In 1969, the Elayaperumal Committee Report testified to these and other discriminatory caste-Hindu practices, but even the Prime Minister, Mrs. Gandhi, who swore by the Nehruvian “socialistic pattern of society,” ignored its findings, and the report gathered dust in filing cabinets. And worse, in Kilvenmani, a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, forty-four Dalits—men, women, some with infants, and children—were forcibly herded into a hut and burned to death by hired hoodlums of the landlords on the night of December 24, 1968, because they had struck work for higher wages. The memory of it, the inhumanity, the cruelty, moves one to tears.
The Panthers came on the Maharashtrian scene with great force and promise, but then, in the face of severe repression, and disputes over the uneasy marriage of the ideas of Ambedkar and Marx, split into factions, two in 1974 itself, barely surviving, with one foot in the grave.25 Far off, in the state of Bihar, the Naxalite movement had forced the state’s politicians to reconsider agrarian reforms, but the upper-caste landlords, riding high in the aftermath of the crushing of that movement, were in no mood to cede ground to the downtrodden. State propaganda that grossly exaggerated the achievements of Mrs. Gandhi’s 20-point program during the Emergency had, however, created a stir among the underdogs, enhancing expectations of debt redemption, occupancy rights of sharecroppers, and higher wages for landless laborers in rural Bihar. Moreover, the Naxalite movement, crushed though it was by then, had emboldened the oppressed.
This brought on landlord retaliation in the aftermath of the Emergency and the coming of the Janata Party to power in the March 1977 general elections. Perceiving the Congress Party to have failed them, the landlords, who generally managed the “vote banks,” had switched sides. A spate of atrocities against Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Class (that is, backward caste) landless laborers and poor peasants followed, the socioeconomic identity of the victims confirming the Panthers’ inclusive characterization of the oppressed and the downtrodden as Dalits, including women.
OFF THE GROUND—WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS
“1968” also witnessed women’s solidarity irrespective of caste or class, and I need to mention the militancy of middle-class women in the wake of the Mathura rape case that sparked off autonomous women’s movements in independent India. Two policemen had raped a young, unlettered, poor tribal girl, who worked as a domestic help, on the night of March 26, 1972, inside a police station in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, but the accused were acquitted by the Supreme Court. The SC judgment, Tuka Ram and another vs. State of Maharashtra, dated 15 September 1978, reversed the decision of the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court on the grounds that Mathura had raised no alarm, and further, that there were no visible marks of injury on her person, suggesting that she had passively consented to sexual intercourse, and such consent was not vitiated by fear of death or hurt.
Thus, according to the Supreme Court, relying on Section 375(c) of the Indian Penal Code, Mathura was not raped. One might ask, a “forlorn young girl … from a poor, humble background and [with] hardly any education … [i]n the dead hours of the night … in a police station … forbiddingly fearsome … stupefied and stunned … [could] her passive submission, even if such was the case, … amount to consent either in fact or in law”?26 For the first time women mobilized across the lines of class, caste, and political affiliation—in a public outcry and widespread protests, which forced amendments to various sections related to Indian rape law. The latter was by then more than a century old, desperately crying out for amendments in the light of past experience with its working. The campaign against rape, and, more generally, against women’s oppression and patriarchy, brought a number of women’s rights advocates and women’s organizations to the fore across the country.
LIMITS OF WORKER MILITANCY
Such budding comradeship among women apart, “1968” didn’t bring forth any across-the-board “fraternity” (comradeship) of the exploited that could have relieved the distress of the working class. The year 1973–74 was unbearable. This was when the prices of food-grains, edible oil and kerosene, the most basic of commodities in the consumption basket of workers, hit the roof. The twenty-day strike in the Indian Railways that began on May 8, 1974, was historic in more ways than one. The Indian Railways was the country’s largest employer, and the strike encompassed the entire rail network, affecting the very “lifeline” of the Indian economy. The strike thus raised the anxiety levels of Indian big business and, consequently, brought on massive state retaliation. The army and the paramilitary forces were deployed on a war footing; 15,000 union-activist workers were served dismissal notices; 50,000 participants were arrested. The Defence of India Rules (DIR) of 1971 (framed under the Defence of India Act, 1971) and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), otherwise meant to be applied in the event of an external national threat, were put into operation by the state against its own citizens.27
Unlike in the past, the railway workers, especially those who had organized themselves independently in the “category” (some of them craft) unions, like the locomotive workers, had begun to militantly challenge the “status quo in the Indian Railways’ system of industrial relations,” epitomized by the accommodating attitude of the two main (recognized) unions—the Congress Party–controlled National Federation of Indian Railwaymen and, to a lesser extent, the “socialist”-steered All-India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF). These apex unions had, over the last two decades, been thoroughly co-opted by railroad management.28
So, it was the railway workers themselves, in the face of grievances that remained poorly addressed over two decades, who became the “conscious agents of their own interests,” thereby creating the momentum for the strike that the AIRF had to lead, to restore its credibility among the workers. What made the strike almost historic was the fact that the railway workers took it upon themselves and showed their potential to “break the bounds of the kind of token action beloved of the institutionalized social-democratic labor movement.” The latter, it should be noted, was led by a union structure and supported by parties that ideally wanted a “monopoly on negotiating the terms of labour’s contract with capital.”
Though the strike was historic, the workers couldn’t break this structure, the vision of which was “openly articulated by unions such as the HMS (Hind Mazdoor Sabha) and HMKP (Hind Mazdoor Kisan Panchayat) and implicit in the practice of the AITUC (All India Trade Union Congress) and CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions),” the former two, the trade union wings of the then two socialist parties, and the latter two, those of the two “social-democratic” communist parties.29 The railway workers could have achieved a breakthrough if the rest of the Indian working class had joined them in solidarity—sincerely, courageously, and uncompromisingly. But given the organizational and political weaknesses of the labor movement, the rest of the Indian working class did not join hands with the railway workers in a manner befitting a militancy that was the need of the hour, and hence the full potential of the strike was not realized.30
The organizational and political weaknesses of the labor movement stem from two structural factors: the peculiar differentiation of the Indian working class and the huge reserve army of labor. The Indian working class is differentiated on three counts, according to (a) the correspondence or not of the wage with the value of labor power,31 (b) the caste, tribal/ethnic