Agartala, Aug 31 (IANS) The UPA government has been giving opportunities to multi-national and private companies to loot India’s natural resources, including coal, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) General Secretary Prakash Karat said here Friday.
Demanding probe into the coal block allocations, Karat said: “The UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government is providing scope to multi-national and private companies to ransack country’s resources.”
He said that coal industry and coal mines had been nationalised in 1973. “India has the fourth largest coal reserves in the world. Without proper auction and bidding, coal reserves cannot be allocated. Both previous BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and Congress-led governments have been trying to distribute the precious natural resources illegally.”
Karat was addressing a gathering organised in connection with the birth centenary of revolutionary Communist leader Putchalapalli Sundarayya.
Criticising the UPA government’s foreign policy, Karat said that the US has been dictating who should be India’s friend and with whom India should maintain diplomacy.
“Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went to Tehran to attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit, but India, on US pressure, reduced 40 percent oil import from Iran. India-Iran ties were excellent in the past, but have fallen now,” the Marxist leader said.
“Communist movement must be in the Indian context. We must organise rural proletariat. That was the vital agenda of the builder of the communist movement in India (Sundarayya),” he said, adding that India’s first agrarian revolution had initiated by Sundarayya in 1934 in Andhra Pradesh.
The 20th Congress of the CPI-M, held in Kozhikode in Kerala, had decided to hold a year-long observance of the birth centenary of the party’s first general secretary P. Sundarayya from May 1.
Sundarayya was the general secretary of the CPI-M from its inception in 1964 and played a major role in establishing the party as a leading force in the Left movement in the country.
