Empowerment missions can move forward only after ensuring that the basic human necessities are fulfilled. Eradication of poverty, ensuring access to clean drinking water, healthcare and primary education are highly significant steps in this regard. Popular Front runs various self-employment schemes, drinking water projects and educational initiatives like ‘School Chalo’, ‘Sarva Shiksha Grams’ and other scholarship schemes in many impoverished villages across the country.

• Fight against human rights violations.
• Campaigning against imperialism and fascism
• People’s movement towards constitutional equality

Popular Front was the first organization to call for a boycott of the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) by the Hindutva sectarian ruling front – BJP. We challenged the Act and the subsequent amendments to other related legislation through a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed in the Supreme Court of India.

We prioritized awareness by directing all our resources towards door-to-door campaigns, corner meets and masjid get-togethers to educate the people about the communal and sectarian motives behind CAA, NPR and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). We warned the people that the National Population Register (NPR) should not be seen as a normal census procedure and that it is a backdoor entry to facilitate NRC.

RSS having pronounced Muslims and other minorities their enemies will be unremittingly targeting them, let it be through inhumane laws, carnages, or incarnations. So our emphasis has been on widening the scope of the anti-CAA-NRC-NPR struggles by not limiting it to a short term exercise of merely pressurizing the government towards delaying its imposition. We believe in transforming these oppositions into revolutionary waves that would turn the tide against the toxic ideology of RSS that has been ruining this nation. We believe these peoples resistance should sustain and transform towards larger movements and a political consciousness that would ensure equal rights and social justice as enshrined in our constitution.

RSS and its incessant mosque demolition projects, how to bell the cat? The so-called secularists of this nation, who didn’t even have the least sensibility to address the Muslim insecurities surrounding Babri demolition and subsequent Hindutva onslaughts, have been since then prescribing Muslims to stop wailing over the lost mosque. They wanted Muslims to give away their claim on the Babri land to establish peace and harmony in the country. Here they conveniently forget the fact that there is a long list of mosques, which the Sangh – Parivar wants to be demolished like the way they did with Babri in 1992.

We believe in putting up people’s resistance against RSS’s overzealousness with regards to listing and demolishing Muslim mosques. It is high time the nation learnt that peace cannot be secured at the expense of justice.

Building self-confidence and sense of security. For any initiative towards the empowerment of backward classes, it is imperative to alleviate the fear in their minds and build confidence. Fear and pessimism impede growth, hold back societies from working towards their progress and prosperity. It leaves them in a constant state of insecurity.

Currently, in India, there is a politics that thrives based on the insecurities and the apprehensions haunting the minorities. Popular Front as an empowerment organization has focused on this point in specific from its very genesis. We were at the forefront countering this politics of fear, thus instilling and promoting confidence among the marginalized communities. This year we organized meetups with community leaders across the country that were attended by national, state and district level leaders of Popular Front and there we called upon them to wipe out even the minute traces of fear left in their mind opposite the Hindutva might in India. The community leaders included Ulemas, academicians, activists, Masjid committee office bearers and political party leaders.

While realistically accepting the gravity of the situation, Popular Front thinks that panicking, lamenting about or falling into a victim mentality will not lead us anywhere. We believe that only unified and organized efforts will bring about change in the situation. Local and national leaders of the organization have been reaching out to the community, visiting rural and urban areas of India, and have been keeping in touch with community leaders and scholars of influence to impart this message. We have kept them in good spirits, instilling hope and resilience, and ensuring that they are in constant engagements with the socio-political realities of India.

• Empowering women and families.
• Guiding students and youth.
• Empowerment and cultural reformation.

While we have been timely responding to the socio-political developments in the country, Popular Front’s idea of a social movement does not revolve around such reactionary approaches. The organization views itself as an agent of social change. It has a comprehensive vision of its own regarding a future India and has specific action plans and projects to make this vision a reality. Total Empowerment of a community will not be possible unless we ensure participation from every element of the society in these empowerment initiatives and special attention needs to be paid to the less privileged ones.

As a section that leads the community spiritually and ideologically, the Ulema holds a special place with regards to community empowerment. Having their life dedicated to the religious education of the community, they fell behind in other areas of life and are so mostly an impoverished and less sophisticated section of our community. Only empowered Ulema can lead the community to empowerment. Taking this factor into cognizance Popular Front has placed special emphasis on programs related to empowering the Ulema.

