FEATURE

Working Class Struggles:

Defying Assassination and Repression

May Day commemorates the historic struggles for workers’ rights and the legacy of the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886. In May 2013, the legacy of the Haymarket Martyrs continues to be most relevant and alive with meaning – as India’s workers fight courageous battles defying repression and assassination in different parts of the country. On the occasion of May Day 2013, we pay tribute to Com. Gangaram Koal, AICCTU tea garden leader martyred in Assam on 25 March 2013, and bring you updates on workers’ struggles in the Delhi-NCR region, especially the NOIDA workers who have been arrested during the All-India Strike and have since been in jail.

On the night of 25th March, Comrade Gangaram Koal, General Secretary of Asom Sangrami Chah Shramik Sangh and member of Assam State Committee of CPI(ML), was brutally assassinated near his home at the Gutibari tea garden in Tinsukia district. Comrade Gangaram was a militant and popular leader of the tea community in the Dibrugarh-Tinsukia region, and he had been at the forefront of protests against large-scale corruption in gram panchayat schemes and in the public distribution system. Undoubtedly, he was killed at the behest of the corrupt nexus of panchayat representatives, government officials, and politicians, in particular the Congress MLA from Chabua Raju Sahu whose interests were threatened by his relentless activism.   
Comrade Gangaram Kol’s home adjoins a tea estate in Gutibari in Tinsukia district. He had been returning home at around 9 pm on is motorbike when he was attacked by assailants with an iron rod and hacked to death with machetes. His body was discovered by a tea garden worker soon after.  
Comrade Gangaram Koal had led a successful struggle last year to get the licence of a corrupt ration agent cancelled. The ration agent, known to be close to the MLA Raju Sahu, ran a ‘fair price’ shop in which 60% of the consumers proved to be bogus, and the remaining 40% genuine consumers had not got even a fraction of their due rations. Only recently, leaders of the ACMS (the tea garden union affiliated with INTUC) were heard publicly declaring that Comrade Gangaram, who challenged their role as agents of the Congress and the tea industry. 
The ACMS acts to keep the tea garden workers as a captive vote-bank, and any emerging popular and independent leader from this community is ruthlessly eliminated or terrorized by the tea garden mafia. In 2000, Daniel Topno, a popular student leader from the tea community who contested as an independent MLA candidate and got substantial votes, was killed. In Sonitpur, Lakhikant Kurmi and Narayan Pondel, tea garden activists, survived a life-threatening assault. Not long ago, a close comrade of Gangaram Koal, CPI(ML) activist Shubhrajyoti Bardhan, was attacked twice – once at the Deputy Commissioner’s office where he had gone to raise question of irregularities in PDS, and once more in a village.    
Comrade Gangaram had been the CPI(ML)’s candidate in the Lok Sabha polls from Dibrugarh in 2009, and had twice been CPI(ML)’s MLA candidate from Chabua in 2006 and 2011. His heinous political assassination has sparked off a massive state-wide protest in Assam. It should be noted that CPI(ML) activists have been assaulted just a few months back by goons when they went to the food and civil supplies department to register a complaint against irregularities in the PDS.
The Tarun Gogoi Government of Assam initially ordered a CID enquiry and was adamant against ordering a CBI enquiry as demanded by the powerful mass movement that emerged to demand justice for Gangaram Koal. On March 29th, Assam observed a successful 12-hour Bandh at the call of the CPI(ML), demanding a CBI enquiry into the assassination. A delegation of Opposition parties including CPI (ML), CPI, CPM, Aam Admi Party, AGP, All India Forward Bloc, Samajwadi Party and Revolutionary Socialist Party met the Governor with the same demand. Subsequently, the Government has had to concede the demand for a CBI enquiry.
However, it is important for the CBI enquiry to be time-bound. Justice delayed is often justice denied, and we can recall that the CBI enquiry into Daniel Topno’s murder is yet to submit its report even after 13 years.   
Assassination has been a notorious stock-in-trade for the mafia of industrialists and politicians threatened by trade union movements. Trade Union leaders such as Shankar GuhaNiyogi and Darasram Sahu in Chhattisgarh, Datta Samant in Mumbai, Gurudas Chatterjee and Jagdev Sharma in Jharkhand are some of the popular workers’ leaders who were martyred at the behest of the powerful vested interests. Comrade Gangaram’s courageous struggle will be continued by his comrades – because murder never can and never will silence workers’ struggles for their rights and their dreams of an egalitarian world.    

