Nationalism and Working Class Movements

Nationalism and Working Class Movements

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• The beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century heralded the entry of modern industry into India. The thousands of hands employed in the construction of railways were the harbingers of the modern Indian working class.
  • Further industrialisation followed with the development of ancillary industries alongside the railways — the coal industry developed rapidly and absorbed a large workforce, followed by the cotton and jute industries.
• The Indian working class suffered the same kind of exploitation witnessed during the industrialisation of Europe and the West more broadly — low wages, long working hours, unhygienic and hazardous conditions, child labour, and the absence of basic amenities.
• The presence of colonialism gave a distinctive character to the Indian working-class movement. Indian workers had to contend with two basic antagonistic forces — imperialist political rule and economic exploitation at the hands of both foreign and native capitalist classes — and, under these circumstances, the working-class movement became inevitably intertwined with the political struggle for national emancipation.
  • The notion of an “Indian working class” was itself linked to the growth of the Indian National Movement and the broader process of the Indian nation-in-the-making, since the idea of an Indian working class could not exist before the idea of the Indian people had itself begun to take root.
• The colonial Government of India was fundamentally pro-capitalist and took only half-hearted steps to address the poor condition of labour.

Earlier Efforts

• The early nationalists, especially the Moderates, were largely indifferent to the labour cause.
  • They drew a sharp distinction between labour in Indian-owned factories and labour in British-owned enterprises — in the latter case, nationalists had no hesitation in extending full support to the workers.
    • This was partly because, in the words of P. Ananda Charlu, Congress president in 1891, employer and employed in Indian-owned industry were not “part and parcel of the same nation.”
  • They believed labour legislation would erode the competitive edge enjoyed by Indian-owned industries, and did not wish to introduce class-based divisions within the movement — for these reasons, they did not support the Factory Acts of 1881 and 1891.
  • A partial exception was the nationalist newspaper Mahratta, then under the influence of the radical thinker G.S. Agarkar, which supported the workers’ cause even at this early stage and urged mill owners to make concessions — though this remained a minor trend overall.
• One major reason for this lukewarm early attitude was that, with the anti-imperialist movement still in its infancy, nationalists did not wish to weaken the common struggle against British rule — the primary task in a colonial situation — by creating divisions within Indian ranks.
  • Dadabhai Naoroji, at the second session of the Indian National Congress (1886), made clear that the Congress “must confine itself to questions in which the entire nation has a direct participation,” leaving the “adjustment of social reforms and other class questions to class Congresses.”
• Later, as the national movement gained strength and ideological trends emerged within nationalist ranks that were less inhibited about labour issues, efforts were made to organise labour and secure it a better bargaining position within the common anti-imperialist front — with unity now sought through concessions from all classes, rather than at the workers’ unilateral expense.
• Consequently, the earliest attempts to improve workers’ economic conditions were essentially philanthropic efforts — isolated, sporadic, and aimed at specific local grievances:
  • 1870: Sasipada Banerjee, a Brahmo social reformer, started a working men’s club and the newspaper Bharat Shramjeevi.
  • 1878: Sorabjee Shapoorji Bengalee unsuccessfully attempted to have a bill providing better working conditions and limiting working hours passed in the Bombay Legislative Council.
  • 1880: Narain Meghajee Lokhanday started the Anglo-Marathi weekly Deenbandhu and set up the Bombay Mill and Millhands Association.
  • 1899: The first strike by the Great Indian Peninsular Railway took place and won widespread support — Tilak’s Kesari and Mahratta had campaigned for it for months, and public meetings and fund collections for the strikers were organised in Bombay and Bengal by prominent nationalists such as Pherozeshah Mehta, D.E. Wacha, and Surendranath Tagore. Because the exploiter in this case was foreign, the agitation was readily embraced as a national issue and an integral part of the national movement.
  • Prominent nationalist leaders such as Bipin Chandra Pal and G. Subramanya Aiyar also demanded better working conditions and other pro-labour reforms during this period.