Women in our society are victims of discrimination at various levels. The discrimination she faced as a woman gets exacerbated when it overlaps with her religious identity as a Muslim because here she by default becomes a target of the Sangh-Parivar agendas against Muslims. Poverty and illiteracy among Muslim women are higher compared to other communities. As the leaders of our families, any attempt at empowering the community should have women in its prime priorities.

Legal support to innocent victims. Rights violations have become rampant in our country. Studies of various human rights groups and watchdogs inside and outside the country certifies this fact. It has internationally diminished India’s image as a secular, democratic nation.

Popular Front was aware of these trends from the beginning and have formulated plans and initiatives to address the issue comprehensively. What makes the situation more hostile is the lack of awareness among common people regarding their rights. While intervening in the issues of rights violations, the organization also endeavoured into programs for educating and equipping masses to stand up for their rights.

Popular Front has encouraged students belonging to marginalized classes to pursue law and supported them by providing legal education. The organization is striving to take this to the next level now. The legal team of the organization has put a structure to make these programs a big success.

Calamity relief and rehabilitation. Covid: Medical relief activities and dignified funeral to the covid victims.

In the face of COVID, a fast-spreading pandemic, Popular Front members worked in coordination with local authorities and other volunteer organizations. The relief cadres actively carried out disinfection drives and provided medical and humanitarian aid. They cleaned public places, assisted quarantined people, and set up makeshift sanitization centres for the public. Organisation supplied sanitisers, hand wash soaps, face masks and PPE kits for medical workers.

Though lifesaving drugs and generic medicines were in stock at medical stores, People were unable to access them due to logistic issues. We as covid volunteers acted as a bridge between patients and medical stores at various places. Popular Front volunteers came to the rescue when people had to get their emergency medicines from faraway places and even from other states.

In many states with a high number of Covid fatalities, the proper and dignified burial of the dead posed a crisis to the families and the local authorities. Popular Front volunteers, after realizing that bodies were piling up and many of the dead were being cremated against their customs, took it upon themselves to ensure a dignified burial to the dead. In the subsequent days, they had to bury hundreds of bodies of people belonging to different faiths in various parts of the country.

Healthy people healthy nation.

Only a healthy body can lead us to a healthy mind and it is only these groups of people forming a healthy society, who could lead us towards empowerment of the nation and its people. So health awareness campaigns and health care initiatives have a special place in our yearly agendas.

Popular Front holds a nationwide campaign every year bringing people’s attention towards staying fit and healthy. There were events like marathons, anti-drug campaigns, martial arts, yoga demonstrations and training sessions organized as part of the ‘Healthy People, Healthy Nation’ campaigns by Popular Front across the country.

Supporting primary education. Scholarship to poor and meritorious students

Political mobilisation of marginalised classes. Broad-based alliance towards a common cause.

Popular Front, as a social movement committed to resisting Sangh-Parivar, believes in nourishing fraternal relations among people who are at the receiving end of this Hindutva menace. For this, we believe it is important to extend our hands in solidarity across ideological and organizational differences.

We were at the forefront of the movement against the anti-Muslim citizenship laws and were impassioned by the support we received to our struggles from the country’s Dalits, Tribals, farmers, minorities, the marginalized and all those who believed in constitutional equality.

We reciprocated with our love and camaraderie when the country’s farmers were in the midst of a battle against the exploitative anti-farmer laws put forward by the BJP government. We stood by the Dalits against the inhumane treatment meted out against them by the power-wielding caste supremacists of this country.

We stood firm in the face of the witch-hunt carried out against us while seeking justice to our Dalit sister in Hathras, who was raped, brutally murdered and was even denied a proper funeral by the Yogi government. The UP Police went on to the extent of cremating her body overnight, away from her family, to bury any pieces of evidence left behind that would incriminate the upper caste Thakur men affiliated to Sangh-Parivar.

We spoke out loud and clear that the “king is naked” when the tyrants were dead set on stigmatizing activists, intellectuals, scholars, Dalit, farmers, Muslim students and leaders by calling them Urban Naxals, Maoists, Khalistani and Islamic extremists for their involvement in the Elgar Parishad, farmers protests and anti-CAA/NRC movement.

The government wanted to cover up the grave human rights violations in the country by cracking down on independent watch-dogs like Amnesty International, lawyers like Mehmood Pracha and Delhi Minorities Commission (DMC) Chairman Zafarul Islam Khan.

The government was insistent on singling out and torturing all these defiant notes to set an example out of them for the dissenting mass across the country. Having been an organization confronting these intricacies of the Hindutva oppression from our very birth, we knew how important it was to lend our solidarity to these vibrant minds, institutions and organizations fighting injustice.