 Hello and welcome to this week. The elections for the 17th Lok Sabha are scheduled to begin in less than a month and campaigning is already on in full swing. These elections have been termed as one of the most important in the country's history and will feature a battle between two different visions of India. Today, we are joined by Sitaramya Churi, general secretary of the CPIM, to talk about the agenda of the CPIM in the coming elections, as well as the campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP. Thank you for joining us. Mr. Yashini, could you just start by talking about what is the central plank of the campaign of the CPIM during the coming elections? What is the key message the party is taking to the voters? Well, the key message right now is that this government should be removed from office and that is essential according to us because on every single foundational pillar of our constitution, there has been a severe assault and that assault continues to grow. And if they continue to remain in office using the government and the authority, they are mounting this assaults, assaults on secular democracy, assaults on federalism, assaults on social justice, assaults on your economic self-reliance and the livelihood of the people. All these essential points are under severe attack. Therefore, the first priority we have given us is three slogans. One, to ensure the defeat of the BJP and its allies. Two, to strengthen the CPIM and the left in the parliament. This is important in order to influence the policy direction of the government. And three, to ensure that an alternative secular government assumes office at the centre. So for these three, to achieve these three objectives, our general tactical approach would be to maximise the pooling of the anti-BJP votes. So in this context, the Prime Minister started his campaign even before the dates were announced, often being on a spree of inaugurating projects. And he's continuously raised this argument of being a strong leader, leader something he raised in 2014 as well. And there's been a lot of criticism from the BJP about the fact that there's no strong leadership in the opposition. So how would you respond to this? Well, this is a very, very familiar argument. And this is an argument we have continuously seen the BJP put forward because they don't believe in parliamentary democracy. They would want a presidential form. And that suits the artist's fascistic agenda of converting our secular democratic republic into their vision of a Hindu-Rashtra. So that has been their ideological perception. Now, why it's not unfamiliar is that they have raised the same slogan in 2004 when Mr. Vajpayee was the Prime Minister saying that there's no other leader of that stature and India is shining and we want India to proceed further to shine more. And therefore, I mean, the opposition is a kitschy or disaggregated set of people. Then what happened? What did the people decide? You had an alternative government and you had an alternative government that continued for two terms and it continued and the Prime Minister you had was the longest continuous Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru. So this is only a ploy in order to confuse the voters to get them to say that we require the current government to come back. But that is not going to work like it didn't work in 2004. It's not going to work in 2019. And a similar argument is also being raised about the opposition that it's still a bit fractured. It has not got its act together. And even the anti-BJP fronts in several states are still yet to be formed. But more importantly, we must realize that politics is not arithmetic. Putting two and two together may give you four in arithmetic. But in politics, it could give you 22 or it will give you zero also. So therefore just merely coming together of everybody is not really the solution. I mean the various factors that go into it, various inputs that will be considered. And like all in the recent assembly elections itself, one example, I mean that'll prove the point, was in Chhattisgarh when you had a breakaway faction of the Congress and the Bhaujan Samaj Party of Mahavati coming together to form a third alternative there. And you saw the result. I mean the result was that it affected the BJP more adversely than anybody else. So I mean politics is politics. So it has its own dynamics. And there's also been a perception in the aftermath of the recent India-Pakistan tensions that the BJP has got something of a boost. And now this is also another key factor is also that the BJP is using these issues in its campaign very aggressively despite the election commission advising against it. So do you see something of that sort on the ground and how does the opposition bring it back? They're trying to. You see what the Modi government requires today is to divert the people's attention away from the actual conditions of their livelihood. There's mounting anger against this Modi government's complete destruction of the livelihood of crores of people in our country. You're a gradient distress, farmers counting suicides, your youth wandering aimlessly without any jobs and jobs actually reducing and on the contrary the price levels going up, petroleum prices particularly. So the living conditions for the people have become the major concern for the people and particularly after demonetization and the GST implementation. So that will be the dominant feature on the basis of which people will vote. But they want to divert that attention away. And one of the diversion is actually to claim that this all what happened in Balakot, etc., etc. was because of the strength of this government. But what is the reality? If you compare the earlier five years before this Modi government came to these five years on every single score of the number of terrorist attacks, on the number of security personnel who have been martyred, on the number of civilians who have been killed and on the number of ceasefire violations. Ceasefire violations have grown exponentially. So the overall handling of the Jammu and Kashmir situation, their JNK policy, I mean all this has contributed to escalating the trends of terrorist attacks. You had first, what I quote, then you had Uri, then you had the surgical strikes. The country was told that everything was now hankidori because we've hit the camps of the terrorists. And then after that terrorist attacks continued and then you had Pulwama. And now with the Balakot, where the Indian Air Force successfully hit the targets that they had chosen inside Pakistan. That is being turned out to say now this is the end of, you know, terror camps because we have destroyed the major terror camp or the terror