The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal

• During the Swadeshi Movement, workers began participating in wider political issues — a marked shift from the earlier focus on purely economic questions — and the number of strikes rose sharply, as the labour movement graduated from unorganised to organised strikes on economic issues, now backed by nationalist support.
• The national upsurge of 16 October 1905 — the day the partition of Bengal came into effect — included a spurt of working-class strikes and hartals across Bengal.
  • Workers in several jute mills and jute press factories, along with railway coolies and carters, struck work; workers at the Burn Company shipyard in Howrah struck after being refused leave to attend a Federation Hall meeting called by Calcutta’s Swadeshi leaders, while workers elsewhere struck when management objected to their singing Bande Mataram or tying rakhis on each other’s wrists as a symbol of unity.
  • Swadeshi leaders enthusiastically took up the tasks of organising stable trade unions, strikes, legal aid, and fund-raising; public meetings in support of striking workers were addressed by national leaders such as B.C. Pal, C.R. Das, and Liaqat Hussain, while strikes themselves were organised by figures such as Ashwini Coomar Banerjee, Prabhat Kumar Roy Chaudhuri, Premtosh Bose, and Apurba Kumar Ghosh — chiefly in government press establishments, the railways, and the jute industry, where foreign capital or the colonial state held sway.
  • The first tentative attempts to form all-India unions were also made at this time, though these efforts proved unsuccessful.
  • Frequent processions in support of the strikers moved through the streets of Calcutta, with people feeding the processionists along the way — large numbers, including women and even police constables, contributed money, rice, potatoes, and green vegetables.
• Elsewhere, Subramania Siva and Chidambaram Pillai led strikes in Tuticorin and Tirunelveli at a foreign-owned cotton mill, arguing that strikes for higher wages would hasten the demise of foreign mills, and were arrested for their efforts.
  • In Rawalpindi, Punjab, arsenal and railway engineering workers struck as part of the wider 1907 Punjab upsurge, which had led to the deportation of Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh.
  • The single biggest strike and political demonstration of the working class in this period followed Tilak’s arrest and trial.
• The Swadeshi period also saw the faint beginnings of a socialist tinge among some radical nationalist leaders exposed to contemporary Marxist and social-democratic currents in Europe, with the example of the Russian working-class movement increasingly urged as a model for emulation in India.
• With the decline of the nationalist mass upsurge after 1908, the labour movement too suffered an eclipse — it was only with the next nationalist upsurge, in the years immediately following the First World War, that the working-class movement was to recover, now on a qualitatively higher plane.

Resurgence of Working-Class Activity: The First World War and After

• The War and its aftermath brought a rise in exports, soaring prices, and substantial profiteering opportunities for industrialists — but only very low wages for workers, fuelling widespread discontent.
  • The emergence of Gandhi brought about a broad-based national movement with a new emphasis on mobilising both workers and peasants for the national cause.
  • This was further pushed along by the Home Rule Leagues (1915), the Rowlatt Satyagraha (1919), and the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement (1920–22).
• The working class now began to create its own national-level organisations to defend its class rights, becoming involved in mainstream nationalist politics to a significant extent, and a felt need emerged for organising workers into trade unions.
  • International developments — the establishment of a socialist republic in the Soviet Union, the formation of the Comintern, the setting up of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the global economic depression — lent an entirely new dimension to the Indian working-class movement.
  • It was in this context that a resurgence of working-class activity occurred in the years from 1919 to 1922 — though there was not yet any political movement grounded in socialism or the conception of class struggle as such.
• The strike movement that began in 1918 swept across the country with great intensity through 1919 and 1920.
  • The Ahmedabad textile strike of March 1918, led personally by Gandhi, was followed by the end of 1918 by the first great strike affecting an entire industry in a leading centre — the Bombay cotton mills.
  • Workers’ participation in major national political events was highly significant: the response to the hartal against the Rowlatt Act in spring 1919 demonstrated the political role of workers at the very forefront of the national struggle, and in April 1919, following the repression in Punjab and Gandhiji’s arrest, the working class of Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat resorted to strikes, agitations, and demonstrations.
  • Railway workers’ agitations over economic demands and racial discrimination also coincided with the wider anti-colonial mass struggle — between 1919 and 1921, railway workers struck on several occasions in support of the Rowlatt agitation and the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement, and the call for an all-India general strike by North Western Railway workers in April 1919 met with an enthusiastic response across the northern region.
    • As the historian Lajpat Jagga has shown, for railwaymen across large parts of the country, Gandhiji came to symbolise resistance to colonial rule and exploitation, just as the Indian Railways symbolised the British Empire — “the political and commercial will of the Raj.”
  • In November 1921, during the visit of the Prince of Wales, workers responded to the Congress call for a boycott with a countrywide general strike — in Bombay, textile factories closed and roughly 140,000 workers took to the streets, participating in rioting and attacks on Europeans and Parsis who had gone to welcome the Prince.
  • Western Indian cotton mills and Calcutta’s jute mills also witnessed unprecedented labour unrest around this time, with 119 strikes in 1920 followed by 152 in 1921 — industrial actions often described as “spontaneous” movements lacking centralised leadership, coordination, programme, or organisation, something akin to a “working-class jacquerie.”

