UNPA, Left to protest in Parliament against inflation

New Delhi:: MPs belonging to Left parties will on Tuesday march into the Parliament to protest against the rising inflation. The Left parties offer outside support to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.

The UNPA and Left are holding a joint protest within Parliament against the goverment's inability to control inflation. The government too is getting its defences ready. CNN-IBN has learnt that the Prime Minister's Office has sent directives to all state governments asking them to deal sternly with hoarders and black marketeers.

Hoarding has been one of the fundamental problems affecting distribution of food grain and prices at the local level.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) politburo member Sitaram Yechury had on Monday warned that the price rise was like a “large albatross” that could cause trouble for the UPA Government ahead of elections.

“The price hike will be like a large albatross sitting on the UPA Government’s neck in the coming elections, and as a supporting party we are telling them they will be in trouble,” Yechury said at a programme on ‘Inflation And Its Impact On The Economy’.

“The entire trajectory of the eight per cent plus economic growth would collapse unless the UPA Government reined in inflation and controlled prices which made the life of common people miserable,” he added.

He said all Left MPs would march to Parliament in a procession against the price rise on Tuesday. ‘This is not the normal way for the MPs to march inside Parliament but we have no other option’, he added.

Yechury said that withdrawing support to the present government would not solve the problem, since the present government was carrying on with certain policies of the previous BJP-led NDA government that had actually led to the present crisis.

He urged the Central Government to immediately ban forward trading on commodities and to strengthen the public distribution system besides restructuring taxes on petroleum products.

The Left parties along with the United National Progressive Alliance (UNPA) would hold a nationwide agitation throughout the country from April16 to 23 to put pressure on the UPA Government to bring down the prices of essential commodities.