Nationalism and the working class movements: Part II

During Swadeshi Movement of Bengal:

• Still workers participated in wider political issues which was shift from earlier agitation on only economic questions.
• The number of strikes rose sharply and labour movement graduated from unorganised strikes to organised strikes on economic issues with the support of the nationalists.
  • The national upsurge on 16 October 1905, the day the partition of Bengal came into effect, included a spurt of working class strikes and hartals in Bengal.
    • Workers in several jute mills and jute press factories, railway coolies and carters, all struck work.
    • Workers in the Bum Company shipyard in Howrah struck work on being refused leave to attend the Federation Hall meeting called by the Calcutta Swadeshi leaders.
    • Workers also went on strike when the management objected to their singing Bande Mataram or tying rakhis on each others’ wrists as a symbol of unity.
  • Swadeshi leaders enthusiastically threw themselves into tasks of organising stable trade unions, strikes, legal aids, fund raising etc.
  • Public meetings in support of striking workers were addressed by national leaders like B.C. Pal, C.R. Das and Liaqat Hussain.
  • Strikes were organised by Ashwini Coomar Banerjee, Prabhat Kumar Roy Chaudhuri, Premtosh Bose and Apurba Kumar Ghosh.
  • These strikes were organised in government press, railways and the jute industry in which either foreign capital or the colonial state held sway.
  • The first tentative attempts to form all-India unions were also made at this timer but these were unsuccessful.
  • Frequent processions in support of the strikers were taken out in the Streets of Calcutta.
    • People fed the processionists on the way.
    • Large numbers including women and even police constables made contributions of money, rice, potatoes, and green vegetables.
• Subramaniya Siva and Chidambaram Pillai led strikes in Tuticorin and Tirunelvelli in a foreign-owned cotton mill saying that strikes for higher wages would lead to the demise of foreign mills and were arrested.
• In Rawalpindi, in Punjab, the arsenal and railway engineering workers went on strike as part of the 1907 upsurge in the Punjab which had led to the deportation of Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh.
• The biggest strike and political demonstration of working class in this period was organised after Tilak’s arrest and trial.
• The Swadeshi period was also to see the faint beginnings of a socialist tinge among some of the radical nationalist leaders who were exposed to the contemporary Marxist and social democratic forces in Europe.
  • The example of the working class movement in Russia as a mechanism of effective political protest began to be urged for emulation in India.
• With the decline in the nationalist mass upsurge after 1908, the labour movement also suffered an eclipse.
  • It was only with the coming of the next nationalist upsurge in the immediate post World-War I years that the working class movement was to regain, though now on a qualitatively higher plane.

Resurgence of working class activity (During The First World War and After):