(Gangaram Koal’s close comrade Subhas Sen, leading AICCTU activist in Assam, remembers the slain comrade.)

Com. Gangaram Koal was born on April 21, 1970 in a very poor tea tribe family of Gutibari village of Panitola Tea Estate in Tinsukia District of Assam. His father’s name was the late Somra Koal and mother the late Taramoni Koal. He left behind his wife Sokhila Munda - a school teacher, son Vishal - a student of class IX and a daughter, a student of class VI.
He matriculated from Panitola High School securing a First Division in 1989 and graduated from Dibrugarh University in 1998. The young Gangaram was the General Secretary of Panitola High School Students’ Union – at a school where Assamese speaking students were a majority and students from the Tea communities a minority. He was a popular student leader: a position that later on helped him to act as a bridge between the Assamese and Tea Tribe people. Later, he was elected first the Assistant Secretary and then the President of the Panitola Unit of All Assam Tea Tribe Students’ Association (AATTSA). In this position, he developed a closer acquaintance with the problems of life and livelihood of the tea tribes and tea workers, and seriously began to address those problems. But this experience generated in him a deep conviction that any organization devoid of working class ideology or any organization taking shelter in pockets of the Tea management will never be able to resolve these basic problems.  From this point on, he was in serious search of an alternative, even as he continued his college education. While a college student, he leased several bighas of land belonging to his father, to fund the establishment of 14 primary schools for the kids of tea workers. Later on, 2 of these schools were elevated to M.E. School status and one to a high school - the Nokhroy High School. Com. Koal was for some years the Headmaster of that High School.
In the meantime his search for an alternative platform for struggle for the rights and dignity of the tea workers continued, and he came in contact with the CPI(ML) Liberation through one of his close friends. 
After coming to Party and being enrolled as a primary member, he was given one important responsibility after another and worked hard to bear each of these responsibilities with full commitment. In Com Gangaram, the qualities of a dynamic student leader were honed by the introduction to Marxism-Leninism. He was one of the State and Tinsukia District Committee Members of CPI(ML), one of the CWC members of AICCTU and Vice Presidents of Assam State Commitee of AICCTU, besides being the General Secretary of Asom Sangrami Chah Shramik Sangha (ASCSS). He contested as a CPI(ML) candidate from Dibrugarh Parliamentary Constituency Seat and twice consecutively as MLA Candidate from the Chabua Legislative Assembly Constituency. He was also elected as a delegate from the Tinsukia District to the 9th Party Congress.
He resigned from the post of Headmaster and became a whole timer of the Party. A Party whole timer, Com. Gangaram, a modest, hardworking, and courageous working class organizer. As a resolute sentinel of people’s interest he had consistently been leading people’s movement against corruption in the village Panchayats, in the Public Distribution System (PDS) and also the inhuman exploitation of tea workers and the Tea Tribes community that had continued for more than two centuries since the British colonial tea planters brought Santhali-speaking tribal communities as indentured labour from the Chhota Nagpur plateau (now Jharkhand). To the ruling class he was a constant irritant, who had been eroding the Congress vote bank in villages and tea gardens, organizing tea workers who had been considered a ‘captive vote bank’ by the Congress.
So, the ruling Congress party and its Chabua MLA Raju Sahu in collaboration with the tea barons masterminded the brutal murder and got it executed by help of professional killers who beat him on his head and stabbed him with a sharp knife leaving deep wounds on several parts of his body including his face, and even partially slashing his throat. He was alone on his motorbike on the way to his home at about 9 P.M. after having attended a discussion on the preparations for the 9th Congress.
The corporate houses and the ruling political parties of Assam are hand-in-glove to plunder more natural resources like tea, petroleum, gas, coal etc., and in order to do so they are willing to turn Assam into a graveyard of democracy. Many CPI(ML) comrades have been killed in the past too. 
On 29th March, there was a successful bandh in Assam. All democratic organisations and individuals rose to the occasion to rise in protest and demanding a time bound CBI enquiry, paying homage to Com. Gangaram and burning the effigy of the MLA Raju Sahu, the main conspirator. On the occasion of the bandh, trains were blockaded at Panitola Railway Station for more than 4 hours with participation of thousands of protesters. On 11th April there was a commemoration meeting at Panitola with participation of 42 organisations and nearly 4000 people. Organisation like the Mottok Yuba Chhatra Parishad, All Assam Moran Students’ Union, Asom Chah Janajati Jatiya Mahasabha, the Assam Tea Labour Union, the Brihattar Asamiya Juba Manch, the AASU, the AIPWA, the AICCTU, All Assam Bengalee Juba Chatra Parishad and others. On 12th April there was a Citizens’ convention at the Guwahati Press Club convened by CPIML, Sadou Asom Janasangskritik Parishad and People’s Forum for Democracy (PFD). Noted left intellectuals like Dr. Hiren Gohain, Paramananda Mazumder, Nalini Dhar Bhattacharjee were amongst the participants besides leaders of NEROWCC, APBEA, the UTCC, ASPWU, the Assam Juba Parishad, Assam Juba Control, the AAWU, the Ganakantha, AICCTU etc. Spontaneous movements were also organised even where the AICCTU or CPI(ML) do not have any organisation or political activities. 

