by
Snehal Shingavi
[This
article first appeared at Socialist
Worker.org, website of the International Socialist
Organization, U.S.]
TENS OF millions of workers took part in a one-day
general strike in India on February 28 in the country's largest industrial
action since its independence in 1947.
This is the first time that India's main trade union
federations, which are all affiliated to one or another political party, have
come together to protest "neoliberal economic and labor policies"
pursued by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the governing coalition led
by the Congress Party. The action was also supported by more than 5,000
independent unions.
This reveals two important things about India that
are usually forgotten by the Western media.
First, India is not merely a seething mass of
desperation, composed of peasants and the abject poor. It has a massive working
class with organizations that are capable of bringing out large forces. Second,
the economic realities of neoliberal growth do not go unchallenged
indefinitely. Even in the places where the vice grip on workers has been
tightened to extreme levels, people find a way to fight back.
Among the demands that the unions made were the
establishment of a national minimum wage, the end of temporary employment (what
are called "contract laborers" in India) in favor of permanent jobs,
more efforts to curb runaway inflation (the official rate is hovering at around
7.5 percent), guaranteed pensions, and an end to the privatization of publicly
owned companies.
The banking and insurance sectors were hit hardest
by the strike, but other workers, including dockworkers, postal workers and
transportation workers, were heavily involved. The coordination of a national
strike on this scale marks the beginning of a new stage in the confrontation
between labor and capital in India, as the benefits of India's boom has
produced an economy in which the benefits accrue to the few at the top.
Despite threats from the central government and a
last-minute offer to negotiate, the strike took place and brought out millions.
In Kerala, the state government threatened workers
with a "dies non" order (no work, no pay), while in other places like
New Delhi, the government attempted to enforce the Essential Services Maintenance
Act (ESMA) to force workers in industries like power generation back to work.
In West Bengal, members of Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee's Trinamool Congress
(TMC) party also attacked and injured strikers.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
FOR THE past decade, India has been the darling of
the economic pundits globally, with massive growth rates and a burgeoning
middle class whose consumptive powers have fuelled the national mythology of
"India Shining." According to current estimates, the Indian economy grew
at around 7 percent last year and is projected to grow again at a similar rate
in 2012.
At the same time, the benefits of that growth have
been massively skewed. As Katherine Boo's new book, Behind the Beautiful
Forevers, demonstrates, the growth of the Indian economy has happened at the
same time as the growth of its underclass.
Mumbai, the symbol of India's new economic power and
famous for its massive film industry, is now commonly referred to as
"Slumbai"--more people live in slums in Mumbai than don't. Many of
these slum dwellers work in the hyper-exploitative informal economy--if they
work at all.
Agricultural reforms implemented in the past 20
years have immiserated people in the countryside. Last year alone, there were
more than 15,000 farmer suicides as a result of indebtedness and bad harvests.
Desperate farmers then migrate to the larger cities and towns where they form
the massive reserve army of the unemployed, which drives down wages.
The national strike was a response to these
conditions and the pinch that workers are feeling throughout the country. Last
year, there were some spectacular job actions at places like the Maruti-Sazuki
auto plant in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon, where workers fought a pitched
battle for wages and occupied the factory for almost two weeks.
At the same time, the official line of the Congress
Party-led government and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is that neoliberal
economic policies are going to continue. At the heart of the fight with the
unions is the controversial pensions bill now before parliament, which would
tie workers' retirement benefits to market-driven financial instruments and put
employee retirements in jeopardy.
But also at issue are Singh's plans to sell off
major state holdings in order to finance repayments on international loans and
budget deficits. Singh did, after all, cut his teeth as the economic architect
of India's neoliberal reforms, which began to be implemented when he was the
finance minister under former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.
All this puts twin pressures on unionized workers in
India. On one side is the threat of being pushed into the growing underclass,
which labor is trying desperately to unionize. The other peril comes from
neoliberalism and the attack on union rights. This has produced the conditions
for greater worker militancy in India.
However, this confrontation between labor and
capital in India will not be decisive. To start with, the unions have only put
forward a tentative one-day strike, with a long and vague list of demands.
