CPIML Lib Kerala

CPIML General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya’s address at the 10th All India AICCTU Conference 2-4 March 2020  Naihati,  Kolkata 

It is a great pleasure and honour for me to greet you all at this tenth all India conference of the AICCTU. The conference celebrates the glorious history of one hundred years of organised trade union movement in India, and thirty years of AICCTU, and I join you to pay homage to the countless martyrs who have strengthened the movement with their supreme acts of sacrifice. We respectfully remember the leaders in whose name you have christened the venue of this conference - Santosh Kumari Devi, who is perhaps India's first woman trade union leader who organised and led the jute workers of Bengal in the 1920s, and comrades Swapan Mukherjee, DP Bakshi, Sudarshan Bose and Hari Singh, our beloved leaders who passed away in recent past. I also salute the memories of comrades Gurudas Dasgupta and Kshiti Goswami, veteran leaders of the Left trade union movement whom we have lost in 2019. I also take this opportunity to salute all our comrades who are languishing in jails, the brave fighting comrades of Maruti and Pricol who have been sentenced to life imprisonment and the lawyer leader of Chhattisgarh workers, Comrade Sudha Bharadwaj who has been booked under the draconian UAPA, and other human rights activists arrested along with her, and demand their immediate unconditional release.

As a former general secretary of AICCTU, I am happy to note the recent expansion of the organisation in various states and sectors. It's especially encouraging to see the growing integration of AICCTU with railway and defence workers. In the 1960s and 1970s I used to hear from my father, who was an employee with the Indian railways, that the railways was the biggest sector for organised workers with a strength of about three million workers. Even in the 1990s when I was directly associated with TU work, the strength was above two million. Now in spite of continuing introduction of more trains and new routes, the strength has gone down to an alarmingly low level amidst growing push for privatisation. I hope the growing integration of AICCTU with the railway and defence workers' struggles, we will see a more powerful and determined resistance to privatisation. It is also heartening to note the growing presence of women workers in the ranks and leadership of AICCTU with the remarkable advance of scheme workers as a fighting contingent of the Indian working class. At a time when Jammu and Kashmir has been stripped of its constitutional status and its very statehood and total denial of democracy in everyday lives of the people, it is encouraging to learn about the recent formation of an AICCTU state unit in Jammu and Kashmir.

We are holding this conference in Naihati, a long-standing centre of the working class movement. We heard about the pioneering role of Santosh Kumari Devi who organised the workers to fight for their rights as workers and also for the freedom of the country from the shackles of British rule. The working class movement grew hand in hand with the freedom movement in the country and workers played a leading role in organising other sections of the society. The rise of anti-colonial nationalism meant unity of the people across religious and linguistic divisions and a policy of increasing nationalisation of productive resources and production. Today the BJP talks about nationalism, but its nationalism means growing marginalisation of religious and linguistic minorities and suppression of diversity under increasing centralisation, its nationalism means systematic denationalisation and destruction of public sector to hand over the reins of the economy to private hands. In fact, this government is allergic to the very term 'Azaadi' or freedom. In Delhi we have just seen how policemen tortured and killed unarmed Muslim youth gleefully telling them that this was a dose of the freedom they wanted. Evidently we are dealing with a government which celebrates slavery, they collaborated with the British rulers when the country fought for freedom and now in power they are trying to subject us to renewed slavery on all fronts.

Today we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on our Constitution, on our citizenship and the whole range of rights the Constitution guarantees to the citizens. But this unprecedented assault has also given rise to unprecedented protests of the people, powered by the massive participation and resolve of students and women and the minority community. The working class will have to overcome all inertia and join this protest movement with all its strength. When the government challenges our citizenship in the name of NRC or NPR, and links our citizenship to religion by amending the Citizenship Act, it actually conspires against all the rights we enjoy as citizens - the right to vote, the right to freedom of speech and assembly, the right to organise and fight for better conditions and higher wages. The attack on labour rights and labour laws and the attack on citizenship are two faces of the same coin, part and parcel of the same project. When they are attacking anti-CAA protestors with loud chants of their latest slogan 'shoot the traitor', please understand all of us could be termed as traitors and attacked with bullets. This slogan and campaign of violence will not remain confined to anti-CAA, anti-NRC, anti-NPR protests, it is a blueprint to suppress every legitimate movement. It will be used against us when we fight for jobs, wages and social security, when we resist privatisation, outsourcing or downsizing.

As inheritors of the glorious legacy of the Indian working class movement we must play our due role at this hour of crisis. Our strength lies in our unity. We must foil every design to divide us on the basis of religion or language or caste. Our strength lies in our consciousness and rich experience of struggle. Our strength lies in our historic legacy and mission to fight against all odds for the complete achievement of our goals. We must harness all our energy and strength to expand our unity, consolidate our organisation and sharpen our struggles. Just as the working class movement originated and grew in India as a leading contingent of the freedom movement, it will advance today as a formidable bulwark of anti-fascist resistance, as a fighting citadel of democracy and socialism.

Wish your conference every success.