Can you imagine a country where 77% people live on a daily budget of less than Rs. 20 while foodgrains rot in state custody and rising food prices subject more and more people to hunger and malnutrition?

Can you imagine a country where national wealth is routinely drained out of the country and amassed in foreign banks and the government refuses to take any action against the culprits in the name of ‘international diplomacy’?

Can you imagine a country where ministers and bureaucrats work in tandem with corporate houses to rob the national exchequer of enormous funds that could have been used for public welfare and the Prime Minister likens this loot to whatever little money the government spends in the name of food, fuel and fertiliser subsidy for the poor?

Can you imagine a country where every year tens of thousands of farmers are compelled to commit suicides and the government conspires with corporate houses to dispossess peasants of their land and livelihood?

Can you imagine a country where the government throws all laws of the land to the winds – from environmental laws and land legislations to panchayat acts – to allow desi and foreign companies to plunder the country’s mineral and other natural resources with impunity?

Can you imagine a country where the government is so mortally afraid of the truth that it always seeks to silence people’s struggles with batons, bullets and black laws and imprison upright intellectuals under sedition charges?

We do not have to imagine such a country. This is the country we are living in. This is India after two decades of liberalization, privatization and globalization. This is India under UPA rule where governance has become a licence for unbridled corruption, where democracy is overshadowed by dark clouds of state repression and the common people have to wage a grim battle for sheer survival.

This state of affairs cannot be tolerated any longer. The UPA government has betrayed all its promises and hence lost its mandate to rule. It has proved to be a government of runaway inflation and unbridled scams. And the Prime Minister and Congress leaders would like to explain everything away as a ‘coalition compulsion’! Whatever ‘compulsion’ the Congress or the UPA may have, the country certainly has no compulsion to tolerate such a regime. Come, let us all join the People’s March to Parliament on March 14 and ask the UPA government to stop giving lame excuses and quit office.

What is the alternative? The NDA would like us to believe that it can bring down prices and stop corruption. But NDA-ruled states – whether Gujarat or Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand or Bihar – are as badly mired in corruption as states ruled by the UPA. Worse still, while the country is seeking an end to corruption and repression, the BJP and the RSS are busy whipping up tension over Kashmir and Ayodhya, and some of them are involved in downright terrorist activities. The NDA is clearly not an acceptable alternative.

Indeed, no government which enforces the policies of liberalisation, privatization and globalization can control prices or curb corruption. No government which represents the corporate agenda can guarantee basic welfare for the people. What the country needs is alternative policies, policies that keep the people’s needs and aspirations, and not the profit and power of capital, at the centre. And to this end, the country needs a powerful awakening of the people and a united assertion of all fighting Left forces.

The CPI(ML) and its allies in the All India Left Coordination are fighting on every front for such a pro-people alternative. Make the March 14 “People’s March to Parliament” a big success to carry this battle forward.

Central Committee

Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)