Every strike has a sting

Furthermore, the overall economic situation in ’74-’75 and today is as different as chalk is from cheese. At that point, the economy was in the doldrums, shortages were acute, inflation was high, and economic hardship was compounded by political strife. Today, despite the undoubted difficulties the poor face, the economy is growing at 8 per cent, inflation is under control and shortages are few.

Before and during the Emergency, I had lived in Bombay. Between the city and Thane, a distance of 32 kilometers, 1,200 industrial and business units were shut because of strikes and lockouts. This was more or less symbolic of what was going on in the rest of the country.

On top of all this had come the railway strike, hurriedly organised by the maverick George Fernandes. He was then even more unpredictable and reckless than during the years he was in power, and made no bones about his expectation that once the movement of coal stopped, every single factory would close down and the “country would starve”. This strike was crushed with a degree of brutality that India had never seen before, nor witnessed since. To my surprise, in a generally anti-Indira ambience, there was widespread support for the government’s repressive action. The public mood changed against the then prime minister only after she refused to step down after the Allahabad High Court’s famous judgment.

There is, of course, no comparison between the railway strike of May 1974 and the recent irresponsible action of Left-controlled trade unions. And yet there is an uncanny semblance between the comments I have been hearing over the last few days and the applause by the middle class that had greeted the failure of Fernandes’s misadventure.

The Left may be gloating over the ‘success’ of its strike but it must know that its reasoning for suddenly inflicting on the country a day-long disruption is devoid of credibility. It may have differences with the UPA government over privatisation, an essential element in effective economic reform, but surely the appropriate forum for settling them is the coordination committee, not the country’s streets? Especially after the Left leaders, on Jyoti Basu’s wise advice, have withdrawn their hasty boycott of the committee. After all, the Manmohan Singh government, bowing to Left Front pressure, did drop its decision to sell a small fraction of the equity of the Bharat Heavy Electricals and other PSUs.

Similarly, there is an urgent need to do something about the shockingly inefficient running of the major airports in Delhi and Mumbai. If privatisation is unacceptable to it, the Left Front must come forward with alternative suggestions, along with precise proposals on how to raise the funds needed for the purpose. Not to come forward with any policy recommendation and persisting in saying no to whatever policy the UPA formulates after due deliberation, amounts to exercising power without responsibility which, in the words of a former British Prime Minister, is the “privilege of the harlot”.

What renders the Left Front’s attitude utterly incomprehensible is that it is obstructing the very policies of the UPA government in New Delhi that its own chief minister in Kolkata, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, is busy promoting in his state. And this brings me to a delicious quirk of irony. On the day of the disruption, what was advertised as a strike in banks and at airports only, was converted in West Bengal into a “bandh” by the Left Front’s militant cadre. One of their victims was Bhattacharya; another, the chief minister’s wife going by car separately to her destination. Once recognised, both were rescued, of course. But ordinary people were not that lucky.

A serious damage, still unrecorded, that the events of September 29 did in Gurgaon — in Congress-ruled state Haryana — needs to be brought into the open. Besides forcibly extending the strike to industries, for which it was never meant, the strikers forced the BPOs to also shut down. This has dented the trust in them of those overseas companies that prefer to outsource their IT operations to Gurgaon and Bangalore, generating huge income and employment. Is this of no concern to the leaders of the CPM and CPI?

The demand by the BJP general secretary, Arun Jaitley — that the CPI (M) and its allies should be fined for disrupting normal life, just as his party and the Shiv Sena had been for organising a bandh in Mumbai — may have been motivated by partisan politics. But this does not detract from its legitimacy. In fact, India needs a law of torts so that every citizen can sue those who deprive him or her of the right to earn a living.

The writer is a well-known political commentator