Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury on Saturday alleged that the BJP government was dividing the working class using Hindutva so that it could push its ‘reforms’, which would help corporate entities and foreign investors.
Inaugurating the 4th conference of the Bank Employees’ Federation of India – Karnataka here, Mr. Yechury said bankers should see through the “cocktail of economic reforms and Hindutva” and stay united.
His party would raise the issue in Parliament, while workers should create awareness about it as reforms and Hindutva was “the weapon that India has created under (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi”.
Mr. Yechury, a Rajya Sabha member, said religion was being imposed on the people of a country that had the second largest population of Muslims in the world. Consequently fundamentalism was growing among both Muslims and Hindus, one fuelling the other and dividing people.
He claimed that the government had sought to waive a Rs. 68,000-crore debt of corporate entities.
Its “next-generation fiscal reforms” sought to bring in foreign investors into sectors such as insurance in which people have invested their money in thousands of crores, and thereby played a key role in the Five-Year plans. To ensure that the working class did not oppose these reforms, the BJP and RSS sought to divide them, he claimed.
The proposal to reduce 10 per cent of non-plan expenditure would result in reduction of government funds to key social welfare programmes, including housing and employment schemes, and especially the MNREGA, he said.
The government was harping on Swachh Bharat only to divert people’s attention from its failure to bring back black money, Mr. Yechury claimed.
K. Srinivas Babu, president of BEFI-Karnataka and chairman of reception committee B.J. Bhandary were present.
