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The CPI(M) has asked the Centre to withdraw the Ordinance to take over the supervision of 1,540 urban and rural cooperative banks. Terming the move as anti-federal, the party’s Polit Bureau said such a move comes on the 45th anniversary of the Emergency.
A statement from the CPI(M) leadership said the decision has been taken without consulting any of the elected State governments, which supervise the cooperative sector including banks. “This is yet another attack on our country’s federal structure. Such over-centralisation is an assault on one of the basic features of our Constitution and federalism. This destroys the autonomy of the cooperatives,” the statement added.
The party said there are 8.4 crore account holders and ₹4.5 lakh crore in deposits in these banks. It alleged, “It is clear that this BJP central government is also eyeing this huge corpus of money to be siphoned off by it like it did with the RBI reserve fund earlier.” The cooperative sector and its banks are the backbone in many parts of the country, rural areas and particularly agriculture. “With the deposits now being available to be disbursed by the Central government, it is clear that the rich, with greater capacities to borrow, will benefit at the expense of the poor. This will further destroy the support for livelihood of crores of our people,” the Left party claimed.
Coal mines on strike
The party decided to support the three-day countrywide strike by all the federations and unions of coal workers demanding the scrapping of the government’s decision to allow commercial mining of coal by the private sector including foreign entities and the move to privatise public sector coal mining companies.
“This decision is tantamount to completely reversing the nationalisation of coal mining which was undertaken in national interest to ensure energy security of our country. This destroys the self-reliant basis of our economy and converts our country into one of self-subservience to profit maximisation of foreign and domestic private corporates,” the party said in another statement.
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