27. Rural struggles must also pay adequate attention to issues like rural roads, electrification, sanitation, health and education. The infrastructure being built by the government is not only woefully inadequate but also corruption-ridden and controlled by the feudal-kulak-bureaucratic nexus. The National Rural Health Mission became a byname for mega-corruption in UP under BSP rule leading to mysterious murders of top health officials and scams are being exposed in Bihar, Jharkhand and several other states as well. Various central and state schemes announced in the name of welfare of minority communities and oppressed and backward castes are also soaked in shallow tokenism and corruption. The rightful beneficiaries of such schemes who are being deceived and deprived in the process must be organized to fight against this deception and to secure their due benefits. While failing to provide basic amenities, almost all state governments are bent upon promoting the liquor business, with legal licences often operating as a front for illicit distillation. As a result there are growing liquor deaths even as governments boast of increased revenue and the parties of the ruling classes collaborate with the liquor mafia. Building a powerful anti-liquor movement must therefore become an integral part of our agenda.
28. Along with the rural administrative network of the central and state governments, the panchayats are playing an increasingly pivotal role in the economics and politics of rural development and various public services and welfare schemes. The network of cooperatives as well as self-help groups also plays an important role in rural life. But thanks to feudal-kulak control, corrupt bureaucratic stranglehold and exorbitant rates of interest, the cooperatives and micro-finance agencies are often spelling greater misery for the rural poor rather than giving them any relief. The fight against corruption and against feudal-kulak-bureaucratic control and for transparency and accountability in these institutions is an important component in the battle for democracy in rural areas. Leading Party committees in rural areas and the entire network of mass organizations – AIALA and AIKM in particular – must work concertedly in this direction.
29. Rural India continues to witness brutal forms of caste and gender-based oppression and violence. Communal forces are also active in rural areas to propagate communal prejudices and fan communal hatred. The questions of human dignity and human rights of the oppressed sections of the society, dalits and women in particular, must therefore be understood as a core agenda of communist rural work. Some crude forms of oppression and violence may have become a thing of the past thanks to sustained and determined resistance, but there can certainly be no room for complacency on this score as brutalities continue to resurface in various spheres of social life. The battle for democracy, dignity and social progress can only be carried forward by relentlessly challenging the feudal-kulak patriarchal hegemony in the countryside.
30. Militant agrarian struggles have been the main source of our mass strength and revolutionary identity. Almost everywhere such struggles have invariably had to face feudal-kulak violence and state repression. In Bihar, feudal-kulak forces formed private armies using caste networks and political patronage and such armies have often enjoyed a high degree of impunity, a veritable immunity from the machinery of law enforcement. This has been borne out by the entire trajectory of the Ranveer Sena right from its inception and the serial perpetration of barbaric massacres to the disbanding of the Amir Das Commission, acquittal of the massacre convicts, and surrender of the state to the fury of Ranveer Sena supporters following the elimination of the Sena chief. In spite of this collusion between the state and the Ranveer Sena, the Party and the revolutionary peasant movement succeeded in overcoming the challenge, by weakening and isolating the Sena and reviving agrarian struggles and broad-based rural mobilisation. The experience of breaking the feudal stranglehold, combating the private armies, the Ranveer Sena in particular, and sustaining broad peasant unity and militant peasant struggles is an invaluable vindication of the inherent strength of the agrarian programme and practice of revolutionary communists.
