I would like to put forth the people’s social, economic and political demands—a manifesto—in the light of the upcoming state assembly elections in five states:
- Reverse privatisation.
- Restore labour laws.
- Fulfil pending demands of the farmers.
- Restore old names of cities.
- Stop rewarding corrupt, criminal and sycophantic people.
- Restore the sanctity of school, college and university spaces, as well as their secular syllabus.
- Ask for review by the courts on previous verdicts which were unfair.
- Annul the UAPA, AFSPA, Sedition law (Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code), NSA, and PSA. Free all the political activists, students, lawyers, journalists!
- Restore Article 370, statehood of Jammu & Kashmir.
- Abolish CAA-NRC.
- Issues: Ensure 100% employment, education, healthcare and housing for all.
- Remove all the sycophants from police, bureaucracy, judiciary, education and other independent institutions.
- Reduce pay and perks of lawmakers (MPs, MLAs) to one-fourth. Abolish their privileges and pensions.
- Make rape and mob lynching punishable by death penalty.
- Enact laws against the spreading of superstitions, distortion of history and facts and figures, fake news, hate mongering etc.
- Cut the power of judges, no more special powers to top judges, police and military officers, ministers, even the prime minister. No peons or soldiers/sepoys allocated to their houses for personal chores.
- Drastic reforms in jails, make them transparent.
- Order a time-bound commission to look into all the fake encounters and punish the criminal, police officials and ministers who were hand in glove with each other.
- Re-evaluate all the defense deals, make them transparent.
- Implement the Right To Information, Right To Education, Right To Work, Right To Recall, and Jan Lokpal Bill, in letter and in spirit.
- Abolish electoral bonds, the PM Cares Fund and all shady funds.
- Ensure, after coming to power, to make public all the names in Swedish Banks, Panama Leaks and all other foreign banks, where black money is stacked.
- Free military from saffronisation.
- Free all government institutions from hosting religious functions.
- Make anti-defection laws more strict.
- Make all the income of the lawmakers and top officers of government open to the public.
- Ensure that elections are “free and fair”!
These demands, as we can see and appreciate, are impossible to be realised in the present economic, social and political order, which is capitalism.
Even the people and the so-called intellectuals will dump them in garbage bin as “unpractical”. Then, the question is:
Why we are not fighting the system, which is incapable of meeting the basic needs of the working people?
Even worse, the truth of the present system is that it breeds such evils, like unemployment, inequality, ignorance, superstition, terrorism and war, degradation of all human values, as well as climate change.
Why not fight for socialism, which is the natural next stage in human civilisation, albeit it can be realised only through revolution and demands sacrifices?