Price Increase and Famine Resistance Committee
organization
The Price Increase and Famine Resistance Committee was a mass movement in West Bengal, India, formed in late 1958 by the Communist Party of India and other left groups, in response to the ongoing food crisis. The PIFRC led one of the most massive and militant political campaigns in the history of West Bengal. The PIFRC demanded total price controls, immediate redistribution of state lands and confiscations without compensation of excessive private lands owned by landlords. The tactics of PIFRC included scouting for hidden rice storages and forced sales of confiscated rice.
August–September 1959
The PIFRC stepped up its agitations in August 1959. The organization put forward August 20, 1959 as the date to initiate mass resistance to force the state government either to accept these demands or to resign. In mid-1959, 35 prominent organisers of PIFRC were put under preventive detention. The detainees includes seven members of the legislative assembly. The movement reached its peak as a general strike was organised in Calcutta and surrounding districts in August–September 1959. The strike paralysed the entire city and its adjoining districts.
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This entry incorporates text from “Price Increase and Famine Resistance Committee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.