• The War and its aftermath brought a rise in exports, soaring prices, and massive profiteering opportunities for the industrialists but very low wages for the workers. This led to discontent among workers.
• The emergence of Gandhi led to a broad-based national movement and the emphasis was placed on the mobilisation of the workers and peasants for the national cause.
  • Also beginning with the Home Rule Leagues in 1915, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in 1919, the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement in 1920-22 gave push.
• The working class now created its own national level organisation to defend its class rights.
  • In this period, the working class got involved in the mainstream of nationalist politics to a significant extent.
  • A need was felt for the organisation of the workers in trade unions.
• International events like the establishment of a socialist republic in the Soviet Union, formation of the Comintern and setting up of International Labour Organisation (ILO) and economic depression lent a new dimension to the movement of the working class in India.
• It was in these contexts that there occurred a resurgence of working class activity in the years from 1919 to 1922.
  • But there was not yet any political movement on the basic of socialism of the conception of class struggle.
• The strike movement which began in 1918 and swept the country in 1919 and 1920 was intense.
  • Ahmedabad textile strike in March 1918 led by Gandhi himself.
  • The end of 1918 saw the first great strike affecting an entire industry in a leading centre in the Bombay cotton mills.
  • The workers’ participation in the major national political events was very significant.
  • The response to the hartal against the Rowlatt Act in the spring of 1919 showed the political role of the workers in the forefront of the common national struggle.
    • In April 1919, following the repression in Punjab and Gandhiji’s arrest, the working class in Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat resorted to strikes, agitations and demonstrations.
  • Railway workers’ agitations for economic demands and against racial discrimination also coincided with the general anticolonial mass struggle.
    • Between 1919 and 1921, on several occasions railway workers struck in support of the Rowlatt agitation and the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement.
    • The call for an All-India general strike given by the North Western Railway workers in April l919 got after enthusiastic response in the northern region.
    • Lajpat Jagga has shown that for railwaymen in large parts of the country, Gandhiji came to symbolize resistance to colonial rule and exploitation, just as the Indian Railways symbolized the British Empire, ‘the political and commercial will of the Raj.”
  • In November 1921, at the time of the visit of the Prince of Wales, the workers responded to the Congress call of a boycott by a countrywide general strike.
    • In Bombay, the textile factories were closed and about 1,40,000 workers were on the streets participating in the rioting and attacks on Europeans and Parsis who had gone to welcome the Prince of Wales.
  • The western Indian cotton mills, the Calcutta jute mills also witnessed unprecedented labour unrest around this time: there were 119 strikes in 1920, followed by 152 in 1921.
  • These industrial actions are often described as ‘spontaneous’ movements with no centralised leadership, no coordination among the strikers, no programme and no organisation something like “a working class jacquerie”.
• Change in the attitude of colonial state and employers:
  • In the 1920s, although only for a while, the colonial state and also some employers realised the usefulness of trade unions as legitimate channels of negotiations.
    • This was in response to the granting of representation to the labour in the legislative councils in the Act of 1919, later this principle being extended to municipalities as well.
  • So this change of attitude was much less a change of heart, and more the pursuance of a “notion of containment“.
    • Later on, not only were a number of anti-labour legislations passed in 1934, 1938 and 1946 to contain working class militancy and trade union activities, but also frequent use of police became a handy tool to break strikes and ensure labour discipline.
• Trade unions were formed by the score in this period.
  • First attempts at trade union organisation were springing up all over India during this period.
    • There is a trace of the Workers in the Ahmedabad Cotton Mills forming a union in 1917.
    • But the basis of organisation was still very weak and far behind the level of militancy.
  • In 1920, there were 125 unions with a total membership of 250,000, and large proportion of these had been formed during 1919-20.
  • The starting point of Indian trade unionism is commonly derived from the Madras Labour Union, formed by B.P. Wadia, an associate of the theosophist Mrs. Besant , in 1918.
• The AITUC:
  • The All India Trade Union Congress was founded on October 31, 1920.
  • Lokamanya Tilak, who had developed a close association with Bombay workers, was one of the moving spirits in the formation of the AITUC.
  • The Indian National Congress president for the year, Lala Lajpat Rai, was elected as the first president of AITUC and Dewan Chaman Lal as the first general secretary.
  • Lajpat Rai was the first to link capitalism with imperialism—“imperialism and militarism are the twin children of capitalism”.
  • In his presidential address to the first AITUC, Lala Lajpat Rai emphasized that, ‘Indian labour should lose no time to organize itself on a national scale… the greatest need in this Country is to organize, agitate, and educate. We must organize our workers, make them class conscious.’‘
  • The manifesto issued to the workers by the AITUC urged them not only to organize themselves but also to intervene in nationalist politics.
  • In second-session-of the AITUC, Dewan Chaman Lal while moving a resolution in favour of Swaraj pointed out that it was to be a Swaraj, not for the capitalists but for the workers.
  • In its early years, AITUC leaders had very limited connection with the working class movements. The main purpose of its founding was to secure a nominating body for representation at the International Labour Conference at Geneva.
  • The prominent Congress and swarajist leader C.R. Das presided over the third and the fourth sessions of the AITUC. The Gaya session of the Congress (1922) welcomed the formation of the AITUC and a committee was formed to assist it.
  • C.R. Das advocated that the Congress should take up the workers’ and peasants’ cause and incorporate them in the struggle for swaraj or else they would get isolated from the movement.
  • Other leaders who kept close contacts with the AITUC included Nehru, Subhash Bose, C.F. Andrews, J.M. Sengupta, Satyamurthy, V.V. Giri and Sarojini Naidu.
  • In the beginning, the AITUC was influenced by social democratic ideas of the British Labour Party.
    • The Gandhian philosophy of non-violence, trusteeship and class-collaboration had great influence on the movement.
  • Gandhi’s aversion to AITUC was well known, as he asked the ATLA, ever loyal to him, not to join it. Making “use of labour strikes for political purposes”, he argued, would be a “serious mistake“.
• Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (1918):
  • Gandhi helped organise the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (1918) and through a protest secured a 27.5 per cent wage hike. (Later, the arbitrator’s award ensured a 35 per cent raise.).
  • It was one of the largest single trade union of the time.

