The Manmohan Singh-led government is a boat with a hole that is bound to sink, according to the former West Bengal Chief Minister and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.
“Manmohan Singh is only too well aware that his government is not in a good position and is somehow managing to survive…What one sees is an impending crisis in the country,” he said on Sunday at a conference of party workers at Arambagh in Hooghly district.
Pointing out that capitalism was facing crisis across the world, he said the working classes in several capitalist countries were taking to the streets in protest against the policies of their governments.
“The United States of America is in the grips of a recession. Industries are closing down; there is stagnation in production in others. Unemployment is growing in countries like the U.S. and Japan…Banks have become bankrupt in some capitalist countries and in Greece the government had become bankrupt,” he noted.
“The people’s struggles in these countries are of some benefit to us and the fight the protesters have taken up is in line with ours….We are fighting capitalism in our country and over the past two years the struggle against it has also intensified across the world,” he said.
“The Manmohan Singh government has been taking the very path that the protests in the U.S. were directed at,” he said, even while criticising the Centre for its “trickle-down theory” that governed its economic policies.
“It is very difficult for the Congress to survive and the Bharatiya Janata Party cannot be an alternative, as both have the same policy…In such a situation the Left parties are on the search for new friends that favour the Left’s alternative policies that will determine the alternative path,” Mr. Bhattacharjee said.
The Left parties were demanding the introduction of a universal public distribution system regardless of the above poverty line/below poverty line distinction, he pointed out.
