Regarding (a), based on whether or not there is a correspondence between the actual wage and the norm of a family wage, or at least a “need-based minimum wage” (the latter, formulated at the 15th Indian Labour Conference in 1956), Dev Nathan, a radical ’68er, has identified four sections of the Indian working class. These are (i) workers who get more than the family wage; (ii) workers who get a wage that corresponds to the family wage; (iii) workers who get less than the family wage, but enough to meet their immediate costs of subsistence, though insufficient for the “reproduction” of labor power, that is, for what is required for sustaining a family, and have to therefore draw upon other productive resources at their command (for example, land in the village) or informal economic activity of non-working-class members of their families; and (iv) workers who are pauperized, those who get a wage which is not even sufficient to meet the immediate costs of subsistence, and do not have any other productive resource, even a tiny plot of land in the village, to fall back upon.
The miners of Chhattisgarh and Chotanagpur working as contract laborers; the bidi workers of Nipani (in Karnataka) and Nizamabad (in Telangana) working on piece rates; the power-loom weavers of Bhiwandi (in Maharashtra) and Belgaum (in Karnataka); quarry, brick-kiln, and construction workers in different parts of the country; and numerous other workers outside agriculture, many of them perennial migrants, are all part of either (iii) or (iv), which together form the bulk of the Indian working class. And, going down the wage hierarchy, the security of employment worsens, working hours get prolonged, unionization is much lower or even absent, extra-economic coercion and/or patron-client relations of dependence and obligation to employers are more prevalent, and labor laws are violated with impunity.32
Importantly, Dev Nathan finds little mobility between regular and casual/contract employment, and also between low-wage and high-wage jobs. This is mainly due to caste, ethnic, religious, and gender-based discrimination, with Hindu, upper-caste men dominating the regular, high-wage jobs and a preponderance of Dalits, Muslims, and adivasis in the casual/contract, low-wage, and dirty/heavy/onerous jobs. Most of the manual sewerage workers, for instance, are Dalits. They go unprotected into dark holes of filth and rotting garbage, clearing blockages mostly with their bare hands. Women workers are predominantly in low-wage jobs, as casual and contract workers, and in subsistence production, which makes it possible to keep the wage below the value of labor power for male workers in (iii) and (iv). In other words, where one finds oneself in the hierarchy of labor powers is considerably determined by the extent of caste, ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination one faces, and this is reinforced by one’s access to the required education and training, which is also significantly determined by the degree of social discrimination one encounters. Nevertheless, Dev Nathan also remarks that it was from among the educated and trained workers—the ones who had regular, high-wage jobs—that the revolutionary cadres of working class origin came into the Naxalite movement.
“SHORT-LIVED DALLI–RAJHARA SPRING”
Organizing the unorganized sections of the working class has been one of the most difficult and demanding duties radicals have had to confront. Shankar Guha Niyogi was the organizing secretary of the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh (CMSS) of the Dalli–Rajhara miners. Discriminated against, these contract workers were confined to a labor camp, separated from the main township administered by the public-sector Bhilai Steel Plant. Ruled by a contractor “mafia,” many of the contract workers were tribal persons who had to struggle even to uphold their very dignity as human beings. What remained etched in their collective memory was the fact that they had been fired upon and twelve of their comrades died in that police firing, this on 3 June 1977, barely three months after the Emergency was lifted, signifying that for the damned of the Indian earth, Emergency or no Emergency, fierce repression of their struggles was going to continue to be the norm. They had given their labor and their working lives to the well-being of the Bhilai Steel Plant, but unlike the regular workforce, they were deemed expendable. They had no entitlements.33
Even as there is no evidence to vouch for the Naxalite part of it, the tale goes that Niyogi, a skilled coke-oven operator in Bhilai Steel Plant, in the 1960s was attracted to revolutionary politics amidst the Spring Thunder of 1967, went on to join the CPI(ML) and was driven underground, but eventually left the party, coming to Dhanitela, near Dalli-Rajhara, to work and organize openly in the quartzite mines over there, where he met and married a tribal co-worker, Aso. He was arrested and jailed under MISA during the Emergency, and upon his release, the miners of Dalli-Rajhara solicited his support, and it was here that the CMSS was formed in 1977.
There followed a series of struggles, these in the face of the “wrath of the powerful mining and labour contractors,”34 and the intransigence of the management of the Bhilai Steel Plant. The demands ranged from enhancing the wage rate of the contract laborers to getting the newly formed labor cooperatives to replace the labor contractors, and even abolishing the contract labor system in what was perennial work. Besides, there was the union’s innovative opposition to the management’s plan to mechanize the mine and retrench most of the workers. The CMSS presented a feasible alternative in the form of a blueprint for semi-mechanization without any retrenchment.
Further, what was distinctive about the CMSS was the involvement of women workers in the struggles, with women office-bearers, rare in Indian trade unions. The CMSS went on to form its own political front, the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM), in 1982, which extended the struggles beyond issues of the workplace, with the Mahila Mukti Morcha (women’s liberation front) a significant part of it. The participation of women workers helped rein in the scourge of sexual exploitation by the contractors, as well as the alcoholism of male workers, which had led to the proliferation of a “lumpen-degenerate culture in the streets and wife-beating and destitution in the homes.”35 The CMSS built a “Shahid Hospital,” which doctors like Binayak Sen, Ashish Kundu, and Saibal Jana helped get off the ground. It established eleven schools, for the Bhilai Steel Plant didn’t care to run any schools in the camp area, and it reportedly also undertook an adult educational program. Its abiding slogan was Sangharsh aur Nirman—Sangharsh ke liye nirman, nirman ke liye sangharsh (“Build a future for the struggle, struggle to build a future”).36
Some CMM-affiliated unions became a force to reckon with in the Bhilai-Durg-Rajnandgaon and adjoining industrial areas where a new generation of industrialists, aggressive parvenus, had rapidly come by huge fortunes, for instance, in the Simplex group of companies. Niyogi was a marked man; on 28 September 1991, he was assassinated by unidentified assailants who pumped six bullets at point-blank range into his body while he was asleep at home. His funeral was attended by over 50,000 people, giving him a hero’s farewell and vowing to carry on the struggle for a better world.
Complicity of some of the parvenu industrialists in the assassination and involvement of the district administration in the cover-up were widely believed but could not be established in the higher courts. Niyogi had spent more than a year in jail under the preventive detention provisions of MISA, which was repealed in 1977, only to reappear again in the form of the National Security Act, 1980, and he was also detained under the preventive detention provisions of this law. He never faced trial though, nor was he ever convicted of any offense; his real “crime” “was political and in an extended sense philosophical.” Remembered widely in radical left circles, he continues to exist as “‘the froth on the waves’ of people’s struggles,”37 that which remains of each wave when it reaches the shore.
VAST REINFORCEMENT OF POTENTIAL WORKERS
The struggles must go on, though, for the churn to endure. The challenges for radical labor organizers are immense, as we have seen, more so because capital exploits the employed workforce with a vast reinforcement of potential workers at its disposal, what Marx called the reserve army of labor or the relative surplus population. In India this is the enormous pool of the unemployed and the underemployed, along with the petty commodity producers and service providers among the self-employed.
The reserve army of labor presents capital with