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Jan Chetna Yatra walked from Kolkata to reach PM Modi’s constituency Varanasi yesterday. When despair has taken place of hope among exploited and oppressed sections of our people, let us pick up once again the torch of revolutionary change.
— Shambhavi Sharma and Sourya Majumder
हिन्दी में पढ़ने के लिए क्लिक करे।
Putki Chowk in the outskirts of Dhanbad district could be entirely unremarkable on a Tuesday afternoon. Carts hawk fried kachori and samosa to the few girls coming out of the government senior secondary school at the crossroad.
It was here that, in 1990, a large gathering of unionised coal workers had temporarily halted the advance of LK Advani’s rath yatra on the way to the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. That the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led government in undivided Bihar arresting the then-BJP minister in Samastipur is well known. All that remains as a memory of this act of working class militancy is a tattered green and red union flag fluttering atop the chowk pole.
It was here, last Tuesday, that a new slogan was heard. ‘Advani ka rath roka tha, Adani ka bhi rokenge’ (We had stopped Adani’s chariot, we will stop Advani’s too).
This was coming from a group gathered around loudspeakers tied to a pick-up van wrapped with banners of ‘Jan Chetna Yatra’.
This roadside meeting is one of the many being held on the way from Kolkata to Prime Minister Modi’s constituency Varanasi. Starting on December 6, the day the historic mosque was demolished, Jan Chetna Yatra is being organised by more than 25 small and large organisations representing workers, farmers, students and youth, women, Adivasis, Dalits, Gandhians and other sections of the population fighting the new corporate fascist regime in India today.
“Fascism cannot be debated…”
“… It has to be fought on the streets.” Echoing the famous words of the Spanish militant Buenaventura Durruti who died fighting against the Franco dictatorship, Kushal Debnath from Mazdoor Kranti Parishad repeated this by way of conclusion at a convention held by the Yatra in Patna’s Gandhi Sangrahalaya on Wednesday. Many of those who spoke underscored that while voting out the Bharatiya Janata Party is necessary, this cannot succeed without the coming together of organised people’s resistance.
Arvind Sinha, a worker leader who came of age during Bihar’s Sampoorna Kranti movement against the Emergency, highlighted how authoritarian and personality-centric tendencies have developed in several ruling parties in India over the last three decades. What separates the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP is its organisational structure and distinctly fascist ideology, Sinha emphasised.
Many of the forces who had earlier initiated a campaign called ‘No Vote to BJP’ in the run-up to the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections joined the Jan Chetna Yatra in the state. Starting from Kolkata’s Esplanade, where the earlier campaign had culminated, the march passed through Howrah, Hooghly, Bankura and Purulia districts. It is here that the questions of deindustrialisation and the resultant migration for work from the region resonated most with by-standers.
It has been nine years since the Modi government launched the ‘Make in India’ scheme to draw private investors and announced a slew of freebies, tax cuts and other incentives to corporates with the promise of generating employment. Finance ministry data shows that the share of corporate tax in total tax revenue reduced from 34.5% in 2014-15 to 24.7% in 2021-22. Instead of the two crore new jobs every year, promised before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, there has actually been a slight dip in labour force participation in manufacturing since then. Jobs in the organised sector actually halved between 2016 to 2021. Decades of governmental neglect to jute, textile, hosiery and other traditional labour intensive sectors which boosted India’s first industrialisation experiments have resulted in factory lock-outs as a result of units being declared ‘sick’.
Land, labour, culture
DS Gohain came to Bokaro Steel City as a CISF jawan from Assam in 1977. Two years later, when a month-long mutiny within the paramilitary ranks over pay and service conditions was crushed by bringing in the Indian Army, he was among the 200 jawans given a life sentence which was later commuted. Since then, Gohain has spearheaded various Adivasi contract worker’ struggles for better working conditions as part of the Jharkhand Krantikari Mazdoor Union.
Speaking to one of the writers, Gohain mentioned how the influence of the RSS has grown over the years. While riots in neighbouring Hazaribagh district during Ramnavami processions has become almost an annual event, even Bokaro was not spared of the flames in 2016 when Bajrang Dal vandalised Muslim-owned shops and beat up a resident. Once a stronghold of firebrand trade unionist AK Roy, the BJP has comfortably won in the Dhanbad Lok Sabha constituency since 2009. Bokaro, with the highest number of voters among the general assembly segments, remains crucial.
Meanwhile, in the Parasnath Hills (alternately known as Marang Buru) hardly 60 kilometres away, the Hemant Soren-led JMM government has been on the back foot. A controversy erupted here after chicken bones were found near a Jain shrine. The JMM blamed a 2019 notification by the previous BJP state government for converting the site into an eco-tourism range, in a bid to placate Jain sentiments. This soft peddling has raised concerns among the Santhals who have revered the mountain as a deity and see this as a ploy to takeover their ancestral lands.
The rising threats to Adivasi culture under BJP rule, in addition to the plunder of natural resources and the devastation of the local ecology, are widely shared. This was reiterated by members of the Bauri Lokshilpi Association, who had joined the Jan Chetna Yatra rally as it entered Bokaro and put up a Chhau dance performance. The folk artistes have been organising for government recognition and support to their ancestral form of theatre. Their livelihoods are on the line.
