The question of Unity

‘Nothing Has Changed, But Everything Begins...’
Santosh Rana

In the post-independence period, the share of agriculture in India's national income has declined significantly over time, the speed of this decline being particularly remarkable since the reform programme of the 1990s. Right now, only about 20 percent of national income are generated in agriculture, although the proportion of working force earning the major portion of their livelihood from agriculture is much larger. The nature of participation of this working force in the production process is also not of one kind. The owner cultivators, who cultivate their land mainly with their own labour, constitute one category of participants. There is a category of sharecroppers who lease in their land from owners. They cultivate their land with their own labour, but have to hand over a part of the produce to the owners as share or rent. Farm labourers constitute a third category. They do not ordinarily own land or other means of production, and hence have to rely only on their own labour power. Some of them have only tiny parcels of land, but these being too insufficient for their subsistence, they have to work on others' lands. Again, sharecroppers too have to work as labourers for a part of their working period.

A relatively recent development in Bengal's countryside is the emergence of a class of workers who can no longer be called farm labourers. They participate in various kinds of activities. Some are employed in house building or house-repairing works, some work in brick-kilns, some are engaged as drivers of van-rickshaws and some others work as carpenters or electrical mechanics. Over the last three decades, the number of non-agricultural workers in rural Bengal have increased significantly. One section of them works in their own villages or in the surrounding areas, but there is another section who migrates elsewhere and even goes outside the state. At present, many workers from Malda, Murshidabad and the Bankura-Medinipur (Paschimanchal) region go outside West Bengal for earning their livelihood.

Those who work outside are engaged in house building, iron factories or hatcheries. They are not really 'free labourers' in the proper sense. They have to work under one kind of unfreedom. Since their place of work is distant from their original areas, the possibility of their receiving local support in case of trouble is also much less. They are even deprived of the minimum trade union rights of the working class.

Farm workers working in their own areas have a higher degree of freedom. Three or four decades ago, non-cultivating landowners (commonly known as jotedars) and rich farmers of rural Bengal had their own attached farm servants. Similarly, women of labourer households were employed as annually attached labourers (kamins). Children were employed as bagals (boys employed for looking after the cattle) on annual contracts. This was a situation of bondage. But things have much changed now. At present, farm workers work on the basis of daily wage. Compared with the past, it is a valid suggestion that labour power has now to some extent assumed the form of a commodity. Various forms of bondage have however lingered. Besides, job opportunities in the labour market are limited and wages are too low.

Among the total working force of India, only 7 percent are employed in the organized sector, while the unorganized sector absorbs the rest. In the former category are the government and semi-government employees, workers of state enterprises and workers of big and medium industries. Plantation workers also fall in the category of this organized sector. Ordinarily they are entitled to facilities like provident fund, gratuity, ESI etc. But in case of the latter two categories, there are numerous complaints of owners appropriating the funds meant for the provident funds and gratuity. For, example, tea gardens and jute mills fall in the category of the organized sector, but in many cases, owners of gardens and mills appropriate such funds. The leather complex near Kolkata is also considered as belonging to the organized sector. But the majority of workers there do not have any appointment letter, provident fund or ESI. Whenever workers demand these facilities, they are either retrenched or implicated in trumped up charges and sent to jail. After the start of the reform programme in the 1990s, the proportion of contract and casual workers in the organized sector has largely gone up, along with a lengthening of the working period. In many cases, workers have now to work for ten to twelve hours a day.

The conditions of the vast majority of the working population, who are employed in the unorganized sector, are far worse. The greater portion of them are engaged in the countryside in agricultural as well as non-agricultural activities. Various state governments have fixed minimum wages for farm workers, but there is no arrangement for overseeing whether the farm workers really get it. Besides, workers of the organized sector are deprived of social securities like the provident fund, gratuity, pension, ESI etc. Construction workers, forest workers and workers engaged in mines and small factories constitute another significant portion of unorganized workers. The permanent workers employed in public sector mines are comparatively well off. For example, all the permanent workers of Coal India fall within the income-tax bracket. But there are many casual and contract workers as well, whose salaries and other benefits are far less. In the mines run under private ownership employers do not pay even the minimum wages and other benefits. In many such mines, workers are forced to work for long hours without minimum safety. Their conditions are largely like those of bonded labourers. Among the seven percent of the working population employed in the organized sector, the conditions of many too are like those belonging to the unorganized sector. In West Bengal, several hundred thousands of workers are employed in the tea gardens. For tea garden workers the State Government has fixed no minimum wages. The argument of the Left Front Government was that they did not prescribe any such minimum wage because wages are determined through trilateral agreements (among the government, the management and the trade union). It is a specious argument, because such trilateral agreements operate in many places, but they are not any hindrance to the announcement of minimum wages by the government. The reality of the tea gardens is that permanent workers get their wages on a daily basis. There is no weekly leave with pay, and the daily wage is even less than the official minimum wage for agricultural labourers. Along with the nominal wages, some benefits ( ration etc) are given, but inflated figures of their values are shown in defense of the management.

On the whole, it may be said that the vast majority of the working class of India is forced to work at wages below the subsistence minimum. Recently the Government of India have been compelled to admit that within 2004-05 to 2009-2010, i.e. during the term of the first UPA Government, the total number of workers increased from 457.8 millions to 459.1 millions, the percentage of increase being only 0.3. Yet the number of casual workers went up from 129.7 millions to 151.3 millions, implying a rise of 16.65 percent. It is clear that the proportion of workers who receive wages sufficient for a decent living has gone down and that of those who live without enough food, lodging, education and proper medical facilities has been rising. During this period, the national income grew by about 8 percent per annum and the profits as well as assets of large capitalists rose by leaps and bounds. It means that the capitalists have appropriated a larger share of the wealth created inside the country, and to that extent, direct producers have been deprived.

