NEW DELHI: The Left parties on Sunday decided to jointly contest the forthcoming Assembly elections in Bihar as an independent and united bloc.
Leaders of six Left parties – the CPM, CPI, All India Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Socialist Party, CPI(Marxist-Leninist) Liberation and Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist) – also decided to hold an all India protest exposing corruption at high levels in the BJP-led Government at the Centre as well as in various states on July 20.
A joint statement from the leaders of Left parties said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that the NDA Government offered a corruption-free administration in the last one year was being thoroughly exposed by the day. In the Lalit Modi-IPL scam, the names of both Union External Affairs Minister and Rajasthan Chief Minister have figured as persons grossly misusing their office to help a fugitive from Indian law, Lalit Modi, it said.“Cases of misuse of office for pecuniary gains have come up in the BJP-ruled states of Maharashtra, involving two BJP ministers. In other BJP-ruled states like Chhattisgarh, instances of high-level corruption are being reported. The Left parties demand that a thorough CBI investigation under the judiciary’s supervision should be conducted in these cases and the guilty booked and punished. All tainted ministers in both the Centre and states must be removed from office until the investigations are completed and action taken,” they said.
Referring to the Vyapam scam, the Left parties said it has exposed the BJP Government in Madhya Pradesh for having perpetrated one of the worst corruption cases in the state ever.
Meanwhile, in a letter to Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, CPM chief Sitaram Yechury demanded the contents of the India-US Defence Framework Agreement, signed last month, be made public, saying the last such pact was made public within a few days in 2005.