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Speech on 5 September at a public meeting in Jadavpur University to oppose the threat of US war on Syria Kunal Chattopadhyay Thank you for inviting me to speak here today. And thank you all for being here. We are assembled here to protest the US intervention, or threat of that, in Syria. But let me put that in context. I will begin by reading out extracts from two very different write ups. The first is by a group of revolutionary organisations on the ground in Syria and nearby regions – Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, etc. In a statement issued on 31 st  August, these comrades have said, among other things, the following: Over 150 thousand were killed, hundreds of thousands injured and disabled, millions of people displaced inside and outside Syria. Cities, villages, and neighborhoods were destroyed fully or partially, using all sorts of weapons, including warplanes, scud missiles, bombs, and tanks, all paid for by the sweat and blood of the Syrian people. This was under

We are salaried . We are employed, to carry out policies mostly decided by bureaucrats and imposed on us. We need a trade union that will look after our interests. Our predecessors, in very difficult conditions, did build such a union. That was the WBCUTA, and later, at the all India level, the AIFUCTO. Locally in Jadavpur we have had the JUTA. But for these organisations, with all their flaws (d iscussed below, a few of those) we would be having neither any academic democracy, nor a decent living. My father, who was a WBCUTA leader, with no Ph D (though eventually 15 or so books and over a hundred papers) so I assume in the eyes of professors with foreign Ph Ds little better than a rabble rouser, always told me about the time the first demand on their charter read, A monthly Pay Packet. I never asked what he meant, for my childhood years are filled with memories of my father coming home with an armload of books and the comment, today I got my UGC. To me, UGC meant father getting a re