Government Response:

• British Government showed some steps by the appointment of Bengal Committee Department in 1919-20, Bombay Industrial Dispute Committee of 1922 and Madras Labour Department in 1921 (passed in 1926).
• The main aim of Government was to find the means to direct the labour movement in India into the safe channel and right type of unionism. This was reflected in Trade Union Act of 1926 with its special restriction of political activities.
• The Trade Union Act, 1926:
  • Recognised trade unions as legal associations;
  • laid down conditions for registration and regulation of trade union activities;
  • Secured immunity, both civil and criminal, for trade unions from prosecution for legitimate activities, but put some restrictions on their political activities.
• Why growth of trade unionism was restricted:
  • Indian workers remained divided among them, competed with each other and did not join the trade union movements, was largely because of this employer-state collusion.
  • Both at industry and factory levels, workers were victimised, intimidated, coerced, often physically attacked for attempting to combine and at the event of a strike, due to an oversupply of labour, the employers could easily dismiss the striking workers. And in all these, the state was always on their side.
  • These factors constrained the growth of trade unionism.
  • Even larger unions like the Bombay Textile Labour Union or the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (ATLA) were vulnerable to pressures from the employers and the state.
  • The Madras Labour Union was temporarily crushed in 1921 by the British textile magnates, the Binnys, with overt assistance from the provincial bureaucracy.
  • The TISCO management, whenever it found an opportunity, tried to crush the Jamshedpur Labour Association (JLA), even though it was actively patronised by the Congress leaders, and was known for its loyalty to the employers; and in this, the local colonial administration was always with the management.
  • Even the goondas or hooligan elements, who were patronised by the employers and hired as strike breakers, were protected by the local police officials as institutionalised tools of violence.
  • There were, in other words, serious obstacles that prevented and even discouraged workers from combining.

Late 1920s:

