This Is No Storm In A Teacup

Guest Post by Harsh Mander

[The sudden withdrawal by some tea plantation managements in North Bengal of not just regular employment, but also all a series of life-enabling services is proving to be nothing short of catastrophic for workers.]

A largely invisible, grim, humanitarian crisis, of mounting hunger, looms over several thousand North Bengal tea garden workers. Duncans, a leading tea company with 15 plantations in Darjeeling and the Himalayan foothills, has plunged its workers into a precarious state of illegal limbo. It has neither formally closed its gardens nor is it running operations normally, with devastating consequences for the survival and future of around 15,000 workers and their families.

The company began tea operations in India in 1857, clearing large swathes of dense forests in North Bengal to establish its extensive tea plantations. With other British plantation companies, it transported industrious tribal people from Chota Nagpur and Santal Parganas as indentured, near-slave labour. After Independence, ownership of these companies gradually passed into Indian hands. Although nominally free now, workers continued to work in near-colonial conditions. The dependence and submissiveness of the workers was partly secured by paying part-wages in kind, as food rations, housing and health services. Until recently, most tea worker households were not even issued Public Distribution System (PDS) ration cards. Instead, State governments supplied PDS grain to companies to issue to workers.

In these conditions, if tea garden managements suddenly withdraw these supplies, workers are left singularly defenceless and precarious. The first such crisis was thrust upon workers of 30 tea gardens in North Bengal in 2003-04, when they were illegally closed and abandoned overnight by owners who no longer found them to be commercially viable. Instead of first securing the interests of the workers and gardens, they simply disappeared. On my visits to the gardens at that time, I found several worker households facing conditions of actual starvation.

A similar situation has arisen today with the illegal semi-closure of 15 gardens by Duncans. Early in 2015, the management abruptly stopped paying wages to its workers. It also terminated food rations. It cut electricity and drinking water supplies to worker colonies. For several years, pensions and provident funds had not been paid. Gardens were not maintained, and ageing, unproductive tea bushes, some a hundred years old, were not replaced. Workers’ houses were not maintained for years. Workers allege both apathy and runaway corruption by the management.

Such illegal semi-closure would jeopardise critically the future of workers in any industry. But tea worker communities have been brought up for generations in forced direct dependence on the management even for basic essentials such as food, clean drinking water, housing and health care. For them, sudden withdrawal by the management of not just regular employment, but also all these life-enabling services, is nothing short of catastrophic.

I found workers surviving by travelling to neighbouring gardens and working at low, piece-work rates. These garden managements are profiting from their distress; they pick them up in buses for which they are charged, and workers are forced to spend longer hours to earn far less in uncertain casual employment, with no job security or additional benefits. Others are mining stones on riverbeds and several younger workers have migrated to Bhutan, Kerala, Delhi and Tamil Nadu. Children are dropping out of school and joining the workforce to bring some food to the table. Adding to worker distress, many are dependent on untreated stream water for drinking. No Duncan tea estate has a functioning hospital since 2000: without doctors, medicine, and occasionally a nurse.

Those we found most threatened by hunger were single women, those ailing and the elderly. Phulo Munda, for instance, is a widow of 57 years. As a permanent worker, she earned around Rs.1,600 a month. But since the undeclared closure, she has received no wages. She has only one meal a day. When strong enough, she trudges to the river bed to break stones, for which she gets Rs.70 a week. For August 2015, she earned just Rs.150. The condition of her house is appalling, with virtually no walls. The wooden pillars to support the tin roof were also bought by her. When it rains, she squats with an umbrella inside the house, awake the whole night. Every day she walks 3 kilometres to fetch drinking water, and collects firewood from the forests nearby. Food, fuel and housing were all guaranteed in the past by the management.

This purgatory situation of semi-closure is patently illegal, but labour officials and trade unions have done little to hold the management and owners accountable. The State government has also not started wage work or restored health care, drinking water or electricity in worker habitations. In the inverse government morality of our times, States defend morally and legally culpable failures by wealthy plantation owners and their corrupt and inept managements. Workers are left defenceless, thrown to the edge of survival. 

Harsh Mander is a human rights worker, writer and teacher

(This article was originally published in The Hindu)

 

Campaign On Alternative Politics Ends With Mock Hanging Of Traitors

The Osongothito Khetra Shramik Sangrami Mancha and Right to Food and Work Campaign- West Bengal jointly organized a mass gathering in Plassey in Nadia on October 9 at the end of their campaign that started on  September 26. The purpose of the campaign was to raise their voice in support of an alternative politics which makes the empowerment of the working class and their demands the moving force of politics and governance.

The campaign focuses on people’s rights and democracy. It calls for the unity of working people above caste, creed and religion. It aims to stop the rule of goons and demands the right to a life of dignity, which includes a universal guarantee for food, health, education, housing and work. A state-wide campaign program,e including motor cycle rallies, street corners, padayatras and mass contact programmes, along with distributing leaflets and posters, took place in different parts of Bengal, starting from September 26.