Moreover, the official trade unions are all connected to various political
parties, and these massive days of protest are usually connected to political
gamesmanship that the parties play against one another.
The unions at the head of the strike were led by the
official left in India, which is still dominated by Stalinist and Maoist
political organizations. So in India, there is the All-India Federation of
Trade Unions (run by the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML)
Janashakti faction), All India Central Council of Trade Unions (dominated by
the CPI-ML Liberation faction), All India United Trade Union Center (run by the
Socialist Unity Center), the All India Trade Union Congress (run by the
Communist Party), the Center of Indian Trade Unions (controlled by the
Communist Party of India-Marxist) and the United Trade Union Congress (run by
the Revolutionary Socialist Party).
Since many of these parties are no longer
revolutionary, they tend to play a dampening role on the class struggle, rather
than developing it.
This isn't to say that workers don't fight back.
They do, but the unions do their best to limit their struggles. In 2006, there
was an attempt to form a federation of Independent Trade Unions called the New
Trade Union Initiative, which holds out some of the best possibilities for an
independent trade union movement in India. Many of these unions also
participated in the recent one-day action.
Second, there are also reactionary trade unions,
like the Hindustan Mazdoor Sabha run by the right-wing Bharatiya Janati Party
(BJP), and the Bhartiya Kamgar Sena, run by the ultra-right-wing Shiv Sena.
Both of these unions also participated in the strike, largely because the
leftist unions kept the slogans vague enough that the right wing could use the
one-day strike as cover for purported populist politics.
Part of the reason that the right and the left were
able to come together (as they have in the past, under the Janata Party
government in the 1970s) is because they are both now in the opposition to the
Congress Party's UPA coalition that runs the central government.
In fact, despite agreeing early on to support the
strike, the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC, run by the Congress
Party) withdrew after the party leadership put substantial pressure on it.
"The strike is politically motivated and illegal. We will oppose it on
Tuesday," said Ashok Chaudhary, the national president of the INTUC.
But this alliance between left and right can only be
temporary and opportunistic, as the BJP and Shiv Sena are both pursuing
neoliberal policies in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra respectively,
where both play much larger regional roles. The left-right labor alliance is
also dangerous, since the right wing has not been shy about stoking up ethnic
and communal hatred in times of economic contraction.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
PART OF the reason that the strike took place in as
spectacular a way as it did was because the traditional left was routed at the
polls in the last elections.
During the time that the left was in power in places
like Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal, they were able to play a dampening role
on industrial actions. But once they were removed from office, they found it
possible to allow the discontent of their members to be expressed in order to
embarrass the current government. But only to a point: Too much worker
militancy threatens their own ability to contain mass anger. Indeed, these
parties have, in the past, used their ability to keep a lid on struggle to lure
capital investment to their economically impoverished states.
Thus, in those traditional leftist strongholds, the
strike was strongest, and it went beyond industrial work stoppages to actually
disrupt traffic and business in major cities. In other places, such as Tamil
Nadu, Rajasthan, and Karnataka, the effects of the strike were not as strongly
felt.
But the most significant showdown was clearly in
West Bengal, where Chief Minister Bannerjee attempted to flex her muscle
against what she called "the politics of bandhs" (protests that shut
downs entire cities). Having recently beaten the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) at the polls, Bannerjee is now in the position of having to do the
bidding of large capital, despite having organized strikes and bandhs herself
in the past.
In Kolkata, the police were out in droves,
attempting to get people back to work, while Bannerjee's TMC party sent many of
its members to break up rallies and pickets throughout the city.
Ironically, Bannerjee came to power on the basis of
an electoral backlash against the CPM when it tried to raze entire villages in
order to make way for a manufacturing campus in the countryside for industrial
giants like Tata Motors. Now, Bannerjee is doing the work of the same
capitalists she claimed to oppose--an opportunistic about-face that will only
expose her to greater challenges.
What the general strike reveals is that although
working class anger at the economic and political system in India is growing,
the major left parties have been unable to deliver anything but symbolic and
token changes in their lives.
The general strike revealed that the working class
in India is quite large and has muscle. But to take the struggle forward,
workers will need new forms of political and union organization.
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