Bombay Mill Strike

This paper attempts to study the historical specificities of class conflict and consciousness in colonial India in the industrial context. This attempt is made on the basis of a study of certain long-term trends converging towards an intensification of labour-capital conflict in the Bombay textile industry and a detailed analysis of a nodal point, the strike actions of 1928-29. The paper questions some current notions about the 'irrationality' of working-class behaviour faced with technological change.

Before considering Datta Samant's role in the post-Emergency period in detail, it is necessary to look at three factors which helped to shape this period, from within the trade union movement. 

The recent publications of many kinds of source material on the beginnings of the Indian communist movement, including hitherto classified intelligence reports, creates the impression that the communist movement in those early days was a very powerful political force. The fact that in 1924, there was both a major strike in the Bombay textile mills and the launching of the Kanpur Conspiracy Case reinforces this impression of a well-organised, secret communist movement posing grave dangers to the government, and both the government and Communist Party leaders, for different reasons, seek to establish a causal relation between the two.

In recent months several industrialists and economists have been trying to persuade us that organised industrial labour is the new privileged class in the country. Relative to unorganised labour, rural and urban, and given the level of industrial wages, permanence of employment and dearness allowance pegged to the price index, this would seem to be so.

The Maharashtra Recognition of Trade Unions and Prevention of Unfair Labour Practices Act was passed in 1971 after consideration or the Report of the Committee on Unfair Labour Practices which was published in July J969. However, though the Act was passed in 1971, it was not enforced till September 8, 1975, i.e, after the imposition of the internal Emergency, when the working class movement was on the defensive. It is quite clearly a piece of anti-working class legislation and the working class should demand its repeal.