Change in the Attitude of the Colonial State and Employers

• In the 1920s, if only briefly, the colonial state and some employers came to recognise the usefulness of trade unions as legitimate channels for negotiation — a shift prompted partly by the granting of labour representation in legislative councils under the Act of 1919, later extended to municipalities as well.
  • This shift, however, reflected far less a genuine change of heart than the pursuit of a “notion of containment.” Later, a number of anti-labour laws were passed in 1934, 1938, and 1946 to contain working-class militancy and trade union activity, with frequent police action also becoming a handy tool for breaking strikes and enforcing labour discipline.
• Trade unions were formed by the score during this period, with first attempts at organisation springing up across India.
  • There is a record of workers in the Ahmedabad Cotton Mills forming a union as early as 1917, though the basis of organisation generally remained weak, well behind the actual level of militancy on the ground.
  • By 1920, there were 125 unions with a combined membership of 250,000, a large proportion of these having been formed during 1919–20.
  • The starting point of Indian trade unionism is commonly traced to the Madras Labour Union, formed in 1918 by B.P. Wadia, an associate of the theosophist Mrs. Besant.

The AITUC

• The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was founded on 31 October 1920.
  • Lokamanya Tilak, who had built a close association with Bombay’s workers, was one of the moving spirits behind its formation.
  • The sitting Indian National Congress president, Lala Lajpat Rai, was elected the AITUC’s first president, with Dewan Chaman Lal as its first general secretary.
• Lajpat Rai was the first to explicitly link capitalism with imperialism, declaring that “imperialism and militarism are the twin children of capitalism.”
  • In his presidential address to the first AITUC session, he emphasised that “Indian labour should lose no time to organize itself on a national scale… the greatest need in this country is to organize, agitate, and educate. We must organize our workers, make them class conscious.”
  • The manifesto issued to workers by the AITUC urged them not only to organise themselves but also to actively intervene in nationalist politics; at the second AITUC session, Dewan Chaman Lal, moving a resolution in favour of Swaraj, stressed that this Swaraj was to be for the workers, not the capitalists.
• In its early years, however, AITUC leaders had only limited real connection with the working-class movement on the ground — the organisation’s main founding purpose was, in fact, to secure a nominating body for Indian representation at the International Labour Conference at Geneva.
  • The prominent Congress and Swarajist leader C.R. Das presided over the AITUC’s third and fourth sessions; the Gaya session of the Congress (1922) welcomed the AITUC’s formation and set up a committee to assist it. Das himself advocated that the Congress take up the cause of workers and peasants and incorporate them into the struggle for Swaraj, warning that otherwise they risked becoming isolated from the movement.
  • Other leaders who maintained close contact with the AITUC included Nehru, Subhas Bose, C.F. Andrews, J.M. Sengupta, Satyamurthy, V.V. Giri, and Sarojini Naidu.
• In its beginnings, the AITUC was influenced by the social-democratic ideas of the British Labour Party, while the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence, trusteeship, and class collaboration also exerted considerable influence on the movement.
  • Gandhi’s own aversion to the AITUC was well known — he advised the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (ATLA), ever loyal to him, not to join it, arguing that using “labour strikes for political purposes” would be a “serious mistake.”

Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (1918)

• Gandhi helped organise the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association in 1918, and through the resulting protest secured a 27.5 per cent wage hike for workers (an arbitrator’s award later raised this to 35 per cent).
  • It became one of the largest single trade unions of its time.

Government Response: The Trade Union Act, 1926

• The British Government took some limited steps in this area, including the appointment of a Bengal labour committee (1919–20), the Bombay Industrial Disputes Committee (1922), and the Madras Labour Department (constituted 1921, formalised by Act in 1926).
  • The Government’s overriding aim was to channel the labour movement into “safe” forms of unionism — an approach reflected in the Trade Union Act of 1926, with its special restrictions on political activity.
• The Trade Union Act, 1926:
  • Recognised trade unions as legal associations;
  • Laid down conditions for the registration and regulation of trade union activities;
  • Secured civil and criminal immunity for trade unions engaged in legitimate activities, while placing certain restrictions on their political activities.

Why the Growth of Trade Unionism Was Restricted

• Indian workers remained divided among themselves and often competed with one another rather than joining the trade union movement — a state of affairs owed largely to systematic employer–state collusion.
  • At both the industry and factory level, workers attempting to organise were routinely victimised, intimidated, coerced, and sometimes physically attacked; given the oversupply of labour, employers could easily dismiss striking workers, with the state consistently siding with employers in such disputes.
• These factors severely constrained the growth of trade unionism. Even larger unions such as the Bombay Textile Labour Union or the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (ATLA) remained vulnerable to pressure from employers and the state.
  • The Madras Labour Union was temporarily crushed in 1921 by the British textile magnates, the Binnys, with overt assistance from the provincial bureaucracy.
  • The TISCO management repeatedly tried to crush the Jamshedpur Labour Association (JLA) whenever opportunity allowed, even though the JLA was actively patronised by Congress leaders and was itself known for its loyalty to employers — the local colonial administration invariably sided with management in this contest.
  • Even goondas, or hired hooligan elements employed by management as strike-breakers, were protected by local police officials, functioning as institutionalised tools of violence.
• There were, in short, serious structural obstacles that actively discouraged and prevented workers from combining into effective unions.

The Late 1920s and the Rise of Communism

• After 1922, the working-class movement entered a lull, reverting largely to purely economic struggles — a phase of “corporatism.” The next wave of working-class activity arrived towards the end of the 1920s, spurred this time by the emergence of a powerful and clearly defined Left Bloc within the national movement.

Rise of the Communists

• The Communist Party of India (CPI) was formally founded in 1925.
  • Communists, unlike socialists, believed explicitly in class struggle; socialists, by contrast, did not subscribe to class struggle as such, though they remained conscious of organising peasants and workers to serve their economic and other interests.
• By early 1927, various Communist groups across India had organised themselves into the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties (WPP), under leaders such as S.A. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, P.C. Joshi, and Sohan Singh Josh.
  • The Workers and Peasants Party in Bengal, organised by middle-class communists, began mobilising mill workers in the Calcutta industrial belt from around 1928.
  • Functioning as a left wing within the Congress, the WPPs rapidly gained strength within the Congress organisation, and strong communist influence lent the broader movement a distinctly militant and revolutionary character.
• In 1928, a six-month-long strike in the Bombay Textile Mills, led by the Girni Kamgar Union, marked a high point of this militancy.
  • Communist influence also spread among workers in the railways, jute mills, municipalities, and paper mills in Bengal and Bombay, as well as in the Burma Oil Company in Madras.
  • The 1929 jute mill strike gave rise to the Bengal Jute Workers’ Union, while the 1937 strike produced the Bengal Chatkal Mazdoor Union — both organised by educated communist leaders, some trained in Moscow.
• Working-class support for the communists did not arise simply from shared antagonism toward capital and the colonial state — their consistent opposition to the state was certainly one source of their popularity, but communist trade unions also skilfully drew on community ties and informal social networks.
  • In Kanpur during the 1930s, the emerging communist leadership of the Kanpur Mazdoor Sabha specifically targeted Muslim workers who felt alienated from the Congress and the Arya Samaj; in Ahmedabad, similarly, the communist-dominated Mill Mazdoor Sangh drew its support chiefly from Muslim workers dissatisfied with the Gandhian ATLA.
  • Religious ties were thus frequently used to organise strikes by these ostensibly class-oriented communist unions, which in practice operated within the existing hierarchical cultural milieu of Indian workers.
• Under communist and radical nationalist influence, workers participated in a large number of strikes and demonstrations nationwide between 1927 and 1929.
  • The AITUC’s decision in November 1927 to boycott the Simon Commission drew significant worker participation in the massive boycott demonstrations, alongside numerous workers’ meetings organised around May Day, Lenin Day, and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Government Response: Repression in the Late 1920s

