The historic ‘Daam Bandho Kaam Do‘ [Check Prices, Give Us Jobs] rally, called by the Indian People’s Front (IPF), was held at the Boat Club in Delhi on 8 October 1990. It was the IPF’s first all-India rally, and saw a historic and massive mobilisation of rural poor from across the country demanding employment and an end to the spiralling price rise.
This rally, which brought together the rural poor to fight for their basic rights of livelihood and employment, was held in the national capital at a time when the country was going through tumultuous social, political and economic upheavals. Fascist right-wing forces were whipping up a casteist-communal frenzy across the country around the demand for construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya and against the Mandal commission recommendations for affirmative action to benefit India’s ‘other backward classes’. In the midst of these developments, IPF’s rally, which saw the participation of thousands and thousands of rural poor and youth, demonstrated the growing potential of our movement to organise the most deprived sections of our society for their rights.
