From the Editor’s desk . . .

 

The Modi juggernaut is marching ahead, wantonly riding roughshod over the Constitution. It is even crushing under it the fundamental pillars of our Constitution—democracy, equality, secularism and fraternity. The federal structure of our country is being demolished. The independence of our most important institutions that can act to protect the Constitution stands compromised. The opposition parties who profess by democracy and secularism are in utter disarray, with many of their senior leaders even willing to jump on the BJP ship. The media has become a servile lapdog.

 

The Modi Government is summarily trashing the Constitutional directives to our policy makers regarding the orientation of our country’s economic and social policies. The country is being run solely and wholly for the naked profiteering of the big corporate houses, both foreign and domestic. Inequality has reached such extreme levels that we have become one of the most unequal countries of the world. The richest 1% of the country’s population has more than half the country’s private wealth. The number of billionaires in the country doubled in just four years, from 56 in 2014 to 119 in 2018, and their total wealth is more than the country’s budget for this year. On the other hand, the bottom 50% of the country’s population owns just 2.4% of the country’s wealth.

 

Due to deliberate government neglect, our education and health systems are in shambles. More than half our children are functionally illiterate. Because of the terrible state of our public health system, crores of people in the country are being pushed down into poverty due to fleecing by private doctors.

 

In a country with the most fertile lands in the world, nearly 40% children suffer from stunting—an indicator of chronic malnourishment. Malnourishment suffered at a very young age impairs mental development of the child for life.

 

Just the increase in the wealth of the country’s billionaires in one year, 2017–18, of Rs 8 lakh crore, is enough money to provide free and good quality education to all our children and universal food subsidy to all people in the country.

 

Unemployment is at unheard-of levels. Probably more than half the population in the country is unemployed or underemployed.

 

These are domestic issues. Together with the world, we are actually facing a far more terrifying crisis, that human civilisation itself is threatened with extinction because of global warming. This crisis has its roots in our entire capitalist developmental model.

 

And yet, the very same people who built the greatest mass movement in the world to win freedom for the country are silent as never before. Their sensibilities have become warped by the propaganda dished out by the media and the trash being circulated by trolls on the social media. They are so busy playing violence-filled video games and watching grisly internet serials on their smart phones that they no longer feel the pain when our fellow citizens are lynched by mobs. The zoom of the high speed motor cycles shown on television has drowned their sensitivities, and so they no longer feel outraged by their own poverty and unemployment.

 

Worse, large numbers of them have fallen prey to the false nationalist and fundamentalist propaganda of the BJP and its parent organisation, the RSS. Forgetting their worsening economic conditions, they are not only voting for it in elections, they ardently believe that Modi is transforming India into a developed and powerful nation.

 

Even more worse, the socialists—the only political force that can fight the fascist and neoliberal  onslaught of the BJP–RSS—are weak and pulverised.

 

We are indeed living in very difficult times.

 

But let us not despair. The present situation, we are very sure, is not permanent. However bad the times are, ultimately, history will march ahead. Our country has seen far more difficult times. During the independence struggle, despite the repression being far more brutal, lakhs of people mobilised and smilingly suffered immense hardships and  ultimately won freedom for the country. Let us have faith in the people of our country, that sooner or later, they will rise above the fascist propaganda and mobilise to build a new world.

 

Let us draw inspiration from the people all over the world—in various parts of the world, after a long period of darkness, socialist forces are on the upswing once again, from Venezuela to Bolivia to Mexico and Argentina, and even in the USA and Britain, challenging the might of the most powerful empire in world history.

 

So, let us not lose hope. Let us stand up for our socialist principles. Let us not manoeuvre and build unprincipled alliances to somehow come to power. Socialism is an honest enterprise. Its ends cannot be obtained by intrigue, cunning, double-dealing.

 

Let us not water down our socialist programme, thinking that if we compromise our principles, we will become a force again.

 

We should not at all do that. For, what do we gain if our voice is heard once again, because our message will no longer be worth hearing? We will have permamently lost our way.

 

Let us do what we can do: live our socialist ideals. As we go about organising people, let us within our unions and groups genuinely implement our socialist ideals—break caste, stand up for gender equality, genuinely create fraternity among all religions, genuinely stand up in defense of minorities, motivate everyone to live a life of simplicity, honesty and self-sacrifice, genuinely implement democratic principles in our organising. Let us speak out honestly and boldly and clearly for what we stand for. Let us proclaim our socialist faith, anywhere and everywhere, to the few or to the many. Let us stop worrying about the size of our movement and think more of its quality. Let us study, let us work hard, let us carry on the struggle to spread our gospel among the people. Let us teach people how capitalism penetrates into every pore of not just the world around us but our personal lives too, and that we will need to fight it everywhere if we are to build a new world. Let us teach socialism to the next generation, let us teach them to dream of a new world, let us teach them that building such a new, alternative, socialist world is possible.

 

This we can definitely do. So let’s do it.

 

With greetings on Independence Day,