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The AIPF Charter of Struggle

Guarantee of Land, Food, Livelihood

• No to Corporate land grab and land acquisition without prior consent; social and environmental impact assessment and fair compensation and rehabilitation for land- and livelihood-losers; protection of fertile, forest and coastal land.

• Ensure Minimum Support Prices for farmers and subsidised irrigation, power, fertilisers and easy and cheap credit to reenergise agriculture and end farmers’ distress and farmers’ suicides

• Stop retrograde changes in Food Security law, scrap APL/BPL and universalise food security; no to slashing of budget for ICDS

• Stop moves to dismantle MNREGA and other welfare schemes

• Curb price rise in all essential commodities

Affordable, Quality, Equitable Education

  • • Ensure universal right to equitable, good quality education and introduction of a common school system; resist commercialisation and privatisation of schooling as well as higher education; ensure that each and every student in India has access to higher education, without being excluded by high fees and shortage of seats; resist saffronization of education and promote secular and scientific education; protect autonomy of educational institutions, as well as campus democracy and students’ right to hold regular union elections in every campus, in keeping with norms democratically decided by the student bodies themselves and not through undemocratic Lyngdoh Committee-style recommendations.

Affordable, Quality Healthcare and Housing

    • • Ensure universal right to accessible healthcare of the highest quality, and eradication of chronic hunger; save India’s Intellectual Property Rights regime from the ongoing attempts at erosion, ensure easy access to high quality generic medicines; end drug trials and coercive population control policies targeting Indian women.

• Ensure right to housing, power, water and sanitation, as well as social security and pensions for all.

Pro-people Economic Policies

    • • Reverse the policy of taxing the poor to subsidise the rich; tax the rich to spend on the poor.

• Reduce excise duties on petro-products and bring down fuel prices

• No to FDI in insurance, defense and multi-brand retail, disinvestment in PSUs and privatization of natural resources like coal; expand public investment in social and physical infrastructure, stop covert expansion of private monopolies via PPP mode in crucial infrastructure sector.

• Promotion of small and medium enterprises with an accent on employment generation

Removing Corruption, Scams and Black Money

    • • Revert the neo-liberal policy of handing over natural resources, forests and mineral reserves to private corporates, which lies at the heart of present day mega scams and plunder of our natural resources.

• Make public the names of all those with black money stashed in Swiss banks, bring this money back to the country to be used for public welfare, and plug every route (like Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement with Mauritius) for the daily outflow of black money.

Employment with Dignity and Rights

    • • Stop attempts to violate, dilute and erode labour laws and rights in the name of a ‘flexible labour market’; ensure job security and an end to rampant contractualization; strictly implement minimum wage laws and expand minimum wage provisions, uphold full rights to trade unions and collective bargaining.

• Enact a Right to Employment and Sustenance Act with provisions for unemployment allowance, and allowances for widow, old-age and persons with disabilities.

• Recognise artisans, craftsmen, including those in self employment in the informal and unorganised sector with a single identity card enabling them to avail all special benefits in housing, health and education.

Safeguarding Environment

    • • Stop destruction of forests and the environment through dilution of Environmental Regulations and Forest Rights Act; promote sustainable development

• Heed the demands of ongoing struggles against nuclear projects, big dams and other anti-people projects; stop dilution of nuclear suppliers’ liability and expansion of nuclear power; explore sustainable energy alternatives.

Freedom from Communal and Casteist Violence

    • • Act firmly to stop communal campaigns to conduct ‘ghar wapsi’ and spread the ‘love jehad’ myth; arrest and prosecute those responsible for hate speeches and communal and sectarian violence; enact a law against communal violence that holds the political and govt authorities in command accountable for preventing such violence.

• Punish sponsors and perpetrators of all cases of caste massacres, communal pogroms, custodial killings and rapes. End the inordinate delay in justice process and compensation for the victims of 1984 anti-Sikh and 2002 Gujarat pogroms; as well as victims of massive caste- communal massacres of Bathanitola, Laxmanpur Bathe, Tsundure, Hashimpura and other such atrocities.

Defending Democratic Rights: Scrapping Draconian Laws, Rejecting Communal and Racist Profiling

    • • No to attacks on democratic rights and freedom of expression; repeal draconian laws like AFSPA, UAPA and the sedition law;

• Take stringent measures to put an end to rampant custodial torture and killings and the witch-hunt of minority youth and adivasis in the name of combating terrorism

• Withdraw false cases and release activists and innocent people who have been languishing in jail

• Enact a law against racist discrimination and violence.

Reforms in Police and Army

    • • Implement police reforms, to make the police accountable to constitutional norms

• Institute an Army Reforms Commission; restrict use of army internally to humanitarian purposes, not internal security; thorough study of adverse effects on army organisations due to prolonged deployment in internal security in last two decades; reforms in army service conditions, welfare and rehabilitation.

Ensuring Women's Freedom and Autonomy, Rights and Dignity of all Gender Identities and Expressions

    • • Take measures to curb all forms of violence against women; uphold the unfettered autonomy of women; act sternly to prevent moral policing, imposition of dress codes or attempts to restrict women’s freedom of mobility or choice of partner; implement all recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee; Enact 33 percent reservation bill for women in parliament and state assemblies; crisis centres and shelters for survivors of gender violence; recognition, rights and social security for all sections of women workers.

• Scrap Section 377 and ensure equal rights and dignity for lesbian, gay, transgender and queer people; implement the Supreme Court’s recommendation of recognition and welfare measures for transgender people.

Rights, Justice, Dignity and Welfare of Oppressed Castes, Nationalities and Minorities

    • • Uphold social justice for dalits, adivasis and backward communities; defend existing quotas and ensure their proper implementation in education and jobs and extend reservations to the Private sector; implement recommendations of Sachar committee and Ranganath Mishra Commission.

• Ensure proper implementation of Prime Minister’s New 15 Point Programme and redesigning of Multi-sectoral Development Programme (MSDP) to deliver benefits to the smaller concentration of target groups, make public and implement the Kundu committee recommendations on diversity index.

• Instituting an Equal Opportunity Commission.

Safeguarding Citizen's Right to Privacy

  • • Scrap the Aadhaar scheme that violates citizens’ privacy; put an end to all attempts to link the Aadhaar card to welfare schemes.

Statehood and Autonomy

  • • Sympathetic consideration of popular agitations around well-founded demands for creation of new states; provision of greater powers and autonomy for backward regions; formation of second states reorganisation commission.

Electoral Reforms

  • • Switch to a system of proportional electoral representation; no to corporate or institutional funding of political parties and elections; bring expenditure directly incurred by parties and by other surrogate means under the EC scanner and fix a ceiling for such expenditure; bring political funding under RTI; right to recall.

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