CPI (M)'s Brinda Karat.
Credit: PTI File Photo
New Delhi: At the peak of the Emergency in April 1976, the management of Birla Cotton Textile Mill in Delhi pressed each of its workers to operate four looms instead of two and made them work longer hours, recalls CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat, a young activist back in the day, in her new book.
In "An Education for Rita", which delves into the decade from 1975-1985, the veteran communist leader notes that the Emergency is generally recalled for the destruction of civil liberties and democratic rights while the assault on workers’ rights is often overlooked.
Karat writes that the Emergency eliminated “the basic right to unionise, to protest, to strike”.
“It thus disarmed the working classes of their hard-won rights." During the Emergency years, Karat was given the responsibility to work with the Birla mills unit and in the workers' colonies in Kamla Nagar and surrounding areas.
Workers of the Birla Cotton Textile Mill went on a strike on the night of April 18, 1976 to protest against the increasing workload and longer work hours.
"We had to have secret meetings and secret leafleting. We used to go to areas where we knew the workers would walk past and we would leave leaflets there. The workers would pick them up and surreptitiously put it in their pockets. Before the Birla strike we smuggled in leaflets and put them on each machine," she said.
The whole preparation for the strike was "underground".
She says that when people write about the Emergency "they don't really look at it from the worker's point of view".
“The way that it impacted workers and the way that management and owners utilized the Emergency to do what they could not have dreamed of doing, leading up to the Emergency were those huge strikes of workers across India including the Railway strike (1974)," she said.
The period also saw large scale demolitions in Delhi for "beautification". Karat said that workers living in the slums were "thrown away", given alternate sites in outer areas of Delhi, 30-40 kilometers away from their workplace.
"Today the scale of the brutal 'relocation' has been forgotten," she notes in the book.
Workers were relocated to areas like Nand Nagri and Jahangirpuri, which were deserted at the time. The workers were left to build their own 'jhuggis', without any road, water, or electricity connectivity.
In 2022, at the age of 74, Karat was once again in Jahangirpuri, standing in front of a bulldozer to stop demolitions.
Asked about the present day situation in the national capital, Karat said while the workers at that time were given an alternate site, the demolitions at present were being undertaken without relocating those living there.
"The difference between what happened then and now is that they were relocated," she said.
The CPI(M) leader also called the new Labour Laws an "incremental attack" on rights of workers, under the guise of new laws, adding that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is "weaponising" its majority in Parliament against the "poor and the working people of India".
"I would say today it's a much more dangerous assault on democratic rights because it is happening all the time in the guise of democracy. What is happening at present, Parliament, the rights of Parliament and the rights of the Opposition in Parliament are being completely diluted and the function of Parliament itself is being changed," she said.
On June 25, 1975, then prime minister Indira Gandhi announced the imposition of the Emergency in a broadcast on All India Radio, shortly after the Supreme Court granted a conditional stay to an Allahabad High Court verdict declaring her election to the Lok Sabha null and void. It was lifted on March 21, 1977.
The 21-month period saw the suspension of civil liberties, arrest of opposition leaders and the suppression of press freedom.