Comrade Gangaram Koal, we will always remember you. Your loss is an immeasurable one. But - they killed you hoping to kill the movement. But they don’t realize that they can never kill your spirit which will continue to inspire movements of the workers and oppressed peoples in Assam’s tea gardens and all over the country.

“We might as well commit suicide – we cannot be assured of a daily meal since my husband was jailed” – Shakeel’s wife says in a distressed phone call to CPI(ML) activists in Delhi. She and her children have been surviving with the help of funds collected from other workers’ families by the AICCTU and CPI(ML). 

Shakeel, a member of Delhi Street Vendors’ Union affiliated to the AICCTU, lives in Mayur Vihar Phase-1 Delhi. He is a migrant worker from Bihar. On the morning of 21st of February, he had gone to the AICCTU’s Sector 10 office to help the NOIDA comrades prepare for a small procession on the second day of the Strike. In his pocket, he had Rs 40,000 that he had taken from someone for his daughter’s marriage. That morning, a large posse of police officers had descended on the office, accompanied by the media; had arrested all those in the office, and had announced to the media that they had nabbed the culprits responsible for arson and looting in NOIDA Sector 20 (Phase-II) the previous day.

Another worker arrested that morning was Gauri Shankar Pal, also a migrant worker from Bihar, who is a street vendor selling boiled eggs in Khora Colony, Ghaziabad, just 1 Km. away from the AICCTU’s Delhi-NCR office branch in Sector 10, NOIDA. Gauri Shankar is the only earning member of his family, and his family is in great hardship ever since he has been in jail. 
Anoj Kumar Singh works in a factory far from NOIDA Phase-II. He has two small children (aged 1 and a half and 6 yrs.) Since he has been jailed, there no one to support his family. His wife, Poonam, is now taken up a job as a domestic worker to survive, leaving her two kids behind while at work.     

CPI(ML)’s Delhi State Committee member Shyam Kishore Yadav was also arrested on that day. Shyam Kishore is just recovering from a serious accident in which his hip bones were fractured; even now, he has trouble walking. His brother Hareram, also a CPI(ML) activist, is also in jail. Hareram suffers from TB; with the TB treatment being interrupted in jail, his health has deteriorated.  
Workers in NOIDA are being punished for the remarkable success of the all-India Strike, with their democratic rights under an all-out assault by the police and administration, under pressure from the industrialists’ lobby. In NOIDA, workers were picked up by police from trade union offices, homes, streets. Trade Union members all over NOIDA were targeted, while innocent workers were also picked up at random. The arrested workers have remained in jail ever since. They were denied bail in the Sessions Court, in spite of the fact that the FIRs against them are blatantly, obviously false.