• Alarmed at the growing strength of the trade union movement under extremist and communist influence, the Government mounted a two-pronged attack on the labour movement.
  • On one hand, it enacted repressive laws such as the Public Safety Act (1929) and the Trade Disputes Act (TDA), 1929, arresting virtually the entire radical leadership of the labour movement in a single sweep and launching the famous Meerut Conspiracy Case against them — the Public Safety Bill and the Trades Disputes Act, which virtually banned strikes, passed in April 1929 without serious Congress opposition.
  • On the other hand, it attempted, with some success, to win over a substantial section of the labour movement through concessions — such as the appointment of the Royal Commission on Labour (1929).
• The Trade Disputes Act (TDA), 1929:
  • Made compulsory the appointment of Courts of Inquiry and Conciliation Boards for settling industrial disputes;
  • Made strikes illegal in public utility services such as posts, railways, water, and electricity, unless each worker planning to strike gave one month’s advance notice to the administration;
  • Forbade trade union activity of a coercive or purely political nature, including sympathetic strikes.
• The Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929): in March 1929, the Government arrested 31 labour leaders; the resulting three-and-a-half-year trial for conspiracy against the King-Emperor led to the conviction of Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange, Joglekar, Philip Spratt, Ben Bradley, Shaukat Usmani, and others.
  • The trial received worldwide publicity but, in its immediate effect, weakened the working-class movement.
• The onset of the Depression worsened matters further. To weather the crisis, Bombay mill owners resorted to rationalisation policies, causing retrenchment, wage losses, and heavier workloads.
  • This intensified the mill-hands’ grievances beyond what could be managed at the individual mill level, resulting in an industry-wide general textile strike in 1928–29.
  • Rationalisation likewise triggered serious industrial action by some 26,000 TISCO workers in Jamshedpur in 1928, while in the Calcutta jute mills, the imposition of longer working hours by the IJMA (Indian Jute Mills Association) led to a general strike in 1929 involving 272,000 workers.
• By this point, working-class militancy had reached a scale that established political groups could no longer afford to ignore.

The Labour Movement’s Major Setback

• The labour movement’s subsequent setback stemmed partly from this government offensive and partly from a shift in the Communist-led wing’s own strategy.
  • From late 1928, the Communists reversed their earlier policy of aligning with and working within the mainstream national movement — a shift that isolated them from the national movement and greatly reduced their hold even over the working class itself.
  • Membership of the Girni Kamgar Union (GKU) fell from 54,000 in December 1928 to a mere 800 by the end of 1929.
• The Communists were similarly isolated within the AITUC and were expelled in the split of 1931.
  • The Left leadership that took control of the AITUC in 1929 lacked internal coherence, being composed of quite disparate elements; growing aggression within this left wing led to the 1929 split in which N.M. Joshi broke away to establish the Indian Trade Union Federation.
  • The AITUC subsequently emerged with an extensive and bold new programme of its own.

