The stirring message of the historic march of more than half a million workers in Delhi on 23rd February was echoed in follwoing word's by Sitaram Yechury, CPI(M) leader in Parliament on the same day.
The deep sense of disquiet emerges out of the fact that while we are today debating hon’ble President’s Address to the Joint Session of both the Houses of Parliament, lakhs of workers are outside on the streets of Delhi beseeching the Parliament of India to take remedial measures and to put the pressure on the Executive and the Government to redress some of their grievances. Lakhs of people are on the streets. They have not come here on any sight-seeing. They left their families and travelled thousands of miles to be here in order to tell us that living conditions of our people are abysmally deteriorating.
This Government has achieved an impossible task. It has actually united all the trade unions across the spectrum. This is a task for which I would like to thank the Government for having united all the trade unions; all of them have come together today to Delhi to raise their specific issues which are absolutely essential for the living conditions of our people. We have to remember the warning that Dr. Ambedkar gave gave us when he presented the draft of this Constitution to the Constituent Assemble. On the 25th November 1949 when he was commending this draft Constitution for adoption, he said,”In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one-man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove these contradictions at the earliest possible moment, or else, those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy, which this assembly has so laboriously built up.” Today, you have lakhs of workers in the streets of Delhi but if you do not pay heed to this warning given by Dr. Ambedkar, tomorrow, you will have crores of them.
Will the Government get the message of this simmering anger and discontent of the working class or face Tahrir square in India?
Courtesy: www.citucentre.org/
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