Citizens call for broad unity of secular democratic forces 

Ludhiana: Having failed to meet people's aspirations on all the fronts the government has resorted to dangerous actions to polarize the society on communal lines. The Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) and now the talk of NPR and the NRC is an outcome of that policy design. Various participants in a brain storming session on the “long term impact of CAA, NPR and NRC” organized here by the Social Thinker Forum and Association for Democratic Rights Ludhiana on January 3 iterated  that the citizenship to the persecuted from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh on the basis of religion is not only unconstitutional but an extremely dangerous retrograde aimed at negating the very idea of secularism and democracy that our freedom fighters stood for. NPR and NRC  are a cover  to defranchize  citizens is a biased way of their  voting rights by marking them as “Doubtful”. This is amply clear from the process as implemented in Assam. Design of detention camps  may become exploitation of labour of poor citizens as the history of German and Italy has shown. This is violation of Article 14 of our constitution which stands for secularism and democracy.  This has been done purposefully to alienate the Muslims and thereby polarize the society and create communal riots and move ahead to make a Hindu Theocratic state of India. But the people of India have recognized their designs and maintained communal harmony. Role of students in this regard is particularly laudable.  People have also by now known that the RSS and its outfits the then Jan Sangh (Now BJP) have been British touts and have not uttered a single slogans against the British. As their leader Dr Munje said in 1946 that by siding with British rulers when freedom is being granted “we will built a Hindu British Empire” .Therefore they have no respect for constitution of the country which stands for love, brotherhood and respect for all beliefs, religions, castes and creeds.
People of India fought for 200years to establish a peoples Republic ,in which the needs and benefit  of all citizens irrespective of caste , creed and religion will be taken care. So people elected government, duty is to serve the people interest. Today  situation is that present government is taking care of their own narrow interests and promoting the private interest of the corporates .The result is that there is great inequality in the society , The constitutional promise of keeping the state rule to built society on the principles of “ Equality, Liberty  , fraternity   and Justice” on the basis of secularism ,i.e mutual respect for every one's belief . But today inequality is as bad as in the British period . The corporates are given Lakh crore of rupees concession but common man is given the gift of raised prices . The new year gift of raised prices is one of many gifts to the commoner. The savings of common families are cheated away by “demonetisation “  and cheating students of not deploying 90000 crore of cess collected from public for higher education but instead imposing unfair higher fees so that commoner could not get higher education , Similarly cess collected for primary education has not been deployed to basic education . If see closely this BJP government more than any earlier government is acting against the common person.
The people were agitating against the government's failures to provide jobs , education, health care to all, remuneration to the farmers, minimum wages to all the workers, basic minimum needs of the agricultural labour,  security for women and above all round development of the nation. The impact of demonetization is visible now with the GDP growth rate falling to negative as per some leading economists.  This was drawing sharp reactions from the people and it became necessary for the government to divert the attention. The participants condemned the brutal use of police on the peaceful protesters in the states ruled by the BJP. This has clearly proved their intentions. It is time that all progressive secular democratic forces of all hues oppose such moves and stand united to defeat the fascist forces. Only a secular democratic unity of the people of India with inclusive growth  can advance the nation. Let us demand that government do its duty towards common man to raise his economic benefits and ensure free health care and free education.
“We call for broader democratic unity to fight the ill design which is against commoner and poor hard working peoples”, they said.
Those who participated in the deliberations include Prof. Jagmoan Singh, Dr Arun Mitra, Dr Balbir Shah, M S Bhatia,  Dr Gagandeep Singh, Dr Param Saini, Charan Sarabha, Kartika Kathuria.