The Indian National Congress’s Attitude Towards the Working Class

• From the very outset, the Indian National Congress maintained an ambivalent position vis-à-vis the working class.
  • During the Swadeshi period, there were only isolated attempts to organise labour strikes in European-owned industries and railways, and nationalist leaders rarely took the initiative to mobilise workers themselves — where a congenial situation arose from “spontaneous” worker action, Congress leaders typically intervened only to harness it to their own movement.
  • By 1918, as strikes proliferated and the working class asserted itself, it became increasingly difficult for Congress to ignore this force — accordingly, at its Amritsar session (1919), Congress adopted a resolution urging provincial committees to “promote labour unions throughout India.”
• By this time, however, Congress had also developed a close relationship with big business.
  • On the labour front, Congress could therefore afford to be more vocal only where European capitalists were involved — as in the railways, jute mills, or tea gardens — while exercising a moderating influence wherever Indian capital was affected, as in the Jamshedpur steel plants or the textile industries of Bombay and Ahmedabad.
  • Workers were frequently asked to sacrifice their present-day needs for the sake of the nation’s future, since a strike affecting Indian business was often portrayed as likely to perpetuate foreign economic domination — with the understanding that unresolved worker grievances would be addressed only once Swaraj was achieved.
• From the 1920s onward, these underlying Congress dilemmas became increasingly visible, at times drawing articulate — even violent — disapproval from workers themselves.
  • Some Congress leaders did, from time to time, participate directly in strikes, such as Gandhi in the Ahmedabad textile strike of 1918 or Subhas Bose in the Jamshedpur steel strike of 1928–29; others became involved in trade union work more generally, such as V.V. Giri in Madras or Gulzarilal Nanda in Ahmedabad.
  • Some were also involved in forming the AITUC, constituted in 1920 chiefly to elect an Indian delegation to the ILO — though the number of unions affiliated to it did increase through the 1920s, its national significance remained “largely marginal,” except briefly in 1929 amid fears of a communist takeover.
• This differential attitude toward workers in European versus Indian enterprises persisted throughout.
  • The Non-Cooperation resolution adopted by Congress in 1920 spoke of the oppression of workers by foreign agents, but conspicuously failed to mention that Indian employers perpetrated similar abuses.
  • As a result, management in Indian-owned industries came to regard Congress-dominated unions such as the ATLA or JLA as the more desirable, “legitimate” channels for negotiation — though workers themselves sometimes placed little faith in such organisations.
    • In Ahmedabad, a series of strikes in 1921–22 proved beyond the union’s control, and after the failed 1923 strike — in which the union itself had taken the initiative — ATLA’s membership declined rapidly.
    • In Jamshedpur, following the 1928 strike, JLA leader Subhas Bose had to be escorted by Gurkha police after his own supporters turned against him over the compromise settlement he had reached with TISCO management.
• Yet, despite this sometimes lukewarm organisational support from Congress, the working class across the country participated overwhelmingly in the nationalist movement — their direct participation in the Gandhian agenda was often selective, but they frequently integrated nationalist agitation into their own struggles and industrial actions.
  • The strike waves in Bengal’s industrial centres in 1920–21 were directly motivated by the enthusiasm generated by the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation movement; the strikes in the Assam tea gardens, the Assam-Bengal Railway, and among steamship employees at Chandpur in May 1921 were likewise directly related to this movement.
  • In Ahmedabad, during the latter part of the Non-Cooperation movement, there was at least one strike a month in the textile industry, some organised around fairly radical demands; striking workers at the Binnys’ Madras cotton mills invited Congress non-cooperators to provide them leadership, and the North-Western Railway strikes of 1919 and 1920 were similarly inspired by the Congress movement.
  • Only occasionally were Congress leaders themselves directly responsible for organising such strikes; at times, workers’ own nationalism surpassed that of the Congress leadership in its radicalism and militancy — in 1928, the Calcutta session of the Congress was taken over for two hours by some 30,000 workers, who passed resolutions demanding complete independence for India and a labour welfare scheme.
• One clear consequence of this Congress dilemma was the growing influence of communists within the labour movement.

