Opinion View from the LEFT

“The minister has further talked about corporate investment in school education,joint ventures and public-private-partnerships. Along with this,the minister has expressed his eagerness to bring in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the education sector.”

“FDI in the education sector will be guided by profit and market principles alone. In the field of higher education,Foreign Educational Institutions (FEIs) would design courses which the market needs,create a false impression about their courses through advertisements and charge exorbitantly high fees for courses which have immediate employment potential. By their money power foreign educational institutions would be able to attract the best teachers and financially well-off students from local institutions,affecting them adversely.”

“FDI in education would impede the development of indigenous and critical research within our university education system,aggravate the tendency towards commercialisation and strengthen the stranglehold of neo-liberal ideas in our academia. The FEIs would be concerned about their profits and not about our culture and society,” it notes.

Obstacles in Lalgarh

The issue carries an article by CPI(M) West Bengal State Secretary Biman Basu on the developments in Lalgarh. He argues that Lalgarh has never been a CPI(M) strong hold and goes on to say that the Jharkhand Party,which has been holding the Assembly seat for long,is responsible for the backwardness of the region. Since 1977,assembly elections have taken place in the state seven times and the Left Front-nominated CPI(M) candidates won in 1977,1987,1991— thus only three times from this constituency,and the rest of the occasions the seat went to the Jharkhand Party (Naren Hansda faction). At present,Chunibala Hansda of the Jharkhand Party is the MLA from this constituency,” he says.

“It is a fact that the state Left Front government has already declared in the Human Development Report in 2004 that many of the villages under Binpur assembly constituency (Lalgarh falls in this seat) are backward. The state government through the three-tier Panchayati Raj system,wanted to implement many developmental projects but due to ‘Maoist’ opposition and reluctance of the Jharkhand Party,the efforts of development could not be implemented properly so far.”

“They even opposed the digging of ponds,construction of roads,and went in for destruction of the small bridges; they blew up road rollers,and cement mixture machines used for road construction,and even did not spare the tourism buildings and nearby Panchayat offices,which were blasted. They even stopped the mobile health service to the rural,tribal,and other oppressed sections of the society.

He claims that the same brand of anti-Left forces including ‘Maoists,’ attempted to kill chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and since then formed a frontal organisation called the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities or PCAPA,and started to spread their activities in and around Lalgarh virtually disallowing the normal rule of law.

“They wanted to spread their day-to-day activities in this Gram panchayat area to stop the functioning of the state administration,and to make a small hamlet to be a government within a government,” he said.

Compiled by Manoj C.G.