The 12th biennial convention of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), a top civil rights network, underway at the Doodhwawala Dharamshala in Jagannath Puri, concluded on November 25 by adopting a declaration detailing the alliance’s stance on the pressing national issues of today, including majoritarianism, redefining citizenship, unfulfilled promises made to tribal communities and agrarian crisis.
The declaration also talked on other issues like declining budget allocation for education, increasing attacks on higher education institutions, rising unemployment, gender inequality, opacity, collapsing economy, chaos in public infrastructure, neglect of health care and health services, attacks on the freedom of speech and on human rights defenders, surveillance of citizens, and climate crisis.
During the three-day conference, several of the 1,000 representatives who attended the convention suggested proposals for future programmes, including setting up workshops for alternative education in different parts of the country in a bid to challenge the mainstream education, public dialogues, poster exhibitions and campaigning on the issue of education across the country, discussion about the issues of unorganized workers, organizing women domestic workers in North and Central India, and so on.
Even as emphasising on the need to develop alternative politics, they supported the idea of planning a black-band march protesting the Ayodhya judgment, which has been proposed for December 6 as a peace procession.
NAPM also decided to observe December 10 as human rights day by organising nationwide programmes protesting the proposed pan-India National Register of Citizens (NRC), and support to the all-India labour strike on January 8, 2020 against the new labour codes.
A committee consisting of NAPM conveners was formed, which included Medha Patkar, Sanjay MG, Arundhati Dhuru, Mahendra Yadav, Kusumam Joseph, Lingaraj Pradhan, Lingraj Azad, Ashish Ranjan, Pasharul Alam, Pradip Chatterjee, Rajeev Yadav, Richa Singh, Basant Hetamsaria, Suniti SR, Meera Sanghamitra, Madhuresh Kumar, among others.
Those appointed advisors on the committee include Anand Mazgaonkar, Aruna Roy, Binayak Sen, Gabrielle Dietrich , Geetha Ramakrishnan, P Chennaiyah, Prafulla Samantara, Ramkrishna Raju, Sandeep Pandey, Sister Celia, and Maj Gen (retd) Sudhir Vombatkere.
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