Gandhi’s Philosophy of Trusteeship and Labour

• Gandhi’s approach to labour rested on the principle of trusteeship — the capitalist regarded as trustee of the workers’ interests — combined with arbitration; he had been developing this philosophy of harmonious capital–labour relations since 1918.
  • Gandhi disapproved of autonomous labour militancy, and after the Chandpur tragedy of May 1921, sharply reprimanded the Bengal Congress leadership for their “misadventure” in trying to harness such militancy for nationalist ends, reasoning: “We seek not to destroy capital or capitalists but to regulate the relations between capital and labour.”
  • A similar sentiment was echoed in Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1929 statement as AITUC president, when he reminded members that Congress was “not a labour organisation,” but rather “a large body comprising all manner of people.”
• Although the Congress Socialists showed greater sympathy for labour, the compulsion to remain an umbrella organisation representing all classes proved an obstacle to Congress integrating the working class more closely into its movement.
  • Beyond the fact that the ATLA secured one of the highest wage hikes of the era (27.5 per cent) during the 1918 dispute, Gandhi’s conception of trusteeship also carried a genuinely radical potential.
    • As Acharya J.B. Kripalani, one of Gandhi’s followers, explained: “The Trustee by the very term used means that he is not the owner. The owner is one whose interest he is called upon to protect” — i.e., the worker.
    • Gandhi himself told Ahmedabad’s textile workers that they were the real masters of the mills, and that if the trustee — the mill owner — failed to act in the interest of the true owners, the workers should offer Satyagraha to assert their rights.
  • Gandhi’s labour philosophy, with its dual emphasis on arbitration and trusteeship, also reflected the practical needs of the anti-imperialist movement, which could ill afford an all-out class war between the constituent classes of the emerging nation.

Workers During the Civil Disobedience Movement

• The CPI formally dissociated itself from the Civil Disobedience Movement.
  • This decision — taken under a Comintern directive in 1928 — cost the Indian communists dearly, as the Civil Disobedience movement soon redirected mass attention squarely towards Gandhi and the Congress; workers’ allegiance to the communists had never, in any case, been either permanent or unconditional.
• Workers nonetheless participated actively in the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930.
  • The textile workers of Sholapur, dock labourers of Karachi, transport and mill workers of Calcutta, and mill workers of Madras all clashed with the Government during the movement.
  • In Bombay, where the Congress slogan during Civil Disobedience held that “workers and peasants are the hands and the feet of the Congress,” a Satyagraha was launched by the GIP Railwaymen’s Union on the very day Gandhiji breached the salt law, 6 April.
  • In Chota Nagpur in 1930, workers began wearing Gandhi caps and attending nationalist meetings in the thousands, seeking greater legitimacy for their own struggles by linking their strikes to the wider nationalist movement.
• After 1931, however, there was a dip in the working-class movement following a further split in the AITUC, chiefly over the question of the working class’s independent political role — the communist faction that held this view broke away to form the Red Trade Union Congress.
  • The Communists subsequently abandoned what they came to regard as suicidal sectarian policies, re-entering the mainstream of nationalist politics from 1934 — a revival that began around 1933–34, once the Civil Disobedience Movement had been withdrawn and the Comintern, in the summer of 1935, mandated a united front strategy.
  • Communists rejoined the AITUC in 1935, and Left influence within both nationalist politics and the trade union movement began growing rapidly once again — the Communists, the Congress Socialists, and Left nationalists led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose now formed a powerful Left consolidation within the Congress and other mass organisations.
  • The result was a marked rise in working-class enthusiasm and militancy around 1937–38, manifested in another nationwide strike wave — a consolidation of communist strength among workers that was itself likely one reason the provincial Congress governments turned sternly anti-labour at this stage.
• The next wave of working-class activity coincided with provincial autonomy and the formation of popular ministries during 1937–1939.

Under Congress Ministries and Afterwards (1937–1939)

