People’s walk to claim dignity
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Janadesh 2007
People’s Verdict 2007 People’s Verdict is a campaign on “Retrieving People’s Dignity through Land and Livelihood” and it aims to have people take up non-violent struggle and civil disobedience in their communities at the local, national and international levels throughout the world in the future. The progression of building a People’s Verdict from the grassroots to the global level will culminate in a large action in late 2007. The large programs being planned in India is to have 25,000 people march 350 kilometers to Delhi from Gwalior and profile the power of more than 100,000 people demanding their land rights. Other support programs are in different countries and are all calling for a poverty-free society The Broader Campaign The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign aims to bring many people together to support those who are suffering without dignity and self-worth. By raising people’s consciousness to the need for equity and justice in their communities and society at large, the campaign works to create structures that retrieve people’s basic dignity and self-worth. It is self-evident in India that the present economic order continues to appropriate wealth in spite of the massive fall-out of poverty and injustice at the national, regional, or international levels and it is not mindful of the adversity effecting millions of people. Raising the issues of people’s basic self-worth and dignity focuses us to redirect our energy away from the present trends i.e. where unregulated industrialization is causing people to lose land, water and forest – which are their livelihood resources, and where they are migrating to cities to perform work as cheap labour, left rootless with-out democratic rights. The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign is to assist with livelihood generation inputs for small landholders so that they can stay on the land; and to give land to those landless people who have no other means of survival; and to see small-scale agriculture as a basic building block to national development. The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign uses non-violent and civil disobedience as its way to show dissent in the existing system and to resist the unethical behavior of leaving people to continuously suffer indignity. In this effort the Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign uses methods from the gandhian tradition as a way to frame the struggle. It is noted that this method of struggle was fundamental to India gaining freedom from the British, and for South Africa to overcome the Apartheid System. The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign in India will build up to a large action that will encourage hundreds of thousands of landless poor to march to the country’s capital and demand justice from the Indian State in Delhi. In spite of repeated efforts to dialogue has been made with various state and central government(s), little headway in terms of providing land to the landless and removing poverty. Given the vibrancy of so many social movements in the country, the landless people are themselves taking up the initiative to resist unjust state policies non-violently. Source: Ekta Parishad |
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