By IPS Correspondents
NEW DELHI, Jan 24 1997 (IPS)

The assassination of prominent trade unionist Dr Datta Samant, and varying reactions to it, reveal widening social cleavages and ideological perceptions in India as it undergoes neo-liberal “free market” structural adjustment.

Samant was individually the most important Indian trade unionist, with an affiliation exceeding 300,000 in Maharashtra, India’s most industrialised state. Known for tough bargaining tactics and militant rhetoric, he led numerous strikes in large industries, including the Great Textile Strike of 1982-83 in Mumbai’s (previously Bombay) 54 cotton mills.

This is the greatest strike in world history, involving 250,000 workers which lasted 20 months, exceeding even the 12 month-long British Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, with 200,000 workers.

Samant was gunned down in broad daylight in Mumbai on Jan. 16 by gunmen suspected by the police to be professional killers. This is a virtual repeat of what happened to the Brazilian unionist, Chico Mendes in Amazonia.

Samant was the third major Indian labour leader to have been murdered in the 1990s, with Shankar Guha Niyogi in central India, and V.G. Gopal in the east. A clutch of industrialists has been charged with plotting Niyogi’s killing, again by hired killers.

The motives for Samant’s assassination have not been decisively established. There are three hypotheses: union rivalry, vengeance on the part of a disgruntled worker, or a business mafia’s conspiracy.

Trade union rivalry, a declining phenomenon in India, appears to be an unlikely motive. Samant had not been recently involved in situations of intense rivalry, unlike 15 years ago. The reaction to Samant’s killing of Vasantrao Hoshing, his greatest rival, is one of disbelief and incomprehension. The police also discount the possibility that an individual worker could have executed such a calculatedly brutal act.

The most plausible hypothesis is that Samant was killed because he was the biggest obstacle to the illegal conversion of textile mill land into commercial plots.

The mills, located in central Mumbai, are sitting on 190 hectares of prime property. Only a third of the mills are working. At the astronomical rates (up to 285 dollars per square foot) that land commands in India’s financial and commercial capital, this is worth a huge 5.6 billion dollars.

The mill owners have been lobbying the state government to be allowed to sell this land. However, much of the land is not freehold, but leased to them under various conditions. Besides, its sale would violate Mumbai’s master plan and destroy its urban ecology by increasing congestion. Labour strongly opposes the land sale.

Nevertheless, the owners have been transferring it to builders under “development” agreements of dubious legality.

Samant was the fiercest, most implacable, opponent of the mill owner-builder nexus. Given their multi-billion stake in the land, it stands to reason that they wanted him eliminated.

Samant’s killing has polarised opinion in India. While 150,000 workers paid homage to him — the funeral had to be delayed by seven hours — and unionists and political leaders condemned the assassination, several writers in the media condemned Samant, charging him with using violence and commanding “an army of thugs”.

In reality, such charges were repeatedly disproved. Samant was a maverick with little respect for balance-sheets and India’s notoriously dilatory legalistic methods of dispute resolution. But he did not belong to the underworld.

“The reaction of the conservative media reflects the new climate of deregulation that prevails in India, which has encouraged an employers’ offensive,” says Jairus Banaji of the Mumbai-based independent Union Research Group. “Many industrialists have interpreted liberalisation to mean abolition of all rules and regulations, and freedom to do what they please”.

In the nineties, the balance of power between labour and capital has shifted significantly against workers in India. In 1991, the loss of person-days owing to industrial disputes was 26.5 million. In the first half of 1996, it fell to 3.5 million.

The number of strikes has decreased by three-fourths. Today, lockouts account for twice as many person-days lost as do strikes.

“In the present atmosphere favouring them, employers have

mounted a new offensive to close down factories which are less profitable than speculative operations,” says Colin Gonsalves, a Mumbai-based labour lawyer. “They impose illegal lockouts on flimsy excuses and move capital out into industries with foreign collaboration or into stockmarkets.”

Indian labour laws do not permit permanent closure of industries without government permission. The government is under growing pressure from prospective investors to “liberalise” laws and create unlimited rights to hire and fire. Government policy, which aims to attract 10 billion dollars in foreign investment at any cost, is gradually softening.

Unions, worried at rising unemployment, oppose this. Meanwhile, factory-owners have devised devious means of effecting closures, for instance by not paying electricity and water bills.

A high-powered official committee, the Fifth Pay Commission, has recommended abolition of the entire class of state employees numbering 1.5 million, and privatisation of their jobs.

More than 75,000 factories have closed down in the past two years. Capital intensity has been rising in industry. As a result, employment in organised manufacturing has actually decreased.

Several unions have demanded that workers be allowed to take over sick factories. However, official callousness has prevented this. Most factories go into outright, illegal, liquidation.

Studies in major cities have found a rising incidence of permanent workers being coercively or illegally fired and re- employed on a temporary basis. Casual workers have few rights and are not entitled to pension and provident fund.

Women workers are the worst victims. A study in Delhi documents a 20 to 30 percent decrease in their earnings. Factory workers are increasingly being converted into home- or sweatshop-based assembly workers.

“Most new, especially foreign, investment in India is being consciously directed into production units with very little employment potential,” finds Banaji. “Even large multinationals are opening big, highly automated soft-drinks bottling plants which will employ just seven workers — not enough to qualify under the Factories Act and other industrial and labour laws.”

Union membership has decreased by an estimated 10 percent over the past five years. Although this is much lower than the decrease recorded in, say, Western Europe or the United States during the right-wing eighties, it is still significant in India with a 300 dollars per capita income and open unemployment of over 20 million.

Excerpt: