Wednesday, March 30 2005 20:50 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Chandigarh: The Left parties today (Mar 30, 2005) launched a sharp attack on ruling Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) at the Centre accusing it of "marginalizing" them and for pursuing economic reforms and gave a call for working towards a political and economic alternative.

Addressing the inaugural session of CPI's Congress in Chandigarh, top leaders of the Left, including CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist), RSP (Republican Socialist Party) and Forward Bloc, suggested keeping the doors open to regional parties, agreed on a "higher level of unity" among them and to work for expanding their spheres of influence in Hindi heartland and western parts of the country.

CPI general secretary A B Bardhan and his CPM counterpart Harkishen Singh Surjeet and other Left leaders said their support to UPA was a "political necessity" but such backing was not for ever as it can be reviewed if the alliance deviated from the common minimum programme.

Bardhan said although Congress has accepted the inevitability of coalition at the Centre, "many of its leaders remain in old mindset and were trying to expand their political space ignoring other allies of UPA and the Left parties."

RSP leader Abani Roy alleged Congress' design was to weaken the Left parties in West Bengal and charged the party with hobnobbing with Trinamool Congress for this.

Bardhan said despite some corrective steps taken by the UPA regime particularly in the sphere of education, foreign policy and agriculture, "we are under no illusion. The UPA Government is a bourgeois Government."

"The economic outlook and policies of this Government - Congress as also its allies - are to go ahead with the so-called economic reforms, which in effect mean carrying through liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation," Bardhan said adding "this is the basis of contradiction and conflict that we find in our relation with Government".

Surjeet said, "It seems to believe that continuing with economic reforms with a human face is the panacea for the country's problems. We do not share this approach."

"The entire course of liberalisation since the 1990s has shown an inhuman face whereby only ten per cent of the people have benefited at the expense of the rest," he said.

Surjeet said the joint effort of the Left will "enable us to rally other democratic forces which is necessary to build the Left and Democratic Alternative". The CPM leader also called for a "relentless fight both political and ideological against the Hindutva and the communal platform".

The draft political resolution circulated at CPI Congress charges the Congress party with "wanting to corner the Communist parties and marginalizing them as far as possible".

It says Congress leaders "have not fully learnt a lesson from the defeat of the P V Narasimha Rao Government in the mid 1990s as also the fall of the Vajpayee led NDA (National Democratic Alliance)."

"After touching the lowest depth in terms of number of seats in Parliament in previous three elections, Congress party has accepted the inevitability of both pre-poll and post-poll coalitions with other secular forces. Its attitude towards the Communist parties, however, remains one of trying to marginalize them as much as possible," says the resolution.