Left To Launch All India Protest Against Note Ban

The Left today issued a call for an all-India protest against the "growing agonies" of the people due to demonetization of the Rs. 1,000 and Rs. 500 currency bills.

CPI General Secretary S Sudhakar Reddy, CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, CPI Secretary D Raja, CPI(ML) Liberation General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya and Forward Bloc Secretary Devarajan attended a meeting that decided to launch the agitation.

In the meeting, they recalled that over 70 people had reportedly died as an indirect consequence of the decision. The working class including the lower middle class, fishermen, farmers, daily wage labourers, MNREGA workers, farmers and the bulk of rural India that relied on cash transactions as the only medium of exchange, had been put through miseries, they said.

"As the Central government has overlooked the miseries of the common man, the Left has decided to launch a week long mass mobilization from November 24 to 30," they added.

The Central government had not done its homework and rolled out the decision recklessly, they said. The general public was not even able to carry out day-to-day transactions without borrowing money, as they did not have hard cash, the Left leaders alleged.

"Under these circumstances, we demand that the Central government permit the use of Rs. 1,000 and Rs. 500 notes for all legal and legitimate transactions till December 30, 2016, or until alternative arrangements are put in place and the required quantity of new currency notes are available," the CPI leaders said.

The cooperative banks, the lifeline of rural financial activity, must be allowed to transact all banking activity, the meeting said, and added that they want the government to waive all farmer loans immediately and also recover over Rs. 11 lakh crores NPAs by confiscating properties of and investigate the revelations of the Sahara-Birla papers, and initiate criminal proceedings.

They also urged the Centre to annul double taxation agreements with tax havens, and publish the names of foreign account holders and produce them in Court.