NEW
DELHI - The Left Front will push for legislation on
behalf of farmers and peasants who continue to live in
conditions akin to bonded labor, says Harkishan Singh
Surjeet, general secretary of the Communist Party of
India - Marxist (CPIM).
"We have to work out
schemes that ease the burden of debt and high interest
rates on farm loans," said Surjeet. He was referring to
the phenomenon of mass suicides by farmers in several
states and stories of starvation deaths amid bumper
harvests and grain exports that benefited traders during
the past government.
Whatever the final shape of
the Common Minimum Program (CMP) that the United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh comes up with, all UPA partners agree
that an immediate priority is the introduction of a
national employment guarantee act that would legally
guarantee every household at least 100 days of
employment in public work programs.
The
employment-guarantee scheme is backed by Singh, a former
economist with the United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development who worked closely with Nobel
Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and the late Mahbub
ul-Haq, the Pakistani economist who devised the
human-development reports of the UN Development Program.
Surjeet said the Left Front would prefer that
the number of employed days per year per family be
increased to 150 to make it closer to International
Labor Organization standards. "We are going to revive
the rural cooperative credit scheme to ensure the easy
flow of badly needed rural credit that would reach small
and marginal farmers," Surjeet said.
He said the
advances made by India in providing global
information-technology services and business process
outsourcing during the previous government would be
continued. "The main difference is that our emphasis
will be on all-round development and not skewed in favor
of urban populations while neglecting the rural masses,"
he explained.
Differences between the Congress
party and the Left Front on economic development are
likely to tempered by a common approach to other issues,
such as the need to counter the Hindu fundamentalism and
right-wing polices of the ousted Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP)-led government.
For his part, new Law
Minister H R Bharadwaj lost no time in announcing that
he would work toward a quick repeal of the dreaded
Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). This is the
draconian anti-terrorist law brought in by the BJP
government in response to a UN call following the
September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.
"We plan to take steps to either repeal or amend this
law," said Bharadwaj of the law that critics say was
grossly misused.
Of the 2,000-odd people
detained under POTA, which does not provide for easy
bail, the vast majority turned out to be from the
minority Muslim community and included politicians,
journalists, social workers, teenagers and elderly
people.
Bharadwaj also promised to examine cases
of partisanship and corruption in state High Courts and
"restore the confidence of the people in the judiciary".
During the just-ended BJP rule, the Supreme
Court has had to censure several state-level courts,
most notably in Gujarat for neglecting to protect the
rights of victims of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in that
state.
This year judges of the Punjab High Court
went on a wildcat strike after investigations were
launched on some of them for having acquired memberships
in a prestigious golf club that had been built on
reserve forest land - and was before them for
adjudication.
Another senior minister in the new
cabinet, Arjun Singh, a crusader for the preservation of
the secular character of the Indian constitution, has
vowed to undo the pro-Hindu changes made in educational
institutions by his predecessor, Murli Manohar Joshi,
now that he is in charge of the Human Resources
Development Ministry.
"He [Joshi] has messed up
the whole thing by trying to communalize education. We
will have to see what rectification we can do," Singh
said. He was referring to the changes Joshi made in
various faculties of leading institutions to accommodate
scholars and academics who had little merit except for
toeing his pro-Hindu line.
Arjun Singh said he
was looking at raising public spending on education to
at least 6 percent of gross domestic product and making
half the funds available to primary and secondary
education, in order to reverse the skewed priority of
previous decades.
The true direction of the new
government will be clear when the annual budget, delayed
to hold the elections, is presented in June.