• After 1922, there was again a lull in the working class movement, and a reversion to purely economic struggles, that is, to corporatism.
  • The next wave of working class activity came towards the end of the 1920s, this time spurred by the emergence of a powerful and clearly defined Left Bloc in the national movement.
• Rise of Communists:
  • Formally Communist Party of India was founded in 1925.
    • Communist believed in Class Struggle unlike socialist who did not believed in class struggle but were conscious of organising peasants and workers with a view to serve their economic and other interest.
  • Various Communist groups in different parts of India had by early 1927 organized themselves into the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties (WPP), under the leadership of people like S.A. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, P.C. Joshi and Sohan Singh Josh.
    • The Workers and Peasants Party in Bengal, organised by middle-class communist to mobilise mill workers from around 1928 in the Calcutta industrial belt.
    • The WPPs, functioning as a left-wing within the Congress, rapidly gained in strength within the Congress organization.
  • Strong communist influences on the movement lent a militant and revolutionary content to it.
    • In 1928 there was a six-month-long strike in Bombay Textile Mills led by the Girni Kamgar Union.
    • Communist influence also spread to workers in the railways, jute mills, municipalities, paper mills etc., in Bengal and Bombay and in the Burma Oil Company in Madras.
    • The jute mill strike in 1929 gave rise to the Bengal Jute Workers’ Union, and the strike of 1937 to the Bengal Chatkal Mazdoor Union, both organised by educated communist leaders, some of them trained in Moscow.
  • The working class support for the communists did not arise simply from a fusion of shared antagonisms towards the capitalist class and the state.
    • Their consistent opposition to the state was of course one reason behind the popularity of the communists.
  • The communist trade unions also utilised community ties and informal social networks.
    • In Kanpur, for example, in the 1930s, the emerging communist leadership of the Kanpur Mazdoor Sabha specifically targeted the Muslim workers alienated by the Congress and the Arya Sarnaj.
    • In Ahmedabad too, the communist dominated Mill Mazdoor Sangh drew its support from the Muslim workers dissatisfied with the Gandhite ATLA.
    • Religious ties were frequently used to organise strikes by these communist trade unions, which thus appeared as class orientated organisations operating essentially within the hierarchical cultural milieu of the Indian workers.
• The workers under Communist and radical nationalist influence participated in a large number of strikes and demonstrations all over the country between 1927 and 1929.
  • The AITUC in November 1927 took a decision to boycott the Simon Commission and many workers participated in the massive Simon boycott demonstrations.
  • There were also numerous workers’ meetings organized on May Day, Lenin Day, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and so on.
• Government response:
  • Alarmed at the increasing strength of the trade union movement under extremist/ communist influence, the Government resorted to a-two-pronged attack on the labour movement.
  • On the one hands it enacted repressive laws like the Public Safety Act (1929) and Trade Disputes Acts (TDA), 1929 and arrested in one swoop virtually the entire radical leadership of the labour movement and launched the famous Meerut Conspiracy Case against them.
    • The Public Safety Bill and the Trades Disputes Act of April 1929-which virtually banned strikes-were passed without any serious Congress opposition.
  • On the other hand, it attempted, with some success, to wean away through concessions (for example the appointment of the Royal Commission on Labour in 1929) a substantial section of the labour movement.
• The TDA, 1929:
  • Made compulsory the appointment of Courts of Inquiry and Consultation Boards for settling industrial disputes;
  • Made illegal the strikes in public utility services like posts, railways, water and electricity, unless each individual worker planning to go on strike gave an advance notice of one month to the administration;
  • Forbade trade union activity of coercive or purely political nature and even sympathetic strikes.
• Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929): 
  • In March 1929, the Government arrested 31 labour leaders, and the three-and-a- half-year trial for conspiring against King-Emperor resulted in the conviction of Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange, Joglekar, Philip Spratt, Ben Bradley, Shaukat Usmani and others.
  • The trial got worldwide publicity but weakened the working class movement.
• The onset of depression worsened the situation once again.
  • To overcome the crisis the Bombay mill owners had resorted to rationalisation policies, causing retrenchment, wage losses and higher workloads.
  • This magnified the problems of the mill-hands to such an extent that they could no longer be dealt with at individual mill level and resulted in an industry-wide general textile strike in 1928-29.
  • Rationalisation policies also resulted in a serious industrial action by twenty-six thousand TISCO workers in jamshedpur in 1928.
  • In the Calcutta jute mills, prescription of long working hours by the IJMA resulted in a general strike in 1929 involving 272 thousand workers
  • The working class militancy had by now reached a proportion when it could no longer be ignored by the established political groups.
• The labour movement suffered a major setback:
  • It was partially due to this Government offensive and partially due to a shift in Stance of the Communist-led wing of the movement.
  • From about the end of 1928, the Communists reversed their policy of aligning themselves with and working within the mainstream of the national movement.
  • This led to the isolation of the Communists from the national movement and greatly reduced their hold over even the working class.
    • The membership of the GKU fell from 54,000 in December 1928 to about 800 by the end of 1929.
    • Similarly, the Communists got isolated within the AITUC and were thrown out in the split of 1931.
• The Left leadership, which came into control of the AITUC in 1929 lacked coherence, being composed of very adverse elements.
  • This left wing within AITUC grew aggressive which resulted in split in 1929 in which N.M. Joshi broke away from the AITUC to set up the India Trade Union Federation.
  • AITUC now came with an extensive and bold programme.