Fields, factories, streets
Ashok ji, endearingly called Neta ji in Rohtas and Sasaram districts in Bihar, is a name that invokes a certain unease among the police administration even today. It was here even as late as the early 2000s that he had led the capture of many absentee landholdings to redistribute them among Dalit farm workers. When we eat in a Musahar Tola near Bhabua, it is with the satisfaction of knowing that the 120 bigha (roughly 74.4 acres) we are on was seized from landlords. When the Yatra enters Sasaram city, even a stray policeman joins in the rally with raised fists.
Today, even those with some land to their name in Bihar migrate far and wide seeking employment. With the growing costs of chemical fertilizers, high-yielding seeds, mechanized cultivation and irrigation as well as the lack of government procurement or marketing channels, agriculture has become a losing bargain for large parts of the country. The ₹6,000 debited annually to farming families under PM KISAN, as the central government’s Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi is better known, has proved thoroughly insufficient. This is why the most densely populated state in India is also the largest source of out-migration in the country.
At such a time, those like Ashok ji who once struggled for land are now turning their attention to education. Government jobs are a ticket to upward social mobility, comically illustrated in the media by news items on how a government teacher in Vaishali was abducted at gunpoint from his classroom to marry the kidnapper’s daughter. The Bihar government’s decision in October to strike off the names of 20 lakh school children who remained absent for more than three consecutive days has come as a major blow. This concern was widely discussed in roadside meetings held in Gaya, Konch, Daudnagar, Nasriganj and Nokha.
As the team of yatris march on towards Uttar Pradesh there is palpable tension. The next night stop is at Chandauli, a forested region which was the hotbed of several struggles against landlordism up to the 1970s, adjacent to Varanasi. Will the marchers enter PM Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency on December 20, where it is set to culminate in another public convention?
In June this year, a Kabir Yatra organised by several Bunkar (or weaver) organisations in the city was stalled by the UP Police. The Bhakti saint came from the Bunkar community and is closely associated with the identity of his hometown, Kashi. Permission for a mass gathering was withdrawn at the final moment citing the Prime Minister’s arrival in the city for a G20 photo-op. On December 17, another visit from the Prime Minister meant house arrest for progressive activists. The iconoclast socialist Aflatoon Desai, who calls the city home, was detained on the way to join a gathering of Samyukt Kisan Morcha on December 17. Last December, another group associated with the Jai Kisan Andolan were detained at Varanasi when they were on the way to Khiriya Ka Bagh in Azamgarh, where several villages are resisting forcefully acquisition of farmland for a new airport. Several Gandhians were taken into custody in July when they tried to stop the demolition of 12 buildings associated with satyagrahi Vinoba Bhave’s Sarva Seva Sangh. More than 70 people have been taken in for interrogation or arrested by the Anti Terrorism Squad in connection with the ban on the Popular Front of India.
Amid heavy intelligence deployment, the Yatra snakes its way through Saidpur in Chandauli, with a cultural program among its peasants to remember the Kakori martyrs Ashfaqullah Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil and Roshan Singh on December 19. Finally, it reaches the iconic Lanka Gate of Benaras Hindu University in Varanasi with red flags waving on the streets. The program culminates, welcomed by Nishad, Bunkar and Mallah groups. Their livelihoods have been integral to the historic city but they face extermination in the face of aggressive monopoly chains which threaten to wipe out traditional small-scale production.
Hundreds of ordinary people came forward to take our parchas, waited an extra half hour to hear the sabhas. Their energy came from the hundreds of revolutionaries, dispersed, who live unwritten, ordinary lives holding on to the red flag across the country. Their eyes hold the dream that a different world is possible. What does this tell us about the invincibility of the fascist bulldozer which has today started eroding even the last semblance of Parliamentary democracy in India?
The prevailing atmosphere is of despair, not acquiescence, with the grand anti-democratic project of the RSS. This is a hopelessness born over three decades, seeing an ascendant corporate class along with their cheerleader governments of various hues rolling back our people’s collective power. A long night awaits us ahead. Without rebuilding this collective strength, in factories, farmlands and the streets, no messiah can dam the fascist stream.
This is an invitation for that long march.
Organizations participating in the Jan Chetna Yatra: Akhil Hind Forward Bloc (Krantikari), Azad Gan Morcha, BAFRB, Bihar Nirman va Asangathit Shramik Union, Chaybagaan Sangram Samiti, Communist Cente of India, CPI-ML (Class Struggle), CPI-ML (New Democracy), CPI-ML (Revolutionary Initiative), Feminists in Resistance, Janvadi Lok Manch, Marxvadi Coordination Committee, Mazdoor Kranti Parishad, Nagrik Adhikar Raksha Manch, PCC CPI-ML, PDSF, Shramjibi Nari Manch, Struggling Workers Coordination Committee
Com. Shambhavi Sharma is General Secretary and Com. Sourya Majumder is Joint Secretary of COLLECTIVE Delhi State Committee.
