Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor

Why Left Debacle?

The Left front is out of power in Tripura. The man leading the State formerly with such a clean administration as to be everyone's envy, Manik Sarkar, must be a very unhappy man today. He must be introspecting why he lost the game. He must be feeling there was no reason for people to reject him since he, as a true communist leader, was fully dedicated to the welfare of the masses. But if he makes a deeper alysis, he will know why he lost.

As rightly pointed out by some eminent columnists, including some in The Sentinel, the Left today is out of the current of time. It is not blowing with the winds of change. At a time when globalization and free-market economy has changed the face of the world, including in developing countries such as India, and when even Chi, in spite of being a communist country, has embraced free-market economy and looks more like a capitalist economy, the Left in India is against the trend just for the sake of an old and outdated ideology. It is uble to meet the rising aspirations of the new and educated youth. These youth need jobs and better avenues to better their lives. These are not idealistic youth given to some old ideologies. They live in real world. For them, therefore, the Left and its ideology are no more relevant.

The Manik Sarkar government was uble to provide jobs to the unemployed youth of his State. As in the rest of the country, they too have modern aspirations to improve their standard of living. Sarkar might be living a very simple life, taking his ration from ration card and with very little bank balance, but the modern youth of his State want a high-flying life as they think they deserve it. And there are several other issues.

It is time for the Left in India to change its mindset and grow with time. They have to change their style of operations. More importantly perhaps, there is need for a leadership change. The likes of Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury should leave and make room for a young and modern leadership.

Aneesh Goswami,

Tezpur.

The President's Visit

Bangladesh President Md Hamid was in Assam and Meghalaya on a two-day tour last week. His first stop-over was Guwahati where he held talks with Assam Chief Minister Sarbanda Sonowal in which he expressed his gratitude for India's help to the Mukti Bahini fighting the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971, which ultimately led to the birth of a new tion, present-day Bangladesh. He also said both Assam and Bangladesh share many things in common, especially culture, tradition and literature.

Here I would like to raise a pertinent point. It is Bangladesh which is Assam's most serious headache because of the influx of its tiols into our territory in millions, and all by illegal means. Here they mage to get ration cards, open bank accounts, enroll in the voters list, and as recent newspaper reports have pointed out, even after being detected and declared as foreigners by foreigners tribuls, they first mage to vanish and then try the backdoor tactic of registering themselves in the NRC, now being updated.

Secondly, these Bangladeshi tiols in Assam are responsible for most of the crimes taking place, including highway dacoity and rape. They have not only encroached upon reserve forests and tiol parks, including the famous Kaziranga, they have also shown courage of the most notorious kind by encroaching upon xatra lands. It is the xatra tradition that forms the most important tradition in Assam. What is there common between this great tradition and any tradition of Bangladesh? The Bangladesh President should have been informed of this then and there. He was wrong in talking about commonness. Thirdly, we are a secular society. But the Bangladeshi society is not secular. It is an Islamized society that does not believe in the ethos of secularism as we practice here and hold so dear, though it is a different matter that some enlightened Bangladeshis, both Hindu and Muslim, are indeed secular and perhaps more so than us.

Pradip Biswas,

Noonmati, Guwahati.

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