It is a sign of our times in more senses than one.

On the morning of January 16 Dr. Datta Samant was gunned down by four "unidentified assailants" just outside his residence in Mumbai. Samant was about to leave for his office when the gunmen came approaching in an autorickshaw. Despite his allegedly "fading fortunes", the legendary trade union leader was still immensely popular among Mumbai workers and also the most easily accessible. He mistook his would-be killers as just another group of workers or union activists, but for once he was greeted not by the familiar warmth of the working class or by lusty cheers of "Datta Samant zindabad". At work were professional contract killers from the Mumbai underworld and two days before Samant could observe the fifteenth anniversary of the historic Bombay textile strike, death came in the form of a dozen-odd barbaric bullets.

Who could possibly be behind this conspiracy? The barons of real estate and designers of deindustrialisation for whom Samant was still a "nuisance" for his dogged opposition to the land sale campaign? Corporate leaders like the Premier Automobile bosses who had grown tired of Samant's stubborn resistance to their dreams of rationalisation? Thackeray and his men afraid as they were that Samant might add a militant working class dimension to the growing popular concern over rampant corruption under the Sena-BJP rule? Or was it the handiwork of underworld dons who are out to lumpenise the trade union scene in Mumbai, dancing to the tunes of the lumpen bourgeoisie's campaign for economic reforms?

The truth may never be known. But for the scores of thousands of workers who were marching through Mumbai streets in Samant's funeral procession, spontaneously raising slogans like Joshi-Munde, aaj ke gunde (Joshi and Munde are the foremost thugs of today), one thing stood out as clear as daylight. The enemies of the working class have succeeded in getting rid of a leader who could still dare to fight for the workers' rights in these dark days of Hong Kongisation of Mumbai.

This is the other dimension of the great Indian dismantling mission which is however yet to be seriously addressed by the sundry opponents of liberalisation. The dismantlers are not only out to destroy whatever structure and notions of planning, self-reliance and public sector we might have had in this country in the first four decades of freedom, they are also determined to do a matching and thorough job of restructuring in the arena of workers' rights and struggles. This is why laws are being amended and leaders killed. Shankar Guha Niyogi was assassinated in Bhilai in 1991 and now Samant has been done to death in Mumbai. Incidentally, these killings have both taken place under BJP rule.

The kind of response that Samant's gruesome assassination has evoked in the media is also characteristic of our times. Samant was of course never a sensation in the eyes of the media, which have traditionally shown scant regard for organised workers' struggles. With some of his recent campaigns ending in failures, the process of counting him out had already started. The first issue of India Today this year listed him among the not-so-mighty who had a fall in 1996 breaking his back for keeps. And now after Samant has fallen to the bullets of contract killers, The Times of India does maintain its "tradition of objectivity" by carrying an editorial on the slain leader, but revealingly the editorial does not waste a single word to condemn this killing. It does not even use any stock expression of mock regret. The attempt is rather to rationalise the whole incident with the argument that it has served to "underscore the aphorism that violence only begets more violence". If it questions anything, it is only the "irony that the murder of Mumbai's militant trade union leader Datta Samant ... should have occurred at a time when his fortunes were clearly on the wane".

Quite predictably, the editorial lambasts Samant for the marathon textile strike of 1982 which "petered out a year later leaving thousands of workers in the lurch". In fact, since the strike Samant has been flayed times without number for its "failure". The systematic destruction of the textile industry by proliferating powerlooms on the one hand and by a virtually officially sponsored sabotage of the National Textile Corporation on the other has often been sought to be explained away as a fallout of the Mumbai textile strike. But the editorial does not stop here, it goes on to attribute the "downward course" of Samant's union to his "foray into politics" and accuses him of using "the trade union movement as a stepping stone to a political career"...

Was the Mumbai textile strike a failure? Did it really hit the proverbial last nail into the coffin of India's textile industry? As Samant used to point out, the textile strike was confined to Maharashtra and there was no action of even remotely matching dimensions in the mills of Ahmedabad, Kanpur or West Bengal; how come then all over the country today the textile industry is said to be in a state of terminal crisis? Moreover, how are we to judge the success or failure of a strike in the longer term? The 1982 textile strike had raised the all important demand of granting mandatory recognition to the union with majority support and ascertaining this majority through secret ballot. This is a basic question of democracy and even though the textile strike could not clinch the issue, today it has become a key demand of the working class all over the country. It is also a promise made, though not yet kept, in the common minimum programme.

And most importantly, the 1982 strike gave the textile workers of Mumbai a new identity and they are still all proud of it. It was a protracted class battle of the textile worker which received unflinching support from the broad masses of rural toilers in Maharashtra. Not for nothing did the Mumbai working class extend such overwhelming support to Samant in the Lok Sabha elections of 1984. At a time when, riding on the crest of the original sympathy wave, Rajiv Gandhi romped home with the biggest ever majority ever enjoyed by the Congress; when a party like BJP finished with a pathetic tally of two parliamentary seats; and CPI(M) stalwarts fell like ninepins in the bastion of West Bengal, Samant emerged tall and triumphant, entering Parliament on an independent anti-Congress ticket on the strength of the proud support of the Mumbai working class.

Samant's was a career marked by successive progressive transitions. Beginning as a practising physician in a working class colony of Ghatkopar in suburban Mumbai, it was his close encounter with the trauma of the stone quarry worker that brought out the trade unionist in him. Samant was no believer in the sophisticated doctrines of divorce between trade unionism and politics. The passion for politics grew naturally as he began to grow aware of the organic links between the economy and polity. But in politics too, Samant kept moving. He first made it to the Maharashtra Assembly as a Congress MLA, but the Emergency found him behind bars and after the iron curtain was lifted, Samant was never to return to the Congress establishment.

The textile strike brought him close to the politics of the Left, and Samant launched a new organisation called Kamgar Aghadi. Close ties of cooperation developed with 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 80s, during the last ten years Samant had also overcome much of this earlier inhibition. In 1987, he shared a platform with Com. 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 action 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.

In his own way and language, Samant appreciated the importance of the task of developing the working class as a distinct political force. He was all praise for the kind of organisation, class political will, fighting capacity and consciousness he could see in the poor peasants and agrarian labourers of central Bihar, something which he said he often missed in the ranks of his union. But perhaps he had become a prisoner of his own success, it was not possible for him to break through the confines of his individualist organisation and trade unionist politics to graduate to the revolutionary communist perspective of worker-peasant alliance and consistent democracy with a socialist orientation.

Yet with all his limitations and inhibitions, Samant's was unmistakably one of those rare voices in Indian politics which vibrated with the pulse of the working class. Perhaps that is why the bankrupt liberal framework, despite its seeming obsession with labour standards and transparency and accountability in public life, always exhibited such a pathological lack of appreciation, nay hatred, for Samant's variety of trade unionism and politics. And it is also precisely why revolutionary communists will continue to cherish the contribution of working class democrats like Datta Samant.