Lest We Forget the Working Class

“Friday, 22^nd February, 1946. Bombay woke to what became the bloodiest day of the Mutiny. Even as the political leadership turned their backs on the ratings, ordinary citizens took to the barricades to bravely face tanks and bullets in support of the strikers. Newspaper reports estimated that several hundred, somewhere between 350 to 700 people were killed and between 1,000 to 1,500 people were injured, some gravely. This day of martyrdom belonged to the workers and students of Bombay.

The civilian death toll was comparable to the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh on Baisakhi Day, 13 April, 1919. The difference was, in Bombay, civilians – mill workers and students – fought pitched battles against British troops and policemen. And, in contrast to Jallianwala Bagh, 22 February 1946 is not commemorated by any memorial or ceremonies and it has been edited out of the “approved” history of the Independence Movement.” (Indeed, when the thespian Utpal Dutt put up a dramatized version of the events called “Kallol” even in 1965 in Kolkata, he was arrested!)

“Shouting patriotic slogans and plastering posters urging Indian soldiers in the British Army not to fight their fellow Indians, crowds thronged the Gateway of India. … At around 2.30pm, the city exploded and pitched battles began in several locations. ….Barricades were thrown up in various parts of the city by the locals, and behind them, the flags of the Congress, Muslim League and the Communist Party fluttered proudly, and the people were ready to defend these flags and, by extension Mother India at any cost …The police opened fire over twenty times in the Fort area.

The BEST (Bombay Electric Supply & Transport) bus drivers who had joined the protests attacked English and European civilians and soldiers…Starting 22^nd February Bombay burnt for 3 days. There was no end to the mob fury. Battles between British troops with machine guns and stone-throwing mobs took place all over the city… The Imperial Bank on Abdur Rehman Street was looted; military lorries were torched at Shivaji Park; and the Kohinoor Mill in the Dadar area was set on fire.

Tram tracks were obstructed by empty drums and barricades…. Out of the sixteen cloth mills in the city, only five worked to their full strength on 23^rd February, while in the other eleven, workers either abstained from work or did only token work……. The police were taking no chances, entering middle-class localities and chawls to track down protest leaders. Beatings and mass arrests took place, with even women and children not being spared.”

            Kapoor goes on to describe how the unrest at Bombay stirred people all over the country – at Karachi, Vishakhapatnam, Madras, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Trichinopoly, Madurai, Kanpur - “the British struggled to control the crowds, the protestors were undeterred by indiscriminate firing. The courage of the ratings had infected the ordinary people”

            “In Vizagapatam the Communist Party organized a procession of workers and other citizens carrying posters which said ‘Release arrested Navy boys’ and ‘Down with Imperialism’…In Calcutta, an unprecedented strike led by Calcutta Tramway workers resulted in a complete paralysis of all forms of transport – trams, buses, taxis and even trains. Almost one lakh students and workers took to the streets. The demonstrators carrying the flags of the Communist Party, Congress and Muslim League went around the city shouting slogans and urging the three parties to unite and help the naval ratings.

They were addressed by leaders of all three parties…In Ahmedabad, on 24^th and 25^th February, 10,000 mill workers, mostly owing allegiance to Congress and Muslim League struck work and eighteen mills were wholly shut. In Trichinopoly, almost 10,000 mill and office workers took out a mile and a half long procession to demonstrate solidarity with the ratings. There was complete hartal in Madras …. In Madurai on 27^th February, a day long bandh culminated in a meeting of over 50,000 people pledging support to the naval ratings…. In Karachi, ….. 30,000 Hindus and Muslims, mill workers and students poured into the Idgah Maidan on 23^rd February in another protest march led by the CPI, which the Congress and Muslim League noticeably avoided.”

            The Naval Central Strike Committee finally surrendered on 23^rd February 1946. At 6.13 am the three flags of the Congress, Muslim League and Communist Party were lowered from the masts of the rebel ships. A last message was read out. It ended thus:

“And a last word to our people.

You have stood by us. We are glad, proud and grateful for that. We mourn the loss of life. Had you not stood by us and demonstrated in your thousands, our cause and our strike would have been drowned in blood. The authorities may yet try to victimise us and punish us. We shall fight that – we ask you to be ready to fight that and redeem the solemn promise of Sardar Vallabhai Patel and Mr Jinnah.

Our strike has been a historic event in the life of our nation. For the first time the blood of the men in the services and the people flowed together in a common cause. We in the services will never forget this. We also know that you, our brothers and sisters, will not forget. Long live our great people. Jai Hind”

The leaders of the  RIN Mutiny were never reinstated into the navies of either independent India or Pakistan. As for the working class, the heroes and heroines of that “Last War” – those who had displayed remarkable courage and even more remarkable unity across religion and party, who had had the audacity to “lead their leaders”, who had given up their lives for the dream that independence from the British would bring them equality and dignity; the situation of that working class today, is best exemplified by the spectacle of 1.14 crore workers (official figure stated in Parliament) walking thousands of kilometres home to their villages, many dying enroute, just one week into the 2020 lockdown, because they had neither a house nor a bank balance.

