CPI-M to spearhead nationwide agitation against price rise

KASARAGOD: CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat today said his party would join hands with other Left secular parties to launch a nationwide agitation against the Centre's "anti-people" policies.

An announcement to this effect would be made tomorrow after consulting other Left secular minded parties, he told reporters here.

Karat said CPI-M would organise a nationwide rally on March 12 to protest the "unprecedented" price hike of essential goods, unemployment and "anti-farmer" policies being pursued by the UPA Goverment.

He said the oil price hike announced in the Union budget would lead to a spurt in the general price leve, even as the Centre announced tax sops worth Rs 80,000 crore to 'please' the affluent and imposed additional taxes worth Rs 70,000 crore on the common man.

Karat also said the CPI-M was against divisions of states as it would only result in harming India's federal set up.

He was speaking at a seminar got up by the party'd as part of the birth centenary celebrations of CPI(M) veteran E M S Namboodiripad, who headed the first Communist Ministry in Kerala in 1957.