INDIA, January 9— For two days, India’s 7,421 freight trains and 59,713 passenger cars did not move to any major cities. They could not move, because in places like the capital of the southwestern state of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, workers were sitting down on the tracks. As were their working class sisters and brothers in Chennai, in neighboring Tamil Nadu. As were workers 1,500 miles (2400 km) away in eastern Assam, bordering Bangladesh and Bhutan, where one quarter of India’s oil is produced. One third of the country’s working class - 150 million workers - were on strike!
‘Stop traffic and trains!’
Buses in Mumbai and Delhi, two of the world’s ten largest cities, with a combined population of nearly 50 million workers, did not move either. In Kolkata, the third largest city in India, transit workers protested inside train stations. Meanwhile in the country’s largest industrial zones like those in Chhattisgarh, workers joined from basic industries such as coal, iron, steel, aluminum, auto, machining, chemical, cement, and power generation.
Sprawling factories in the Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai industrial belts went idle as farmers, students, teachers, service workers like bank clerks, ‘anganwaldis’ (childcare) and healthcare workers—even non-unionized workers—joined workers in the streets in response to the unions’ command to ‘rail and rasta roko: “stop traffic and trains!”
The demands
A joint committee of nationwide labor unions, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), called the strike in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest “Labour Law” proposals to further weaken the ability of workers to unionize, to the point where labor unions will practically be illegal. Among the twelve strike demands were: stop the proposed “Labour Laws”; stop privatization of public transit; raise the minimum wage; institute price controls on the rising food costs; faster government recognition of new unions; abolish non-permanent and contract labor; and establish a social security fund for non-union workers.
Behind these demands, the conditions for this massive general strike (like the 180 million-strong strike in 2016) have been brewing at least since 1991. In 1991, India’s bosses turned to U.S. imperialism for foreign investment–which the World Bank provided–in exchange for massive restructuring of the Indian economy.
The changes brought astronomical profits for the bosses and mass misery for the workers. Dispossession brought mass internal migration, fueled by capitalist-provoked racist violence by growing Hindu-centric “Hindutva” fascist movements, guilty of massacres of Muslims and non-Hindi speakers, and racism against the “untouchable” Dalit caste. It’s no coincidence Narendra Modi’s Bharata Janatiya Party (BJP) formally embraced the Hindutva in the early 1990s.
Today, India’s working class has the worst sanitation, highest suicide rate, most malnourished children, and high rates of sexist attacks on women workers and gender-based violence. But the working class has not given up, and these strikes point our way to workers’ power.
‘The whole of Bengaluru sprung into the air…’
That’s because the strike also hurt India’s bosses in industries that weren’t even on strike. India is the world’s top exporter of information technology (IT) services, representing nearly eight per cent of India’s economy. At the center of India’s IT industry is Bengaluru (Bangalore). With 12.3 million workers, the bosses treasure it as the “Silicon Valley” of India. It is also home to some of India’s most important educational, aerospace and military research facilities.
And workers from every industry there brought it all to a grinding halt. The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), the “city’s lifeline…with a daily ridership of 45 lakh [450,000]” reported a 90 per cent reduction in service (Times of India, 1/9). Workers threw stones at the scabs still working, damaging 35 BMTC buses and twelve more state-run commuter buses, ensuring total shutdown. Even the prestigious universities that initially remained open were forced to close.
Bengaluru workers proved Marx correct once again: the working class cannot stir, cannot raise itself up without the entire capitalist system being sprung into the air.
Build PLP!
Progressive Labor Party salutes our striking sisters and brothers. The international working class needs that militant leadership now more than ever. Ultimately what our class needs most is mass international revolutionary communist leadership, which at the moment is absent among the multitude of nationalist fake leftist groups in India. Workers in India showed us again that we run the world. They showed the potential that as PLP grows around the world and links these struggles into a revolutionary communist movement of millions, the sooner we will smash these racist borders and control it.