BJP, and its mentor the RSS and its affiliates, have launched toxic hate campaigns targeting minorities and threatening our basic social fabric. The government has provided shameful protection to these barbaric forces while at the same time selectively exercising the authority of its agencies to arrest, harass, and even bulldoze the properties of those opposing its policies. It has also tried to hide behind pseudo-nationalist rhetoric and militarism even as it goes about dismantling the fundamental pillars of our Constitution – democracy, federalism and secularism.

Various sections of the people, especially the working class and the peasantry have been building resistance against this disastrous corporate-communal agenda of the ruling dispensation. On several occasions they have successfully pushed back neoliberal anti people policies, as evident from the historic Kisan struggle or the recent victory of Maharashtra electricity workers.

We firmly believe that this historic march to Delhi by the workers, peasants and agricultural workers, raising the basic issues and demands of all sections of the people, on 5 April 2023 will further advance the people’s resistance and give notice to this government that its anti-people policies will no longer be tolerated.

We appeal to the people of the country to stand with the basic producing classes and join them in this struggle.

Full Statement and Signatories: Statement on April 05 Kisan March

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