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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

The time is ripe for unity -Prabhat Patnaik

-The Telegraph

Over 1.5 lakh farm and industrial workers walked together in Delhi on September 5, not because no one thought of it sooner, but because the conditions have now been created to prompt it

On September 5 an event of great significance occurred in the capital: more than 1.5 lakh workers, peasants and agricultural labourers staged a rally on Parliament Street. The capital has certainly seen much bigger rallies in the past, but not in the recent past. In fact, one had almost forgotten the Boat Club rallies of yore, and come to believe that a new era had come when, notwithstanding great hardships, people were reluctant to hold mass demonstrations, at least along class lines.

The September 5 rally was significant not just for removing this impression; it brought together for the first time in post-Independence India three distinct classes, the workers belonging to trade unions, the peasants organized under the Kisan Sabha, and the agricultural workers belonging to a different union altogether. There have been separate rallies of workers and of peasants earlier, but never a joint rally, and certainly not one that included agricultural workers.

Since all three main unions that organized the rally are linked to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), their coming together may be seen merely as a central political decision. But the fact that this happened only now, and had never happened before, is not because the idea had not occurred to anyone before, but because conditions have now been created for such unity which did not exist earlier. Under the neoliberal regime in India the interests of workers and peasants have got directly linked in a manner that is altogether unprecedented.

Traditionally, the interests of peasants, who want higher prices for their produce, are seen to go against the interests of workers, who get hurt by such higher prices; their money wages being sticky, higher prices, especially of foodgrains, lower their real wages. In Britain in the early 19th century, the workers and the industrial capitalists had come together to demand a repeal of the Corn Laws so that cheaper food could be imported. (There, of course, the peasantry had virtually disappeared by then, and lower grain prices were opposed by landlords, so that the contradiction was different; but it illustrates the nature of the problem). In India in the late 1960s and early 1970s, rising food prices (under pressure from the surplus farmers and landlords) had led to a squeeze on the real wages of the urban workers, resulting in a spate of strikes, culminating in the Railway Strike of 1974, and foreshadowing the Emergency.

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