In the FIR that named Shyamkishor Yadav, the SHO of Sector 20 police station stated that she and her team were on a raid when they received information that a group of people were gathering to protest. On reaching the spot, they found 34 people, whom they instantly recognised as the ones responsible for the arson and looting carried out the previous day. She further stated that they arrested all of them, and that their families would be duly informed of their arrest. She took care to add that the guidelines laid down by the honourable Supreme Court were followed to ensure that there were no human rights violations, and those arrested had no complaints against the police! The Sessions Judge asked the police how they could claim to recognize so many people: she quizzed them on whether the men’s faces were towards them all the time during the violence on February 20th? The police claimed they had a video clipping of the violence that took place on February 20th. The counsel for the AICCTU members asked to see the video footage with the Judge, and also provided photographs of the AICCTU members to match with the faces of people in the video. We did this, knowing full well that there was no way any of these men were anywhere near the spot where the violence took place on the 20th February. However, the video was not shown to us – it was seen by the Judge in her Chambers, accompanied by the police. Subsequently, the Additional Sessions Judge passed an order denying bail. That order states that the accused causes crores of rupees of property to be destroyed in 200 factories; that they set fire to vehicles and factories; and that the police arrested the workers having recognised them in the video clipping! The bail rejection order states that “the accused have indulged in anti-people activity and have caused damage to public property.” In a blatantly biased and illegal way, the bail rejection order deems the accused to be guilty even before the trial has been held – on the basis of a video clipping which would in fact go to prove the innocence of these workers!  
As we go to press (22 April), just a few of the arrested workers have got bail. There is a virtual emergency in place in NOIDA in the working class localities, and there is palpable fear in working class settlements. On 20 April, some students from Delhi and the CPI(ML)’s Delhi State Secretary went to NOIDA to campaign for a Convention to be held in Delhi on the 23rd  April and for a March to the NOIDA DM’s office on the 25th April. When they reached the AICCTU office in Sector 10, they were told that the SHO of the Sector 20 Police Station herself had come with her team and sat near the office for a long time, warning workers that there would be more arrests if they distributed any leaflets or campaigned in any way! I made a call to the NOIDA SSP to ask him about this intimidation by the police. ‘Why are people being prevented from distributing leaflets,’ I asked. He replied, “What is the content of the leaflet? Is there anything against police or factory owners?” It has, then, become the job of the police to enforce a gag order on any criticism of factory owners or police by workers and trade unions!  

In Uttar Pradesh with Akhilesh Yadav as CM, it is interesting to reflect on the role of the police. The police does not so much as lift a baton against the Samajwadi Party-backed mobs of the dominant community who have repeatedly assaulted the Dalits of Ramgarh village in Dadri (Greater NOIDA). Likewise, they watch benignly as communal mobs repeatedly attack minorities. But when a 10-year old Dalit girl complains of gang-rape by Rajput criminals, the police in Bulanshahr was quick to confine her over night in the police lock-up, separated from her mother! In Aligarh, the police refused to register an FIR when a little girl went missing. When her raped and murdered body was found the next day, her parents protested – and the police was caught on camera brutally hitting the grieving family and knocking one old lady to the ground. And in NOIDA, the police has arrested workers wholesale, without bothering to investigate the events of February 20. So, the police that won’t raise a finger against perpetrators of dalit atrocities, communal violence or rape, is quick to beat up protestors and arrest innocent workers.

The NOIDA police’s motto is ‘Always Alert and Serving People’. Given the way it is arresting innocent workers and terrorizing unions, it should be ‘Always Anti-People, Serving Corporations’.

If the NOIDA police and UP administration really wanted, surely they could, in the two months since the Strike, easily use the available CCTV footage to identify the real miscreants and arrest them, instead of booking TU leaders and innocent workers who had nothing to do with the incident? Actually, the stray incidents during the Strike have just been used as a pretext to crack down on the entire workers’ movement and to terrorise workers against joining trade unions. The police, acting at the behest of the UP Government and factory managements, is hell bent on preventing workers from organising against denial of minimum wages, exploitation of contract workers in violation of the law, and denial of the right to unionise. It is an all-out crackdown on democracy – and calls for widespread democratic mobilisation in defence of democracy in NOIDA, as well as a concerted effort on part of the Central Trade Unions that had called the Strike.