New Delhi: For the second day, farmers and workers’ unions staged protests in the state capitals across the country, barring the five poll-bound states, on Monday, November 27, to highlight the issues faced by their communities under the Narendra Modi government.
The three-day protest, which began on Sunday, sought to underline the “lingering acute agrarian crisis and the resultant rural to urban migration of the pauperised peasantry and rural worker masses”. A call was issued for “worker-farmer unity to challenge corporate- communal nexus”.
On the final day, on Tuesday, the protestors would march to Raj Bhavans to submit a charter of demands to the governors.
“The neoliberal policies are the genesis of the agrarian crisis. Its disastrous impacts spoil the lives of not only the peasantry but workers and youth too. The large-scale migration causes conducive environment for unbridled unemployment, large-scale privatisation of public service units (PSUs), contractualisation and denial of basic rights of workers such as minimum wage, employment security, statutory old age pension, right to form association, collective bargaining and the right to strike. Thus eliminating the agrarian crisis has become the joint responsibility of the farmers as well as the workers,” said a press statement released by Samyukta Kisan Morcha, which is organising the protest.
Hitting out at the Modi government, the statement said, “The BJP-led Modi government is unleashing a brutal attack on the lives and livelihoods of the workers and farmers to facilitate corporate exploitation and profiteering. Also, the BJP- RSS combine is relying on communal politics based on hate campign and communal riots to crush the unity of workers and farmers. The growing unity of the farmers and workers only can challenge the twin danger of the corporate-communal nexus and save the country.”