• During the 1937 elections, the AITUC extended its support to Congress candidates, while the compulsion to secure labour votes led Congress to include labour-welfare promises in its election manifesto — pledging measures for the settlement of labour disputes and for securing the rights to form unions and to strike.
  • Congress’s subsequent electoral victory aroused great enthusiasm and expectation among the working classes, with a number of trade union leaders going on to become labour ministers in Congress cabinets.
• One key factor giving fresh impetus to the trade union movement under Congress ministries was the increased civil liberties and generally pro-labour attitude of many Congress governments.
  • Notably, a majority of strikes during this period ended successfully, in full or partial victory for the workers — though many pro-labour bills, while introduced, could not be carried far due to sustained pressure from capitalists.
• Trade union membership grew by roughly 50 per cent during this period, accompanying a spectacular rise in industrial unrest and strikes through 1937–38 that alarmed Indian industrialists — ultimately producing a decisive anti-labour shift in Congress policy.
  • In non-Congress Bengal, Congress leaders were happy to support the general jute mill strike of 1937, seeing an ideal opportunity to discredit the Fazlul Huq ministry and strike at the “white bosses” of the IJMA — with Nehru going so far as to call it “a part of our freedom movement.”
  • Yet in Congress-ruled provinces such as Bombay, Madras, and U.P., their own governments employed similarly strong-arm tactics to control industrial unrest.
    • The same Nehru, despite his socialist leanings, during the Kanpur textile strikes of 1937, while condemning the victimisation of workers, also defended the mill manager’s “right to dismiss a worker who does not do his work well.”
  • By this stage, Congress appeared closely allied with Indian capitalists — a perception underscored by the passage of the Bombay Trades Disputes Act (1938), condemned by all parties except Congress itself and immediately met with a general strike in Bombay.
• In 1938, at Nagpur, the National Federation of Trade Unions merged into the AITUC, with equal representation for both sections in its governing body — the AITUC once again became the unifying body of Indian trade unionism as a whole, with only the Textile Labour Association of Ahmedabad, under its Gandhian orientation, remaining outside.
  • The AITUC now put forward an extensive and bold economic-political programme aimed at establishing a socialist state in India, alongside the socialisation and nationalisation of the means of production.
• A distinctive feature of the Congress Socialist Party was that its membership was made conditional on prior membership of the Indian National Congress — constituting it, in effect, a wing within the Congress and discouraging genuinely independent mass membership.
• Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the trade union movement had continued to spread across India, leading to the formation of numerous further unions.

During and After the Second World War (1939–1947)

• Workers initially opposed the War: Bombay’s working class was among the first in the world to stage an anti-war strike on 2 October 1939.
  • With the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the Communists recast the conflict’s character from an “imperialist war” to a “People’s War,” now backing the Allied cause as necessary to defeat Fascism, which they saw as threatening the “socialist fatherland.” This shift led the Communist Party to formally dissociate itself from the Quit India Movement, launched by Gandhiji in August 1942, while also pursuing a policy of industrial peace with employers so as not to hamper production and the wider war effort.
• Communist efforts to build popular support for the “People’s War” nonetheless failed to succeed.
  • Workers’ past allegiance to the communists had rested largely on their consistent resistance to the state; with this role now reversed, their fortunes correspondingly began to wane, as the Quit India movement drew overwhelming mass support instead.
  • Although communists in the 1940s gained control of a number of trade unions and came to dominate the AITUC organisationally, this did not, in real terms, reflect rising popularity, since actual union membership among workers remained very low.
• Despite communist opposition to Quit India, immediately following the arrest of Gandhiji and other leaders on 9 August 1942 and the Quit India Resolution, strikes and hartals swept the country for about a week.
  • The Tata Steel Plant remained closed for thirteen days, with strikers declaring they would not resume work until a national government was formed; in Ahmedabad, the textile strike lasted roughly three and a half months.
  • Worker participation was comparatively low in areas of strong Communist influence, though in many places the Communist rank and file actively joined the Quit India call despite their party’s official line.
• Between 1945 and 1947, workers participated actively in the post-war national upsurge.
  • In 1945, dock workers in Bombay and Calcutta refused to load ships carrying supplies to Allied troops fighting in Indonesia; in 1946, workers went on strike in support of the Naval Ratings; and during the final year of colonial rule, workers in the postal service, railways, and numerous other establishments also went on strike.
• The closing years of colonial rule likewise saw a sharp nationwide increase in strikes over purely economic issues — the all-India strike of Post and Telegraph Department employees being the best known among them.
  • The pent-up economic grievances of the war years, compounded by post-war demobilisation, persistently high prices, scarcity of food and other essentials, and falling real wages, together drove the working class to the very limits of its tolerance.
  • The prevailing mood, in anticipation of freedom, was heavy with expectation — independence was widely seen across Indian society as promising an end to prevailing miseries.
• Ultimately, workers were neither unresponsive to, nor wholly detached from, the nationalist or leftist politics organised by educated middle-class politicians — but their support for these movements remained, throughout, conditional rather than absolute.