Dear Comrades,
As many as a hundred million workers participated in a one-day,
India-wide general strike Tuesday to protest against the socio-economic
policies of the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance
government and support a 10-point charter of demands.
The demands
included: action to contain rising prices; a halt to privatization; an
end to government complicity in employers’ systematic violation of
labour regulations; equal pay and rights for the large number of
contract workers employed in industry and the public sector; and the
provision of social benefits to the vast majority of India’s workers who
toil under sweatshop-type conditions in the so-called unorganized
sector.
The strike was called by the eleven government-recognized national
trade union centrals, including those affiliated with the two Stalinist
parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the
Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM]—and the respective labor wings
of the Congress Party and the Official Opposition, the Hindu supremacist
Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP.
The strike’s impact varied widely by state and industry.
It
paralyzed the activities of public sector banks and insurance
companies, postal services, much of the public transport system, and
government-owned ports across most of India. Much of the coal industry
was shut down and there were walkouts at many manufacturing plants,
including in the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, the scene last year of
a series of militant strikes and plant occupations by Maruti-Suzuki car
assembly workers.
The national rail network and air traffic, by contrast, were scarcely affected.
Normal
life in the southwestern state of Kerala ground to a halt, with buses
off the roads and shops closed, as workers ignored an order from the
Congress Party-led United Democratic Front government to dock the pay of
all state employees who joined the strike.
The strike had a
major impact in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, and more broadly in
the western Indian state of Maharashtra in which it lies. The walkout of
employees at state banks and at the Reserve Bank of India, the
country’s central bank, seriously disrupted the operations of
non-unionized private banks.
The AIADMK government of the
southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu took provocative measures to break
the strike, particularly in the transport sector. Drivers and conductors
on state-owned buses were offered double-pay if they worked Tuesday.
Nevertheless, the strike had a significant impact, as many central and
state government employees, including in banking and telecommunications
joined the strike. In the textile-manufacturing centers of Tripur and
Coimbatore, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job.
In
West Bengal, the right-wing Trinamool Congress government mounted a
determined effort to break the strike, mobilizing the police and goon
squads to harass and intimidate strike supporters. In the run-up to the
strike, the government issued a circular announcing that state
government employees who failed to show up for work on Tuesday could be
deemed to have committed a “break in service,” a reprisal that would
mean the loss of all their accumulated pension benefits.
In the
face of this threat, most state employees did report to work and in
Kolkata, the state capital and India’s third most populous city,
state-owned bus and subways functioned normally. But otherwise, the
strike was massively supported, with workers in coal, power generation,
construction and many other industries walking off the job. About 90
percent of tea garden workers struck. Most central government offices,
mainly banks, insurance, postal and telephone, were closed.
And
while the state-owned transport system functioned, most private busses,
and three-wheeler and other taxis operators joined the strike—despite a
threat by State Transport Minister Madan Mitra that private bus
operators who failed to run their buses on Tuesday would not be allowed
to operate for the ensuing week.
As a part of its
anti-strike measures, the government deployed an additional 15,000
police in Kolkata alone. More than 2,000 strike supporters were arrested
across the state.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has ordered all
government departments to submit the names of those who were absent
from work Tuesday. According to press reports, she has yet to decide
whether to make good on the threat to strip strike supporters of their
pension benefits. Such a draconian and vindictive reprisal would
undoubtedly trigger widespread demands from rank-and-file workers for
immediate strike action.
In Bangalore, an IT hub in BJP-ruled
Karnataka, workers in most government offices and banks, and
three-wheeler taxi drivers joined the strike. Shops and schools were
closed. While the IT-industry functioned normally, the government’s
deployment of additional buses failed to prevent the strike from having a
broad impact. In Karnataka, as in many other parts of India, an
important element in the strike’s impact was the sizeable participation
of workers from the “unorganized sector”—including three-wheeler
drivers, construction workers, warehouse laborers, and anganwadi (community health) workers.
Tuesday’s
protest strike and a recent wave of bitter strikes in India’s new
globally integrated manufacturing sector—including at plants owned by
Foxconn, BYD Electronics, Hyundai, and makers of parts for Ford, GM, and
other transnational auto makers—attest to the growing anger and
militancy within the working class.
India’s elite and the Obama
administration gush incessantly about India’s “rise”, but the expansion
of Indian capitalism over the past two decades has been accomplished
through the ruthless exploitation of the working class and in the midst
of an agrarian crisis directly attributable to big business’ pro-market
agenda.
Moreover, the Indian elite, like its counterparts around
the world, has responded to the global economic crisis, by pressing for
an intensification of the assault on working people. They are demanding
that the Congress Party-led UPA slash social spending, eliminate price
subsidies and gut restrictions on layoffs and plant closures. The
response of much of the corporate media to the protest strike was
vituperative. “It is time the UPA government overcame its ambivalence
and … pushed ahead with long-delayed labour reforms,” thundered the New Indian Express.
But
whilst Tuesday’s strike was proof of mounting worker militancy, the
unions who called it did not do so to initiate a working class challenge
to the UPA government and the bourgeoisie’s program of making India a
haven for cheap-labor production for world capitalism, but rather to
contain and politically suppress the working class.
The
leadership of the strike was very much in the hands of the CPI and CPM
through their labor federations, respectively the All India Trades Union
Congress (AITUC) and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). Over the
past two decades the Stalinists have called 14 one-day general strikes
as political cover for the leading role they have played in imposing
Indian big business’ agenda. The Stalinists have repeatedly propped up
governments at the Center, including for four years the current UPA
government, and in those states where they have held office they have
openly pursued pro-investor policies.
The Stalinists have hailed
the decision of the Congress and BJP unions to join Tuesday’s strike as
“historic.” On Tuesday, AITUC General Secretary Gurudas Dasgupta praised
G. Sanjiva Reddy, the President of the Congress-affiliated INTUC and a
Congress MP, as a “most consistent fighter in our joint struggle.”
The
Stalinists’ embrace of the Congress and BJP unions is clearly a
stepping stone to a further round of reactionary political alliances
between the Stalinist-led Left Front and the open parties of Indian big
business.
World Socialist Web Site correspondents spoke Tuesday to several striking workers in Chennai.
Sekar,
a postal worker, said, “For many years there hasn’t been new
recruitment in the post offices. As a result the existing work force
bears an enormous work load. There are still tens of thousands of
contract employees who have not been made regular after so many years of
work.”
Sridhar a telegraph worker, told the WSWS: “More than
half of the workers took part in the strike. But nearly 40 percent did
not, because they are concerned about losing about Rs.1,000 [US $20]
according to the ‘No work No Pay’ rules of the government.” The WSWS
correspondents pointed out that there are other reasons sections of
workers might have chosen not to participate in the strike, including
the fact that all the major trade unions that called it are affiliated
to political parties that have been instrumental in the implementation
of pro-market reforms. Expressing his agreement with this comment,
Sridhar said, “All these political parties implement anti-labor policies
which they claim to oppose while in opposition. This is deception.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/indi-m02.shtml