Left takes new route to attract youth in Bengal
KOLKATA: Move over Das Kapital and What Is To Be Done, roundhouse kicks and upper cuts are here. Leaders of Left parties have ditched classic Marxist literature for a range of sports – martial arts, football, boxing, volleyball and swimming – to attract potential comrades in a bid to remain relevant in the political milieu of West Bengal.
The sharp departure from the traditional strategy for attracting youngsters is part of a nationwide strategy adopted by CPI-M leaders at their last party congress in Vijayawada but the focus will be West Bengal, where the country’s largest communist party is facing its toughest political battle.
According to party sources, the idea was drawn from a model pursued by Vladimir Lenin, the revolutionary who was impressed by Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel ‘What Is To Be Done’. The Soviet leader adopted similar ways to attract children aged 10 to 15, who were inducted in the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organisation and trained as future volunteers of the red forces of the Soviet Union.
In West Bengal, the party will periodically organise camps in different districts to persuade participants to join the newly constituted Red Volunteer Force (RVF) of the CPI-M.
The participants will be between 18 and 30 years, the sources said. Famous faces in each sports discipline may be asked to conduct training camps to attract youngsters.
The camps will be attended by state-level and district-level CPI-M leaders, who will interact with participants.
CPI-M state secretariat member Robin Deb told Hindustan Times that the party did not have a uniformed volunteer force in Bengal like those formed by the units in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.
“Lack of appeal of the party among youths was identified as one of our principal weaknesses. Accordingly, the party A CPI-M LEADER, on the strategy
is working out different strategies for overcoming the weaknesses, be it through sports or more activity in social media,” Deb said.
“Our Kerala unit was a pioneer in adopting this sports camp strategy that was a major success there. So the party leadership decided to replicate it in other states, especially in West Bengal,” a senior central committee member told HT.
He said these camps may trigger wide interest in the state as sports camps conducted by well-known experts in different fields are rare in the districts.
Like the Soviet organisation, the RVF volunteers will have their own uniform that they will have to sport compulsorily while on duty or attending organisational programmes.
The RVF uniform will consist of a red cap, a red T-shirt and white or khaki trouser. The colour of the trouser will vary from state to state.
The uniform of Lenin’s organisation was a white shirt, a red neckerchief and organisational and rank badges.
The move comes at a time when the Left is struggling to remain relevant in Bengal in the face of a sustained onslaught by the ruling Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
During the 2014 general election, the CPI-M won just two Lok Sabha seats in its former bastion. In the 2011 assembly polls, the Left parties slumped to 62 seats in the 294-member House, down from the 233 seats they had won in the previous election. Despite the benefit of pictorial pack warnings, the Health Ministry had deferred its decision to increase the size of pictorial health warnings to cover 85% of the pack on both sides from April 1 on the recommendations of a parliamentary committee.
Tobacco kills one person every six seconds, with an average tobacco-user losing seven to eight years prematurely, World Health Organisation (WHO) says.
Close to 6 million people die of tobacco use each year, of which 6 lakh are non-smokers who die from inhaling second-hand smoke.
In India, one million people die of smoking-related diseases each year
Despite bans on advertising, sale to minors and smoking in public places, more than one in three adults smoke or chew tobacco in India.
According to a 2014 report by the Canadian Cancer Society, India is ranked 136th among 198 countries listed according to the
size of their tobacco warnings.
India is now the fifth-largest market for illegal cigarettes in the world, according toEuromonoitor International.
If all countries increased taxes by 50%, there would be 49 million fewer tobacco smokers preventing 11 million deaths, as per WHO.
On average, raising taxes by 10% lowers use by 4% in highincome countries and by 5% in low- and middle-income countries, shows WHO data.
According to Tobacco Institute of India, fakes and smuggled cigarettes now account for one in five cigarettes sold in India. This results in a revenue loss of more than `7,000 crore.