Kerala was first state to have a court ban on bandh, now it passes off as hartal

In 2000, the Kerala High Court ruled that enforcement of a hartal call by a party or association or organisation by “force, intimidation — physical or mental — and coercion” was “unconstitutional”. But Kerala continues to log out of life as regularly as it did before the two court orders.

Three months ago, rights activist M K Haridas moved an application under the Right to Information Act to seek details of how many hartals crippled life in the state during 2006. The reply was revealing: the numbers ranged from 11 days of such shutdown in Kochi to 19 in capital Thiruvananthapuram to as many as 59 days lost to hartals in Thrissur. And there has been no let-up this year too. Almost every hartal here, no matter who calls it, continues to paralyse everything — from roads to offices to schools to shops.

Soon after coming to power, the present Left Government of V S Achuthanandan had declared in the Assembly that it would like to ban hartals and general strikes in the state’s two sunshine sectors, Tourism and IT, but not in the others. A year later, even that has not happened.

There has been no dearth of protests in the state against hartals. On Gandhi Jayanti day, a local NGO, Campaign for Peace, sent one lakh postcards to the Chief Justice of Kerala High Court, pleading to “do something”. The cards, now being signed by thousands, carries this message: “I oppose the anti-people hartal as a form of expression of protest. I request you to ensure the safety of those who disagree with the hartal, protect their right to work and travel and also to protect public property on the days of hartal.”

The HC had said “forcibly compelling” people to participate in a general strike or a hartal would amount to interference with their constitutional rights, and directed the state Government, district collectors and all other officers to recover damages from those calling for hartals when there is damage to public property. No one in Kerala has had to pay up yet, even as the hartals leave behind a trail of damages.

But there is also the question as to how seriously the courts really expect compliance to the ban order. One of the judges who passed the Kerala High Court’s pioneering ban order on bandhs in 1997 was Justice K G Balakrishnan. Before he assumed charge as the country’s Chief Justice a few months ago, Justice Balakrishnan had spoken to The Indian Express on the flouting of the ban. The idea behind the ban, he had said, was only to “sensitise people to the need for reining in such practices, and those are achieved. No such orders are expected to be implemented in total”.