Today, the unorganised sector employs 83% of the Indian work force, but 92.4% of all workers are informal workers, i.e. those whose conditions of work are not governed by any sort of written contract. As per a recent report of the International Labour Organisation (“Wage and Minimum Wage in the time of Covid 19”), real wage growth in India was one of the lowest in Asia. India’s “real wage" grew by a paltry 2.8% in 2015, 2.6% in 2016, and 2.5% in 2017, while it remained flat in 2018.

Whereas Pakistan’s real wage grew 8.9% in 2015, and 4% each for the next three years; Vietnam grew between 3.7% and 12.4%; while China grew by 5.5-7% in the past four years. The Report claims that, even prior to Covid, in 2018, in PPP (purchasing power parity) terms, India’s gross monthly wage of $215 was third from the lowest after Bangladesh and Solomon Island among the 30 countries of the Asia Pacific Region. According to the ILO, after Covid, informal workers in India 8saw a 22.6% fall in wages, even as formal sector employees had their salaries cut by 3.6% on an average.

Our ‘socialism’ has extended only so far as building up a remarkable infrastructure in the public sector – now being dismantled and privatized at an equally amazing rate; it has not gone as far as treating the worker as an equal, as a free citizen, deserving a life of dignity. All those matters have been relegated to the Chapter of “unenforceable” Directive Principles in our Constitution.

That is why, in this 75^th year of independence, Bezwada Wilson of the Safai Karmachari Andolan has to cry out in distress that in the past 5 years, 535 persons have lost their lives in sewers and septic tanks, even as the Union Minister claims in Parliament that there have been no deaths of manual scavengers. Crores are being earnt and spent in real estate development of our glittering metropolises, but we have not bothered to build sewerage systems where human beings would not be required to enter sewers, storm drains and septic tanks. Caste discrimination remains deeply interred in the society.

But the ‘unkindest cut’ to the working class in this 75^th year, has been the repeal of 46 labour laws and bulldozing through of four Labour Codes by the Union Government, during a raging pandemic with barely any Parliamentary debate. And this, at a time when only a tiny percent of the working people is unionised, and various sections of the unorganised sector – notably construction workers, domestic workers, safai karmacharis and hawkers – have been struggling to get specific laws passed and implemented in their favour.

Almost all unions across the political spectrum, including on many occasions the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh affiliated to the BJP, have expressed apprehension regarding the impact of this enormous sea change of legal regime. 5 crore workers in the coal, steel, banking, postal services, copper and oil sectors struck work on 28^th -29^th March 2022 upon the call of a Joint Platform of Trade Unions which many independent unions also supported. Their demands - Scrap the 4 labour codes, Stop privatization and the sale of public assets through the National Monetisation Pipeline, Grant farmers the legal right to MSP, and Enhance the minimum wage. There has been absolutely no effort to conduct any meaningful discussions with the representatives of the workers.

While the Union Government has been propagating that bringing in of a national minimum wage and widening the social security net to include informal and gig workers in the new Codes will be significant steps toward improving labour conditions, more careful perusal of the Codes reveal the following:

1. Forming a trade union has been made more difficult, and without unionization, and participation in collective bargaining, it is virtually impossible for workers to assert or obtain any other rights. The doing away with Standard Standing Orders means that recruitment, disciplinary action, promotion and retrenchment will no longer be subject to explicit rules of fairness, reasonableness and natural justice.
2. Far from precarious labour / contractual labour being abolished, now for all practical purposes, the concept of a Permanent worker or a Principal Employer has been abolished. There will now only be “term contracts” and the contractor will be the employer.
3. The Wage Code still excludes 10 lakh ASHA workers and around 36 lakh Anganwadi workers, who, despite their militant struggles, and their critical roles during their pandemic, continue to be described as “voluntary” workers. Similarly gig/platform workers are designated as contractors/ self-employed. A vaguely defined Floor Wage (can anything be less than a Minimum?), as opposed to a Minimum Wage that was specifically defined through judicial pronouncements and nutritional and living standards, has been brought into existence, and this threatens to depress wages nationally.
4. The requirement of maintenance of several registers has been done away with and replaced by self-certification, thus depriving workers of any kind of documentary evidence; Inspectors are now Facilitators who will have very limited powers and will be unable to prosecute without government sanction; and trade unions will no longer have access to balance sheets to negotiate bonuses.
5. While a lot of nice sounding platitudes have been written into the Codes, what is absent are the procedural remedies available to workers and unions to report or be redressed for violations. Additionally, the excessive delegation in the Codes in regard to every sort of detail of conditions of work means that the workers will be at the mercy of a generally unsympathetic executive.
6. The stringent restrictions on strike which were earlier applicable only to essential services are now universalized, making a legal strike a near impossibility.

The Union Labour Ministry has decided to hold on 25^th -26^th August 2022 at Tirupati, a conference of the Labour Ministers and labour officials of all the States in order to “work out modalities for the roll out of the labour codes.” It is trying hard to push a “one go” simultaneous implementation of all four Codes. Labour is a subject in the concurrent list upon which both the States and the Union Government are empowered to legislate. The need of the hour is the mobilisation of the working class in their respective states before 25^th -26^th August, to impress upon their respective state governments, their clear “NO” to this rollout.