The participants began motorcycle rallies from the Assam border, Orissa border, Bangladesh border and Jharkhand border from October 1 and made their way to Krishnanagar after facing ruling party hooligans in Keshpur and police harassment in Baruipur on  October 8 .In the process, the campaign covered almost all 19 districts in West Bengal and travelled 1,300-1,400 km in the State.

On the following day, about 2,000 people, including 180 people who had been on the campaign trial, reached Plassey to identify the modern day Mir Jafars. Mir Jafar was originally responsible for India’s defeat at the hand of British at Plassey and is considered one of the great traitors in Indian history. For a symbolic protest, they gathered in a field near Plassey station and took part in a mock trial to penalise the modern day Mir Jafars.

Before the trial started, the leaders of the Mancha addressed the gathering. The Mancha consists of about 20 unions of unorganized sector, which is the largest and most deprived working sector of the country involving 94% of workers. Bela Adak President of PBKMS (Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity) and Jagganath Das, General Secretary of Shramajivi Samanvay Committee spoke about the terror and discrimination faced by unorganised sector workers in their work place as well as homes. 

Anuradha Talwar, leader of PBKMS and Somnath Ghosh, leader of Hosiery Workers’ Union and convenor of the Manch, pointed out the success of the week-long campaign that took place in North Bengal in Doars where the tea garden owners had bowed to the demand of the workers for 20% bonus.

They also spoke of the success with which the participants in the rally had stood against ruling party terror at various places. Sanjay Poria, President and leader of West Bengal Civic Police Association, talked about their plight in not being appointed to the job which they rightfully deserved and the discriminatory behavior on the part of the police department. Sanjay has been under surveillance of the police and intelligence department for his organised protest against the injustice of the government to the civic volunteers. 

The civic volunteers are a huge number of unemployed  youth who have been provided with low wages and face dismissal and police brutality at the slightest attempt to protest about their terrible working conditions. On this day, following his speech, two police vans full of force reached the spot and there was tension that he might be arrested.

Following the speeches which ended with a great round of applause, the assembly participated in the mock trial to identify the modern traitors in politics. As the notion of alternative politics advocates for the right of people to dislodge the elected representatives from power if they are proved to be inefficient in working for the welfare of the people and to keep the elected representative under continuous monitoring, the assembly passed judgment on the basis of popular unanimity that the political leaders, administrators, bureaucrats, police and all the administrative officials had behaved treacherously with them.

Some of them played the role of political leaders, elected representatives, capitalists, bureaucrats and police while some were the people’s judges. The gathering agreed that these people had failed to perform their duty and they hade let the people down, therefore they deserved highest penalty. 

They also expressed their unanimous opinion to hang these modern day Mir Jafars and an act of mock death penalty was performed by hanging a straw effigy. The meeting ended with a pledge to fight these modern day Mir Jafars and to strengthen the unity of the working people.

Rallies Join Forces For Final Day's Programme

On October 8, the penultimate day of the campaign by Asanghatit Shramik Sangrami Manch and the Right to Food and Work Campaign West Bengal, two rallies started from two seperate points- one from Pandua in Hooghly, and the other from Badu in North 24 Parganas.

The rally in Pandua met women’s groups in Kalna 1 , Kalna 2 and Pandua blocks, campaigning with them, mainly through small public meetings where women from self-help groups had organised street corner meetings . The meetings focused majorly on the issues of the non–implementation of NFSA . The women took a lot of initiative in making all these meetings a a success.

The rally from Badu was joined by strong contingents from Shramajivi Samanvay Committee and West Bengal Civic Police Association (WBCPA). The rally travelled through Nadia district and was hosted by the Chakdah Lorry Owners’ Association and Chakdah Bigyan O Sanskritik Sanstha. At a meeting at the lorry stand issues of environmental importance were brought up. 

 

A similar programme on the issue of indiscriminate cutting of trees and filling of ponds by racketeers was organised by Netaji Swamiji Ideal Youth Society at Shantipur, where the motorcycle rally was also taken throughout Shantipur town. In Krishnanagar, a similar road show was organised by friends from Association for Protection of Democratic Rights, along with street corner meetings at the DM's office and near the Post Office.

Two deputations – one to the BDO Shantipur, and the other to District Magistrate of Nadia district - were also undertaken to inform the Government about the Manch's demands.

The two rallies met and merged at Krishnanagar and will proceed towards Plassey on October 9, where a mock trial of modern day Mir Jaffars (traitors to the people’s causes) will he held tomorrow (October 9) from 10 a.m. to 12 noon at the field next to Plassey station, Nadia.

State-wide Rally Photographs