A T LEAST twenty-one people are reported to have been done to death in a most grisly carnage in the Dalgaon tea estate of Jalpaiguri district. On 6 November morning, a group of workers had apparently gheraoed the house of the local CITU strongman Tarakeshwar Lohar over the controversial appointment of three outsiders as clerks. But anticipating ‘trouble’ the leader had already kept his henchmen ready who opened fire on the protesting workers. The sequence of events soon led to this ghastly carnage, but Tarakeshwar Lohar, his family and close cohorts mysteriously managed to escape to safety.
An explosive crisis has gripped the tea industry in the country. Wages are being systematically reduced, bonus and other customary ‘benefits’ are being increasingly denied, and with lock-out and closure assuming epidemic proportions employment itself has become most uncertain and insecure. While small-scale ‘unregulated’ tea-growing is being encouraged in cultivable lands, workers are being evicted from established tea gardens to transfer the latter to powerful real estate barons. According to a report, in North Bengal alone some 400 tea garden workers have been starved to death or driven to suicide.
For the tea garden workers, the brewing crisis in the industry is accompanied by the ever-tightening noose of repression. The governments of all tea-growing states are adopting increasingly repressive measures to crush the workers. Between the Manjolai tea estate massacre in Tamil Nadu in July 1999 and the Chandmoni firing in Siliguri in June 2002 and the most recent killing of five workers of Khobang tea estate in Tinsukia district of Assam, the history of tea garden workers’ agitation in the country has been witness to recurrent incidents of police brutalities.
The Dalgaon incident is preceded by another similar but smaller incident that claimed three lives in Changmari tea estate in the same district in February this year. These two incidents reflect the same crisis in the industry and the growing unrest among the workers, but follow a slightly different pattern in that they surfaced as internal clashes of the dominant CITU-affiliated union. Like the INTUC-affiliated ACMS union in Assam, many well entrenched leaders of the CITU-affiliated union in West Bengal are also busy colluding with the industry and the local management to subject the workers to drastic cuts in wages and deterioration in working and living conditions.
Apart from reflecting this general crisis of the tea industry, the Dalgaon carnage also brought home the growing criminalisation of politics in Left-ruled West Bengal. The government and leaders of the CPI(M) are however making a ridiculous attempt to trivialise even such a grisly and eye-opening incident by describing it as an isolated and apolitical event. The local and state leaders of CPI(M) and CITU are issuing conflicting and confusing statements about the exact nature and history of association of Tarakeshwar Lohar, a kind of tea garden mafia don who was at the centre of the entire episode, with the formal structure of the party and the trade union. But every observer of West Bengal politics knows it only too well that the likes of Tarakeshwar Lohar and Rashid Khan are not only characteristic products of the CPI(M)’s politics of power but increasingly they are also the local pillars of the CPI(M)-led political establishment.
While the CPI(M) is busy hiding its connection with the individuals involved, the state government refuses to accept its share of responsibility for a human tragedy of such massive magnitude. Hence the government’s refusal to institute any inquiry into the carnage. Yet at another level, the government and the industry and the entire corporate lobby are keen on using the Dalgaon incident to push the agenda of curtailment of trade union rights and an aggressive restructuring of industrial relations. While defending the rights and interests of tea workers in the face of the crisis, the red flag trade union movement must defeat every attempt of the industry and anti-worker forces to use the Dalgaon tragedy to demoralise the workers and discredit the entire trade union movement. At the same time, the Tarakeshwar Lohars must be resolutely weeded out of the trade union arena.