Communal Violence in Maharashtra

the Lal Nishan Party, with LNP activists not only operating in his unions but even contesting and winning elections on Kamgar Aghadi tickets. Reluctant to associate himself with the IPF in the early 1980s, during the last 10 years Samant had also overcome much of this earlier inhibition. In 1987, he shared a platform with Nagbhushan Patnaik in the workers' convention held by IPF at Ambernath. In September 1995, he addressed the inaugural rally of the AICCTU's Third National Conference in Patna. And since December 1995, his Maharashtra Girni Kamgar Union has been waging joint actions with AICCTU-affiliated textile workers' unions in UP, Gujarat and Bihar under the banner of the Save NTC Action Committee. In the otherwise increasingly bipolar politics of Maharashtra dominated by the Congress and the BJP-Shiv Sena combine, Samant was a consistent advocate of a third front building bridges between the dalit. Left and other secular political streams.