Free The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy

with the Madras Labour Union being the oldest in India, we have not been able to make significant advancement. We still continue to sign agreements with the landlords. We still have not achieved our dream of land redistribution.
    In Tanjore district, the area known as the granary of South India, Vadapathimangalam Thiagaraja Mudaliar owns 15,000 acres of land; Kunniyur Subramania Iyer and Sambasiva Iyer own 5,000 acres each; Rao Bahadur Subburathna Mudaliar owns 2,500 acres; K G Estates owns 4,000 acres, K T V Estates owns 3,000 acres and K C Desikar owns 15,000 acres. This is not a Communist Party statistic; it is extracted from a report prepared by the World Bank, that crony of the imperialist powers. It is evident to everybody that land in Tanjore is monopolized by a few individuals. The working people have no lands; those who till the soil have no rights. Peasants are being treated worse than slaves. To talk of land distribution here is to talk of the gross inequality that sustains the feudal structure. To put it in simple numbers, 60 per cent of the land lies with 5 per cent of the people at the top; at the bottom, 60 per centof the people own only 5 per cent of the land. And below this are the wretched of the earth: the landless agricultural labourers of Tanjore, who own nothing, not even the land on which their tiny, mud-walled hut stands, not even metal vessels, not even a change of clothing. And it is the rights of these have-nots, these proletarians, that the Paddy Producers Association seeks to crush. Though their powers have been eroded by years of our unrelenting struggle, they enjoy immunity because of their political connections.
    When the agricultural labourers protested against the utilization of tractors in East Tanjore, the state provided security to the landlords by drafting in its police force. But, comrades, one day sooner or later, the words of our great leader Marx will come true, and, as he said, the working people will direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves. They will destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they will smash to pieces machinery, they will set factories ablaze, they will seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman.
    The landlords have learnt how to quell our protests. They appoint a police force of fifty men and a rowdy force of fifty men to protect every tractor. What can be done in such a situation?
    A year ago, we launched a poster campaign so that people would stay brave and have the courage to tacklethe police. We did not want our women to shudder at the sight of a uniform. We designed a poster to directly attack them: ‘Police Dogs! Cause Trouble and You Will Pay Double!’ These posters appeared all over the district: Mannargudi, Thiruthuraipoondi, Vedaranyam, Nagapattinam, Mayawaram, Kumbakonam, Sirkazhi. The police, in a shock over such an open attack, alleged in their special reports that these posters were dropped from the Soviet Union with the help of a silent aeroplane. This is an indication of the extent of their imagination. The ruling classes are aware of the benefits of propaganda to ensure that the people are estranged from the Communist parties.
    As a result of such propaganda, people are unable to distinguish truth from falsehood. They believe these cock-and-bull stories of the government; they believe that trade unions and strike action of the labourers causes all the problems; they are unaware of the scores of young children who are dying from hunger every day. The middle class, just like the ruling class, conveniently believes that those who die are the surplus people, the ones who took up space, the nation’s disgrace. Does the middle class have enough conscience to feel rattled when, every time the monsoon fails, the parched lands grow soup kitchens?
    We take this opportunity to remind the chief minister that the previous Indian National