The AMOFOI celebrated its 44th Foundation Day and the 66th Human Rights Day here in collaboration with Freethought Party of India (FPI). Founder of AMOFOI and general secretary of FPI B Ramchandra CST Voltaire gave a brief picture of the works done by AMOFOI in the last 43 years to make casteless, priest-less, dowry-less marriages a popular movement.

A seminar on the theme “India needs proportional representation on the model of Nepal and New Zealand to do justice to all the voters and all the political parties of India,” was held. Voltaire pointed out that the Indian electoral system does not reflect the right public opinion. He said that PM Narendra Modi has been ruling India with 37% of the vote share which would never happen in countries like Germany, New Zealand and Nepal.

Madhusudan Yadav, an Ambedkarite intellectual and a local functionary of the BSP, presided. He held the view that in order to have PR system of election in India, one must have the proper understanding of the vital term, justice: social, economic and political which is in the Preamble to the Constitution and once political justice is well-understood, there would be a popular pressure on all the ruling political parties to implement mixed PR system.

Humanist Rationalist Organisation, State secretary Basanti Acharya and three other rationalists, namely, Satya Narayan Samantasinghar, an activist of the Nisanibaran Samit Odisha, Amir Prasad Sahoo, a noted freethinker and Madam Swapna Bijayini, while paying rich tributes to the noted columnist Eleanor Roosevelt who authored the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 did speak out boldly against the unfair electoral system that has been going on in India since 1952.

At the start of the seminar, the AMOFOI-FPI Book No. 7 on Humanism and Freethought focusing on the contributions of Eleanor Roosevelt was released.