Leading Indian
Daily Calls For Suppression Of Strikes And Unions
By Keith Jones
07 October 2005
World
Socialist Web
The New Indian Express, one of
Indias leading English-language dailies, published an extraordinary
editorial in its issue of Friday, September 30, calling for the outlawing
of strikes and trade unions.
At the end of a
lengthy denunciation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its
allies in the Left Front for having sponsored a one-day general strike
against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments
right-wing economic policies, the New Indian Express declared: ...perhaps
the time has come for the Congress to get its act together and actually
implement some neo-liberal policies. It could begin by banning
trade unions and strikes and freeing India of this scourge forever.
The September 29
general strikewhich saw 60 million workers walk off the jobis
testament to the continuing mass opposition of Indias workers
and toilers to the economic reform agenda of Indian capital.
Seventeen months ago, Indias previous ruling coalition, the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance, was routed at the
polls when ordinary Indians were given the opportunity to render verdict
on its claims that a surge in foreign investment, profits, and share
prices meant India is shining.
The Congress-led
UPA, which survives in office only because it has the parliamentary
support of the Left Front, professes alarm at the appalling state of
public health care and education and concern for the plight of the poor.
But it has pressed forward with implementing the very same big business
agenda as did the Hindu-supremacist BJPprivatization, the gutting
of all restrictions on layoffs and contracting-out, the slashing of
state expenditure on agricultural price supports, the promotion of private-public
partnerships, and massive new military expenditures.
Nevertheless, as
the New Indian Express editorial attests, sections of Indian big business
are impatient with the pace of reform. Fearing they will
lose out in the ever-intensifying global struggle for markets, profits,
investment, and resources, they want all working-class and popular opposition
to the transformation of India into a cheap labor haven for international
capital stamped out.
The Indian state
has already moved significantly in this direction, with the courts issuing
a series of judgments that threaten democratic rights, including the
right to mount hartals or political strikes. In the summer of 2003,
the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the state government of Tamil Nadu
was well within its rights when it fired 200,000 striking government
employees and sought to replace them with scabs. The Court then further
proclaimed that state employees, and potentially other workers, have
no inherent constitutional right to strike.
The New Indian Express
is a major daily that serves as the flagship of a Chennai-based publishing
empire, the New Indian Express Group of Companies. Its influence
and connections to Indias business establishment are, however,
far greater than this indicates, for the New Indian Express and the
New Indian Express Group are themselves closely connected to an even
larger Mumbai-based company, Indian Express Newspapers. (The two Express
groups were created in the late 1990s when the grandsons of Indian Express
founder Ram Nath Goenka decided to divide up his empire.) Indian Express
Newspapers publishes dailies with a combined readership of more than
5 million, including the highly influential Indian Express and Financial
Express.
So close are the
two companies that the Indian Express and New Indian Express share articles
and editorials.
On September 30,
both papers published as their lead editorial a diatribe against the
Left Front titled Radical hypocrisy: Its time the Left ended
this agony. Except for the concluding paragraph, the two editorials
are identical.
Whereas the New
Indian Express calls for the agony to be ended by the Congress-led
government outlawing strikes and unions, the editorial in the Indian
Express concludes by saying that the Left Front would be more
honest if it withdrew support for the UPA government.
In other words,
the Mumbai Express editorial board and branch of the Goenka business
empire felt that the Chennai board and branch had gone too far in giving
free rein to the anti-democratic animus that animated the editorial
and in revealing what powerful sections of the Indian bourgeoisie think.
So they replaced the last sentences calling for the banning of unions
and strikesthat is, for the establishment of dictatorial forms
of rulewhile otherwise printing the same editorial verbatim.
Such is the state
of class relations in the worlds largest democracy.