ON-ground mobilisation to make the second 'Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Rally' truly massive in scale is being coordinated by thousands of activists of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), and All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU) for over six months.

LAKHS of workers, farmers, and agricultural workers are preparing to march to Delhi to join the Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh rally organised by the CITU, AIKS and AIAWU. These three organisations have been conducting joint struggles at the state and national levels for the past few years, but the Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh rally has an added importance because it is being organised at a crucial juncture.

THERE is continuing systemic crisis of the capitalist order and its retrograde reflections are visible on all spheres – social, political, economic and in governance. The authoritarian and divisive onslaughts of the ruling classes powered by the corporate-communal nexus with clear fascistic intent are felt on all fronts. And at the same time the voice of disapproval and unrest of working people is becoming louder and widespread, bringing forth the reality of determined organised combat.

THE last full budget of the NDA government continues to be plagued with the idea that “the private capital will ameliorate some of the basic problems of India and that large capital-intensive technologies will usher in development, including inclusive development.”How fallacious is this argument we have seen in the last 3 decades. The structural difference brought in by the Manmohan Singh budget in 1991 was to “shift India’s economy away from the hands of the government to the hands of private enterprise, and embraced free trade.”This was a global phenomenon.

As many as 14 crore agri-labourers make up the biggest economic class in India – and the poorestIN the recently presented Economic Survey for 2022-23, tucked away in the verbiage and data, there is a nugget of information that should shock the conscience of all Indians, whether ruling BJP supporters or not. According to the calculations done by the government’s own economists, real wages – that is, wages adjusted to inflation – of rural labourers are either stagnating or showing a marginal fall over the past over two years.