NEW DELHI, 10 April 2005 — The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made no difference to the lives of people in nine months its has been in power, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), one of the coalition partners, said here yesterday.
“There is not much change at the ground level (after the UPA came to power),” said CPI-M leader Prakash Karat on the third day of the party’s 18th congress here.
In a resolution titled “agrarian crisis and struggles of peasants and agricultural workers” adopted at the meeting, the CPI-M alleged that the government had failed on various fronts.
“The government’s policy has failed to deal with the enormous human consequences of drought, flood and natural disaster,” the resolution said. “If financial liberalization has damaged the formal sector credit in rural areas, changes in banking policy have had a disastrous effect on the debt of the poor, placing them increasingly at the mercy of usurious private money lenders,” it said.
The Communists, who support the UPA government from outside, blamed it for bringing in the Seed Bill that seeks to control the quality and marketing of new seeds, saying this was just to help the multinational agri-business corporations. Reiterating that the Communists would still prefer a weak Congress government to a majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, Karat said they would “carry on the struggle against communalism” and fight against the anti-people economic polices of the present government.
Karat said many of the 800-member delegates attending the six-day party congress were concerned about the “severe agrarian distress” that had been sparked off by the liberalization policies of the previous BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. “But they also pointed out that the present UPA government’s policies did not mark any significant departure from the NDA’s policies. They urged that this situation must change,” he said.
The Communist also warned the central government against taking a “unilateral and arbitrary” decision to increase fuel prices. “We won’t accept any unilateral and arbitrary decision to increase petrol and diesel prices,” Karat said.