location. But then more than a dozen security personnel were killed in terrorist attacks after Balakot. You had this bomb blast in Jammu. So this attacks, I mean people are also seeing what is the ground reality. What requires to fight terrorism is the unity of our people, which is precisely what all of us, including the CPI, all the political parties said this is a fight between a united India and terrorism. Terrorism knows no opposition and no ruling party. Terrorism has to be fought unitedly. It is the Prime Minister Modi and the BJP who are actually politicizing this to divert people's attention away from their basic problems in order to and hope that they'll get electoral benefits. I mean it's a most bizarre situation. You have the BJP president claiming that 250 people were killed. You have the union home minister saying that 300 were killed because 300 cell phones that were working were not working now. And you have another cabinet minister saying 450 are killed. And then you have one cabinet minister who said nobody is killed because the intention was not to cause any deaths. But to show Pakistan that we are capable of hitting. So they will try to misuse this whole situation, try and exploit this. But I think people have already seen through it and it's not really going to work like they are hoping that it will work to their advantage. And it's also in some sense is a diversion from the Rafale scam too. And last time the BJP had made such a huge hue and cry over corruption in this time. And precisely, I mean two things as I because apart from imposing the misery in the people there is a large scale loot of our public resources. I mean this is happening through the unpaid loans taken by Kroni, friends of the prime minister. And now it's all everybody knows who's taken how much and how many of them have actually left the country to evade any legal action. Now what is stopping us from actually confiscating their properties here, their assets here and economic offenders that these cases and then restoring the money and paying back to the people whose money is what they've taken as loans from the banks where the people have deposited through their accounts. That is not happening. And Rafale, it's now crystal clear that the government misled the Supreme Court during getting the first order that it got. And now the review is going on. The matter is before the courts, but every day the information that is coming is that the entire original Rafale deal was annulled and a new deal was agreed upon by the prime minister personally when he visited France. So moving on to two states where the CPIM has a lot at stake, starting with Kerala, where right now this BJP is again engaged in a major campaign of polarization and we even seen the Congress led UDF move, I respond to that by moving a bit to the right. So how does the left actually plan to counter this narrative and establish it? Well, leftists countering this narrative by actually appealing to the secular credentials of the people of Kerala. I mean, it's not a normal thing for 56 lakhs of women to come together to form a human wall all across Kerala in defense of the equality of rights of women. And the double speak and the hypocrisy of the BJP is getting exposed as well. And so of the Congress, the BJP on the one hand talks of women's equality when he talks of the triple talak issue. So women's equality for Muslim women, but no women's equality for Hindu women, as well as temple entry in some women lives concern. Now all these issues were raised in the court petitions. The review of that court decision is there, wait for the review. If you want the review, instead of that coming and threatening that if you do implement the Supreme Court order, we will dismiss the democratically elected CPIM led LDF government. Now this is being said none other than the national president of the BJP. So it's a clear cut. I mean a hypocrisy, double speak, a folk tongue policy that people of Kerala I'm sure will see through the whole thing. And also see through the double speak of the Congress, which on the triple talak talked of saying that it should go to a select committee for further examination, etc. But when it comes to the question of sovereign law, initially they first they first held the Supreme Court order and then they backed right. So clearly they're also being very, very opportunistic for which they'll pay the price. And in West Bengal, we have again the BJP looking to maximize its seat by seats by a long standing campaign of polarization. And there's Mamta Banerjee who is also trying to emerge as a national figure against the BJP, despite all the depression she's unleashed. So what is the left strategy to carve out its own space? You see the left understanding of the Bengal situation clearly is that both the Tamil Congress and the BJP are indulging in what we call competitive communism and they feed each other. And that is what they have been both of them. I mean it helps both of them and therefore they work in tandem in many of the things. Many of the corruption issues that the Prime Minister Tom Tom's about saying that they are very strict and things like that. But on the cases of Sharada, Narada, that Rose Valley, you know, all that cases of new public body through this shit-fund companies, the CBI case is there. But it just doesn't proceed. I mean there's a meaning to it, you know, why that is not happening. So our call in Bengal of the entire left front is that to defeat both the BJP and TMC, defeating the Modi government to save India, defeating the TMC government to save Bengal. And as far as these talks of emerging as a national leader, etc. account, I mean these are all things that are normal pre-election. It happens in a number of times, you'll have calls for a fourth front, you'll have a calls for a federal front, you'll have a calls for all this. So all the regional parties would try to come to something but never have they ever worked, neither will they work. Because Indian reality we must understand given the diversity of our country, given the fact that different political parties have the confidence of the people in different states of our country, any national level coming together like this, what the BJP keeps on propagating or this Mahagraband, you know, anything of that sort at the national level never can happen. Because a party that is the dominant party in one state is completely irrelevant in the neighboring state. So in that situation, and that is what always has happened, that the alternative government that is formed, the formation that forms that alternative government, is always established post-election. A chemistry issue. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching.