example, elections were held recently in Patna University after a gap of nearly three decades. Even in a campus like Jawaharlal Nehru University known for its democratic environment, elections could not be held for four years thanks to the unreasonable and undemocratic restrictions imposed by the Lyngdoh Committee. AISA has been in the forefront of the student movement for restoration and expansion of campus democracy.
12. The right to work remains conspicuously absent in our constitutional charter of fundamental rights. The much trumpeted MNREGA, touted as the world’s biggest employment guarantee programme, makes a mockery of the concept of employment guarantee. Unemployment allowance is used as a paltry occasional dole to win elections in a state or two, and the growing army of the unemployed has absolutely no provision of social security. The fight for securing the fundamental right to dignified employment and adequate unemployment allowance for periods without employment therefore remains a key task of the youth movement.
13. With higher education or professional training courses becoming increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible, millions of young people have to go in for whatever jobs are available. These jobs are mostly contractual, involving heavy work-loads and long hours of work in lieu of extremely insufficient income. Regularisation of employment and improvement in wages and working conditions remains the central concern for these young workers. The youth movement must address this central concern in close cooperation with concerned trade unions.
14. Issues like mass education, public health and sanitation, civic amenities, energy, public transport, environmental justice and disaster management must also figure prominently as important concerns of the student-youth movement. We are passing through a paradoxical situation in which urbanisation is going on in an unplanned manner without adequate and appropriate infrastructure or minimal civic amenities. Instead of taking responsibility for filling these gaps, the neo-liberal state is busy privatising every essential service. Rural areas are of course far more neglected in terms of infrastructure, basic services and civic amenities. The fight for basic amenities, affordable housing and functional services has therefore assumed paramount importance and the youth movement must respond accordingly.
15. The student-youth movement inspired by the Naxalbari tradition has always been driven by the dream of radical social transformation. Integration with the working people and their struggles, especially with the rural poor, has therefore been a cardinal principle for revolutionary youth vanguards. While taking up the whole range of immediate and key issues concerning the overwhelming majority of students and youth, and trying to broaden the base of the movement, vanguard activists must continue to uphold and practise this basic revolutionary principle. In the present phase, the student-youth movement must boldly stand by the peasant-adivasi resistance to corporate land-grab and mining loot and the working class movement for industrial democracy and trade union rights.
16. Afraid of the huge potential of united assertion of the
youth, the ruling classes constantly try to divide the youth along
caste, communal, linguistic and regional lines. Maharashtra has
seen the ugliest kind of chauvinistic politics systematically targeting and attacking young job-seekers and migrant workers from Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.
The sinister SMS-campaign in the wake of the Kokrajhar violence in Assam and the resultant panic has revealed the vulnerability and insecurity experienced by students and young migrant workers from the North-eastern region.
