Challenge is to build an alternative platform

V.V. KRISHNAN

Prakash Karat, general secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist)

The United Progressive Alliance government is getting increasingly discredited. It has utterly failed to curb price rise and solve the basic problems of the people, like unemployment and farmers distress. The UPA and the Congress party have suffered a mortal blow with the spate of corruption scandals. The measures it is seen taking to get out of this crisis is going to cause more harm than FDI in retail trade and trying to cut down subsidies for public goods. At the same time, the Bharatiya Janata Party is also facing increasing difficulties. The Gadkari affair and the earlier episodes in Karnataka show that the BJP is equally mired in corruption. The challenge is how to build an alternative politics which is not influenced by big capital and money and to build an alternative platform which can rally all sections of the working people.

As far as the Left is concerned, we cannot rely on some of the non-Congress secular parties that do not have any consistent alternative policies. The vote in the Lok Sabha disapproving FDI in retail is an example of the opportunism of some of these parties. We do not think a third alternative is possible with such parties as there cannot be a common platform of alternative policies. The only way an alternative to the present set-up will emerge is through developing movements and struggles and building a Left and democratic alliance in the process.

As told to T.K. Rajalakshmi