Speakers at the 21st All India Conference of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) focussed on unity of the Left parties to fight the capitalist, fundamentalist and obscurantist forces during the inaugural session of the six-day meet that got underway here on Tuesday.
Communist Party of India General Secretary Suravaram Sudhakar Reddy set the tone speaking on need for unity of the Left parties which have the responsibility to safeguard the rights of the workers, peasants, minorities, intellectuals and artists.
The Left parties have to fight the cultural terrorism of the right wing fundamentalists like the Sangh Parivar, who were attacking writers, actors and demanding scrapping of history text books, he said. “Let us accept the challenge to protect them,” he added.
Condemning the increasing incidents of State repression, Polit Bureau member of CPI (ML) Liberation Kavita Krishnan said that the recent incidents of extra-judicial killings of five undertrials in Telangana and 20 woodcutters in Andhra Pradesh represented a culture of impunity.
The good times promised by the BJP Government are only for money bags and communal forces, she said.
"The unity of Left parties is important as it can act as a nucleus of the forces that can be rallied against the neo-liberal economic policies, president of the inaugural session and member CPI (M) Polit Bureau S. Ramachandran Pillai said.
General secretary All India Forward Bloc Debabrata Biswas, general secretary of SUCI ( C) Provash Ghosh, leader of RSP Abani Roy also spoke.
The party congress will focus on the central theme of how to counter the rightwing offensive, to organise struggles and sustained movements of the working class, peasantry, agricultural workers and other oppressed sections of the people.
The party will actively take up social issues and fight for the rights of the women, adivasis, dalits and the minorities, CPI (M) general secretary Prakash Karat said in his address.
