Police Brutality against striking Honda Workers in Gurgaon, India

When several thousand striking workers of Honda Motorcycles, and workers from nearby factories expressing solidarity with them, gathered at mini secretariat in Gurgaon in the afternoon of 25th July 2005, they were immediately surrounded by police and para-military forces. These forces were assembled by the Gurgaon administration from other districts during the day.  What followed was a premeditated attack on unarmed workers captured and broadcast live by the bourgeoisie media. When the brutal attack ended by 8 PM, 800 workers have been seriously wounded, most of them sustaining head injuries. To cap this repression, at least 400 workers were put in the jail. That the intent of the administration was to teach the workers a lesson is clear from the fact that repression did not stop on 25th July itself. When workers and their families went to meet injured workers at civil hospital the next day, they have to face the wrath of the police again. 

The Parliament, which was in session in New Delhi at the time, expressed "shock" at this "atrocity". Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh expressed his "deep concern". From Stalinists to Hindu fundamentalists to Sonia Gandhi, leader of the ruling Party, politicians of all colors rushed to Gurgaon to express sham sympathy for injured workers. For the next couple of days, bourgeois media was filled with pretense of shock at this police brutality, as if something unusual for the Indian bourgeois state has happened.

In reality, this latest round of repression is very much in the traditions of violent repression of working class by the Indian state. To the older workers in Delhi region, it immediately brought to mind October 1979. At the time, to cap a rising wave of radical workers strikes, repressive forces of the state all but occupied Faridabad, industrial suburb to the south of New Delhi. Through a series of shootings in different parts of the city and through imposition of curfew at the end of October 1979, the bourgeoisie was able to suppress the workers movement.  A couple of years before that, workers of Swadeshi Cotton Mills at Kanpur were rounded up and fired upon by the repressive forces of the state, killing at least 400 workers. The chain of repression goes back uninterrupted through suppression of Railway workers strike of 1974 and many other workers struggles.

Yet is the shock of the bourgeoisie real? No, not at the police brutality.  But at finding the working class still alive and kicking, and having the temerity to raise its head after fifteen years of relentless offensive of the bourgeoisie. This clearly came through in the business press of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is seriously worried that the contagion could spread.

The Business Standard of 6th August 2005 feared "The riot that followed the labor management dispute in Gurgaon over the Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI) could be the first major sign of things to come".  That the workers "After a decade-and-a-half of market-friendly policy changes", "seem to be sticking their necks out again".  And that militant workers being squashed by the state is not exactly news. But India has not had any serious problems on this front since the shackles of the Control Raj were unbound in the early 1990s. As per Financial Express of 6th August 2005, "The Gurgaon worker unrest has sent a chill down the spine of managements". Indian Express of 9th August 2005 feared the Gurgaon incident could have a "domino effect ".This alarm of the bourgeoisie was shared by the state both at provincial level as well as central level. The bourgeoisie was surprised to see a face of the working class that it has not seen in last few years. After initial surprise, it decided to quickly put a lid on this ?dispute?.

Just two days after police brutality of 25th July 2005, Haryana Chief Minister, Mr. Hooda called a meeting of the Honda management and union bosses on 27th July and cobbled together an ?agreement?. To atone for the police repression, Mr. Hooda ordered a ?judicial inquiry? by retired Justice G. C. Garg. The efficacy of this ?inquiry? is underlined by the fact that Mr. G. C. Garg, when he was presiding Judge of Punjab and Haryana High Court in 1999, was known more for using rough tactics and police repression than for fairness.

While making critical noises, Leftists and unions hailed all this as victory for the workers. This despite the fact that nearly one hundred workers are still in jail. Also, unions promised that workers will not ask for pay revision for one year. Management agreed to take back 67 suspended workers but insisted to remove them from all productive work.

Meaning of the Honda Strike

A part of the shock of bourgeoisie is possibly whipped up, it is crying wolf. A part was political theatre as the coalition at New Delhi, supported by Leftists, pretend to be "people friendly".  

Honda workers at Gurgaon, an industrial suburb to the west of Delhi, have been agitating since the beginning of this year. They were on strike since 27th June 2005 and have refused to sign promises of "good conduct" demanded by the management. At the same time, their movement was controlled by the leftists, partners in the ruling coalition in New Delhi, and was trapped in the political games of different fractions of the bourgeoisie at the centre and the state level.  It is not any extraordinary militancy of Honda workers struggles that has alarmed the bourgeoisie. It is the fact that despite all obstacles, workers were able to give expression to their anger and their resistance. The bourgeoisie is worried, to use words of Business Standard, as workers "seem to be sticking their necks out again" after a decade and a half.
Indian bourgeoisie has all the reasons to be satisfied with last decade and a half. For one, it has experienced unprecedented enrichment and its ambitions have soared. For another, it has been successful in carrying through relentless offensive against the working class without facing any serious resistance. Entire economy has witnessed massive destruction of permanent jobs, their conversion into contract labor at much lower wages and no social wage. In Gurgaon itself at Hero Honda, another Motorcycle Joint Venture of Honda, while production in last decade has jumped from a couple of hundred thousands to 2.6 Million motorcycles, number of permanent jobs has remained the same. On the other hand, number of temporary workers has grown by many thousands who are compelled to work at 50 euros month, which is standard wage of millions of temporary workers.  Similarly while Maruti-Suzuki car plant has grown its production, it sacked nearly 3000 permanent workers a couple of years ago without workers able to fight back. There place was taken by temporary workers. This is the story of every other company throughout India.  A depressing part of this story has been the fact that, because of its disarray, working class has been compelled to accept all these attacks with its head bowed down.
Honda Motorcycle workers were confronted by identical onslaught. Honda management wanted to sack above a thousand permanent workers and replace with temporary workers. It is a sign of changing mood of the workers, that Honda workers developed an open, even if limited, resistance. The repression has not really instilled fear among the working class.  On the contrary, it has generated a rudimentary level of self-assurance, a feeling that after years a section of the class has been able stand up to the bourgeoisie. 
This is what the bourgeoisie is scared of. This is what holds a real promise for the working class and revolutionaries. Like the working class in the rest of the world, working class in India is taking initial steps toward rediscovering the path of class struggle. This path of rediscovery is going to be long and difficult and intervention of revolutionary in this process is going to be indispensable for it fruition.

