Thousands march in India

PHOTO: SOCIALIST UNITY CENTER OF INDIA COMMUNIST PARTY

Nearly 100,000 members of the Socialist Unity Center of India (Communist) Party from every major city and town in India converged on the capital city of Delhi in a massive rally on the anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, March 14.

For months before the rally, every SUCI(C) member gathered signatures in a massive organizing campaign. They gathered petitions to present to the Indian government. Thousands of people took month-long treks to cities, towns and “even to remote villages, traveling hundreds of miles to reach out to every citizen.” (suci-c.in).

The party members who went to Delhi brought trunks filled with the 37.5 million signatures they had collected demanding an end to unemployment, high prices for food and transportation, child selling, sex trafficking, privatization, and corrupt connections between the Indian government and the banks and corporations. They demanded an end to the “sordid state of the health and education sectors.” They also opposed any U.S. attempts to “subvert the sovereignty of Iran, North Korea or any other country.”

Though the party had prepared huge tents to accommodate the massive crowd overnight, a storm destroyed the communal kitchens, tents and the facilities for drinking water. But, according to the organizers, there were “no murmurs of discomfort, no dampening of the spirit, no derailment of the firm resolve of organizers, volunteers and participants.” Instead SUCI(C) members called it “an ordeal which served as an occasion to renew their revolutionary mettle.”

Although the participants stopped traffic and hundreds of onlookers surged into the streets to join the protest, no word of the biggest march in Delhi’s history was broadcast on India’s corporate-owned media.