Left takes Bush-bashing to blogs

New Delhi: After all the whining-yelling public rallies and acerbic sound bites on the national media, the Left parties have gone global with its protest against US President George Bush's India visit.

The CPI(M) has put its best foot forward for Bush bashing by hitting the blogosphere.

The age-old party has started a blog site for its 'Boycott Bush's Visit to India' campaign, in its efforts to rally global opinion against what they call "the visit of a global terrorist to India."

And bloggers already seem to have lapped it up.

"This is such a great protest, reminiscent of Gandhi's protest against British India - 'Minto Go Home'," says one blogger. "I wish you and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) the best in winning this war against the greatest threat to humanity, Bush's United States."

The administrators of the site gobackglobalterrorist.blogspot.com calls this an endeavour to encourage people to create more blogs opposing Bush's visit to India. This campaign, if carried out effectively, should see thousands of links opposing Bush, they say.

"We appeal to all the patriots, peace-loving people on the globe to campaign for having more blogs coming up on the occassion of his visit," goes the appeal.

"We want the blogger community to rise to the occassion and have as many individual blogs as possible with a variety of content like poetry, photographs, cartoons, writeups, humour etc," it adds.

The blog page is actually a space providing links to the blogs that are being put up opposing President Bush's visit to India, commencing March 2, 2006.

The Left parties - including the CPI, the CPI(M) - and the Samajwadi Party have decided to organise a massive public march and rally to protest Bush's visit.

"Under President Bush, the US continues to occupy Iraq and oppress its people. It threatens Syria and has targeted Iran on the issue of its nuclear programme. It backs the naked oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel.

"He is certainly not welcome in India," a joint statement of CPI, CPI(M), RSP, AIFB, CPI(ML) Liberation, JD(S) and SP said after a decision in this regard was taken at a meeting.

"We have constituted a broad-based committee against Bush's visit and decided to organise under its banner a massive public march and rally to protest his visit," the statement said, calling the American leader an 'enemy of sovereign nations'.