What is the remedy? The only remedy is the united resistance of the toiling people. Some initiatives in this direction have been seen recently, and a manifestation of such initiatives has been the nationwide strike in last February. But the unity that is necessary for resisting the all-round onslaught of domestic and foreign capital is still very much distant. Here it is necessary to discuss the structure of Indian society and how it hinders the formation of a comprehensive unity of the working people.

Stratified Social Structure
It has already been said that tea garden workers are paid even less than the prescribed minimum wages for agricultural labourers. An event of closure leads them to regular starvation, and starvation deaths are regular occurrences in the gardens. A look at the identity of tea garden workers would suggest that most of them are Jharkhandis (their ancestors came from the Jharkhand region in order to work at the tea gardens) and the rest are Gorkhas. The mother tongue of the Jharkhandis is Sadri. But there is no arrangement for instructing people through this language even at the primary level. For this reason, the children of worker families face, besides poverty, another big problem, namely the language barrier, in respect of learning. There are a small number of Hindi-medium schools in the garden areas. To the Sadri-speaking population, the proximity with Hindi is greater than with other languages, but their children do not understand Hindi. Owing to the suppression of identity and culture, many of the tea garden workers e.g. Santals, Mundas, Oraons etc, although recorded as scheduled tribes, are deprived of the opportunity for learning. In consequence, there is a complete lack of occupational mobility among them, which means that when they get work in the gardens, they are underfed and if the gardens are closed, they simply starve. At the time of the beginning of the tea industry, the white planters brought them as indentured labourers, and they did not have the right to leave the gardens. Now they have this right, but there is no job opportunity elsewhere. Hence the old condition prevails. Hence the acquisition of super profits by means of super-exploitation of their labour rests on a non-capitalist or pre-capitalist relation of suppression, which cannot be smashed just by means of wage struggles or other trade union struggles. One primary condition for the formation of an effective unity of these workers with the advanced sections of the working class is that the latter have to side firmly with the former's struggle for linguistic and cultural identity fulfilment. The larger section of the government employees, bank employees, postal employees, employees of the electricity sector, and teachers of schools and colleges working in North Bengal consists of Bengalis. Many of them are associated with different leftist mass organizations. It is also true that they play a somewhat struggling role against the overall onslaught of the neo-liberal policies. But they are never seen to stand by the struggle of the Jharkhandi, Nepali or Kamptapuri-speaking masses (who form the majority of the people of North Bengal) for their language, culture or identity.

The workers engaged in the leather complex of Kolkata provide another instance. Those who have some acquaintances among them know that the vast majority (probably more than ninety percent) of them belong either to the scheduled castes or the Muslim community. All over India (including West Bengal) they have been victims of suppression, discrimination and deprivation through ages, the accumulated consequence of which is the present degrading condition. As a result, they have to toil hard at extremely low wages without appointment letters, ESI or provident fund benefits. As long as the advanced sections of the working class of Kolkata do not firmly stand by the side of these deprived workers, overall unity of the working class is a far cry.

A study of the other sections of workers engaged in the unorganized sector would suggest a similar picture. The vast majority of them are from adivasi, dalit and other backward and suppressed communities. The acquisition of huge super profits by the billionaires of India is due to the super-exploitation imposed on the toilers of this unorganized sector.

Workers of the unorganized sector constitute that strong army, an alliance with which would enable the advanced workers to resist the all-round onslaught of global capital. In the strike called by the central trade unions in February the economic demands, as well as the demands for social security, of the working class received importance. This is good as a beginning, but not enough. The movement of the working people must realize that the onslaught on the working class cannot be resisted without democratization of the Indian society. This democratization requires not only the full implementation of land reforms, but also abolition of all the manifestations of suppressions and discriminations based on caste, religion, nationality and other identities. Those workers who, owing to their birth in advanced communities, have got the opportunity of education and acquired organizational ability, must take special responsibility for this.

Many erroneous trends exist also among the workers of backward and suppressed communities. Special mention should be made of the fact that proto-bourgeois strata have been formed in those communities, who oppose the class unity of workers and virtually stand in favour of the neo-liberal regime. The Indian ruling classes use these sections. For this reason, the task of building up this class unity is by no means an easy task. Advanced workers must understand the complexity of this situation and find ways of solving them.

In the concrete conditions of Russia, Lenin solved this problem. Tsarist Russia was a prison of non-Russian nationalities. The unity of Russian workers with their non-Russian counterparts was not possible without a recognition of equal rights and equal status of the suppressed nationalities. The Russian working class could not fulfil its historical mission without the Great Russian chauvinism existing within itself. This led Lenin to the formulation that those who did not recognize equal rights of all nationalities and all languages could not be called even ordinary democrats, let alone communists.

The Indian situation is different. Here linguistic and nationality -based suppression and discrimination exists side by side with caste-based, religious and other identity suppressions and discriminations. Here the demand for equal status and equal rights of all communities come to the fore as a real demand. In some cases , it assumes the form of demand for reservation, while in some others it is the demand for linguistic recognition and dignity. There are cases where it emerges as the demand for autonomy. Advanced workers must understand these demands in the concrete conditions of India and determine its attitude according to the specificity of each case.
[Translated from original Bengali by Anirban Biswas]

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 46, May 26-June 1, 2013

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