Shri T. S. Sankaran
President, Lok Raj Sangathan
New Delhi
 

Dear Sir,

The AIPSG wishes to congratulate the LRS for organizing this all-India conference on “How to Stop the Privatization and Anti-Labour Laws” and conveys its heartfelt greetings to the participants for taking up this question for deliberation. 

For the hundreds of millions of people of India who have been its victims, the relevance of this demand needs no explanation. The victims are spread across the entire country and in every sector, be it energy, defence, food production, transport, engineering, metals and minerals etc.  They include the peasantry and tribals, workers and professionals, young and old and especially women and other disadvantaged. The victimization has not just been in economic and material terms but primarily in the destruction of the social fabric. 
A handful of the business houses of India have seized control of the political apparatus and are using their power to transform the assets of society to their private assets. Internally, they are suppressing anyone who opposes them.  Externally, they are preparing for war to seize other people’s assets. The situation has gone thus far that poverty has come to be treated as a crime in the legal system and the struggles of the poor for a livelihood are treated as law and order subjects. By placing the defeat of the liberalization and privatization program on the agenda for solution, the LRS is creating conditions to take Indian society forward on a new basis, in place of the medievalism where the richest of India want to take it – a world that will guarantee their enrichment while everyone else will have to fend for themselves.

The march of human civilization in general and Indian civilization in particular have been accompanied by a progressive rise in the prosperity of the people at the societal scale. Such social upliftment has gone hand in hand with the expansion of social property that serves all members of society. From the ancient times of the janapadas and mahajanapadas to the most recent period of the expansion of the state sector in India, the assets belonging to the people of India as a whole, irrespective of the social system, had become the basis of such social progress. The market reform and privatization movement sweeping the globe for the last two decades and being implemented in India today have as their target the destruction of all existing social property and their conversion to private wealth, thereby eliminating the very foundation of general social progress. The privatization agenda is thus a profoundly anti-social agenda, threatening the march of civilization and our generation is charged with the responsibility to make sure that it does not pass.
The scale of this anti-social movement is such that it is not merely content with the sale of state owned enterprises to private hands or with the transformation of social sectors like health care, education and other social services to profit-making enterprises. It also has eyes set on transforming necessities of every living organism like water supply into for-profit enterprises and even turning the flora and fauna to serve private profiteering.  It is not surprising then that militarization is the bed-fellow of such privatisation because it serves the thirst of private economic interests to dominate everything and everyone. Ten years after the privatization and liberalization agenda was launched, the whole country is being prepared to accept war, and to accept a law like POTA in the name of war by privatizing the war sector itself and making it a profitable enterprise. When war is accepted as a source of profit for a few, the blood of the slaughtered becomes the source of that profit. This is a future that cannot be permitted to pass by the people of India because it is our sons and daughters whose blood will spill. We are summoned by our past and future generations to ensure that we do not permit such wrecking to this land.

The destruction of the political superstructure – the political state that objectively oversees the expansion of social rights and social property, whether under the maharajas and Shahenshahs or under the Prime Ministers and Presidents of modern times - is the main content of the supra-national organizations like the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank today. They oversee the agenda to countries to be run as corporations, and for people to be removed from any decision-making by bringing to the fore those forces in every society that espouse such an agenda. It is within this big picture that the Indian big business houses are pursuing their liberalization and privatization agenda, which was launched in the backdrop of anarchy and violence in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. 

Ever since, the Indian big business houses have manufactured provocations and pretexts in endless succession to pursue that agenda because they are incapable of politically mobilizing the people of India to consent to their anti-people program. They have even managed to recruit a large number of the political parties in India behind this agenda. But the people of India are not going to go away.  They have come this far from the days when only the nawabs and zamindars could join the royals in decision-making and have acquired a consciousness moulded by their struggle against the colonial rulers and the rulers of the Indian republic to have a say in how they are governed. They are still waiting for the day when they will be governing themselves rather than being marginalized from governance through the first-past-the-post system, of consenting to be governed by a minority. 

In sum, people have to fight mighty political battles to come to the centre-stage of political power, and anyone who says otherwise or sows illusion that this will happen by electing some of the political parties to power is mistaken. The privatization agenda cannot be won without these political battles nor can the liberalization and privatization agenda and the anti-social offensive be defeated without fighting the political battles for people’s empowerment.

The experience of the last 11 years has shown clearly that the privatization agenda is not a policy of the BJP, NDA or the UF or the Congress government. All the parties that have formed governments in the last decade will swear by their pro-social aims to get elected, while implementing the very opposite agenda once in power. Thus, defeating the privatization agenda politically cannot mean defeating one of these governments or the party combines in an election. Yet this is the form the debate takes because of the limited available political mechanisms.  Today, it is essential that the political debate transcends the existing mechanisms and takes up a program that will create organs of power in the hands of the people in a fundamentally new way. 

Today, all those who are today fighting – the workers of Modern foods, the workers of BALCO, the farmers of Karnataka, the plantation workers of Kanya Kumari, fighters of Narmada valley, the rights activists from Warangal to Imphal, the scientists and academics opposing military research, the women fighting against globalization, the intelligentsia fighting for enlightenment and egalitarianism and the youth and students who are the future of society constitute a powerful force that can bring forward such a pro-social program. Objectively, this movement has begun to challenge the privatization and liberalization program frontally and that is seen in the desperation of the big business houses of India who have stepped up their communal pogroms and state repression against the people to disorient them. The space created by the US government to push the anti-social agenda in the post September 11 period has emboldened the Indian authorities, and they are so punch-drunk that they have launched a wave of fresh attacks in the latest budget, directed against the middle strata whom they had wooed so carefully until now and the peasantry that they treated as the vote block. 

Experience tells that the middle strata, in spite of appearing as the main instrument of the big business houses to continue their brutal rule on the masses, also aspires for the high road of civilization, for the ideals of sarva jana sukhina bhavantu and is an integral component of the movement for a pro-social program.  This creates a favorable condition for unifying all the forces opposed to the privatization and liberalization agenda and the AIPSG thinks that this conference is well-positioned to create the necessary mechanisms for uniting the movement as it leads it in practice. The key question of leadership is to imbue the individual struggles with the new vision and the new responsibilities these struggles have for the future of India.

In the assessment of the AIPSG, no other country in the world is in a better position than India to make or break the privatization-liberalization agenda at this time. This is so because the political space for the people to operate is wide open due to the objective situation India finds itself in the world today. The latest attempt by the Congress party to exploit the growing opposition for its own narrow aims is a move to close this space, and is a warning sign that needs to be countered.  But it does not the change the objective fact that India and South Asia are at the centre of today’s geopolitical developments. The whole world today looks at the low level of social development in India as a curse on the human race and the people of the world are ready to support the struggle of the Indian people to overcome this curse. 

The strivings of the Indian business houses to turn India into a big power, whether in collusion with the US or in contention with it, has taken the mask off India, which had presented itself as a pro-people regime since 1947 on the world stage. India’s social system has not yet been destroyed thoroughly and people are willing to fight to preserve the existing social fabric and to modernize it to meet their current needs. Coalescing of the people’s forces around a common program to take India forward on the basis of people’s empowerment is not only the need of the hour but has the best chance of success. We are convinced that this conference will rise to the occasion and take up this challenge as it drafts its resolutions to march forward.

In conclusion, the AIPSG considers this conference as an extremely important forum to involve the workers and other toiling masses of India to sum up the experience of the last ten years of the liberalization and privatization program, and wishes it full success as it charts the future course. We await eagerly to hear of the decisions made by this conference that would also be of immense value for our own work towards the empowerment of the people.

Sincerely, 
[signed]