[Marxistindia] Scrap Decision to Takeover Cooperative Banks

[news from the cpi(m)]

June 25, 2020


Press Statement


The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued  
the following statement:

Withdraw Ordinance:
Scrap the Decision of Central Takeover of Cooperative Banks

The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) condemns the unilateral decision by the  
central government to take over the supervision of 1540 urban and  
rural cooperative banks through an ordinance.

This decision has been taken without consulting any of the elected  
state governments when the cooperative sector including banks are  
supervised by the state governments. This is yet another attack on our  
country’s federal structure. Such over-centralisation is an assault on  
one of the basic features of our Constitution, federalism. This  
totally destroys the autonomy of the cooperatives.

Currently there are 8.4 crores of account holders and Rs. 4.5 lakh  
crores of deposits in these banks. It is clear that this BJP central  
government is also eying this huge corpus of money to be siphoned off  
by it like it did with the RBI reserve fund earlier.

The cooperative sector and its banks are the backbone in many parts of  
the country, rural areas and particularly agriculture. With the  
deposits now being available to be disbursed by the central  
government, it is clear that the rich, with greater capacities to  
borrow, will benefit at the expense of the poor. This will further  
destroy the support for livelihood of crores of our people.

It is indeed ironic that this ordinance was passed on the 45th  
anniversary of internal emergency in the country. This constitutes a  
grave attack on India’s constitutional order.

The PB of the CPI(M) demands the immediate withdrawal of this ordinance.


For CPI(M) Central Committee Office