Yechury raps Centre for inviting Brazil President for Republic Day

“Balsonaro prides himself calling as a fascist. Prime Minister Narendra Modi choose to invite him as the chief guest for the Republic Day parade,” he said after releasing the 1,00,000th copy of the Tamil edition of the Communist Manifesto published by Bharathi Puthakalayam at Chennai Book Fair.

Yechury alleged that PM Modi and Balsonaro were like “birds of a feather flock together.” He noted that the rise of the right wing forces globally was to divert the people’s attention from issues concerning them like economic crisis and loss of jobs. He said that from Donald Trump in US to Narendra Modi in India, the right wing leaders were the biggest allies of the global capitalists.

He also noted that India’s richest one per cent hold more than four-times the wealth held by the bottom 70 per cent of the country’s population, adding that the total wealth of all Indian billionaires was more than the full-year budget.

“This prolonged crisis of the global capitalism proves that the bankruptcy of the neoliberal trajectory. As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was countervailing power to the capitalism. Capitalism had to blunt social consciousness and ideas among the workers and working class in the capitalist countries. Therefore, capitalism adopted strategy of the welfare economy and unemployment allowance, safety net, national health scheme and government sponsored insurance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entire dismantling of the social welfare measures continues to take place. It paves way of the unbridled exploitation of the people which led to the present crisis,” he said.

Yechury said the Communist Manifesto was being read by more people now than what it was a decade ago. “Why are people asking for the Marxist literature? Even the Pope sitting in Vatican wants one. When the global economic crisis was going on, Pope ordered copies of Capital for the Vatican library. If you want to understand the capitalist crisis in 2008, why it came and how to solve it, there is no way but to go back to Karl Marx and to read his works. It is the only way we can understand why this crisis is taking place,” he said, adding that only way out of the neo-economic recession that the country is facing is by increasing the publicinvestment to create new jobopportunities.