Communist Internationalist, New Delhi,  27 August 2005

What Are the Real Reasons for the War in Iraq?

The working class knows that the war is not worth the money or lives being spent on it. In addition to the 1,900 American lives lost, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis have been killed, maimed and left homeless. All the official explanations for the war in Iraq have been exposed as lies – there are no weapons of mass destruction, there was no link between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to any other nation. The Bush administration has lost all credibility, all political authority.

There are plenty of explanations and slogans offered by anti-war activists about the causes of the war. At today’s demonstration you will hear speaker after speaker berate you with variations on the following:

It’s a war for oil. It’s the result of corporate greed. No blood for oil!

It’s a policy error. It’s a mistake.

It’s a Republican war.

It’s an irrational policy of a reactionary faction of the ruling class.

It’s the fault of the stupidity and ineptitude of George W. Bush, who can never acknowledge a mistake.

Whatever kernels of truth exist in each of these explanations, they all obscure the reality that the war in Iraq is the inevitable consequence of a globally decomposing capitalist system and the increasing difficulty of US imperialism to maintain its hegemony in an increasingly chaotic world.

In 1989, when Russian imperialism collapsed and the cold war came to an end, the politicians and the capitalist media promised us a new world order, a future of peace, prosperity, and democracy. Billions of dollars previously spent on the arms race would be transferred to social programs and the world would be a better place. Fifteen years later the new world order has become a new world chaos. There is no peace, no prosperity, and the forces of state repression and dictatorship are on the rise. The Cold War, with its disciplined blocs, led respectively by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. superpowers, where secondary and tertiary powers subordinated their interests to those of the bloc, looks increasingly like the “good old days” for the world capitalist class. The collapse of Russian imperialism was a pyrrhic victory for American imperialism, more a reflection of the decomposition of the global capitalist system than a triumph for American power. With the collapse of the blocs, the glue that kept the lesser powers in line disappeared, and every country more and more began pursuing its own imperialist interests, “every man (or nation) for itself,” producing a situation of increasing chaos on the international terrain.

In 1992, U.S. imperialism officially adopted the strategic goal of preventing the rise of any rival bloc or rival power in Europe and Asia so that it would remain the only superpower in the world and this goal has guided U.S. foreign policy ever since, whether Republicans or Democrats have occupied the White House. It is this strategy which explains U.S. imperialism’s increasing number of military excursions throughout the world – to send a warning and block any potential rival, including America’s onetime allies, to remind them that the U.S. is the only superpower in the world. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not a greedy attempt to boost oil profits for U.S. corporations – far more has been and will be spent on the war and occupation of Iraq than will ever be compensated for by Iraqi oil production. It’s not a policy error, or the result of Republican or Bush administration stupidity, but a conscious decision supported by all factions of the ruling class, except for the extreme rightwing isolationists. The invasion of Iraq was the lynchpin in the American geopolitical strategy to keep European imperialisms from making inroads in the Middle East. Coupled with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and new American alliances with former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, it meant growing U.S. control of one of the most strategically important areas in the world.

For the ruling class the real problem with the war in Iraq is that the greatest military machine in the history of the world is now bogged down in a quagmire, and is increasingly unable to unleash necessary military operations in other imperialist theatres. This would have happened no matter who was president, because it is a central characteristic of capitalist decomposition that every action that American imperialism takes to improve its situation only winds up exacerbating the problems even more. However, the Bush administration’s clumsiness and ineptitude both on the level of the propaganda and ideological explanation for the war (the Democrats prefer justifying military interventions on the basis of human rights) and the squandering of the considerable “patriotic” sentiment that followed the 9/11 attacks, and its tactical handling of the invasion on the ground has made things even more of a mess. The deteriorating military situation and growing unpopularity of the war raises serious problems for the ruling class because it makes it increasingly difficult for the U.S. to have available fresh, deployable troops or to drum up support for further military ventures which are a vital necessity to defend U.S. imperialist interests.

Since this war and all the wars that capitalism has in store for us in the years ahead are inexorably linked to capitalism’s drive to survive, to maintain a world of exploitation and profit, the way to end war is not to change policies, or to change presidents, but for the working class to change the world, to understand its historic responsibilities and potential, to develop the consciousness and unity necessary to destroy capitalism and consign it to the historic rubbish pile, and replace it with a society based on the fulfillment of human need and the construction of a genuine human community – a workers’ revolution..

Internationalism, September 24, 2005

In the midst of the violence and fear that is Iraq today, and after a mortar attack had killed 7 Shia pilgrims, it was easy for panic caused by suspicion of a suicide bomber to cause a stampede. On August 31, in Baghdad, nearly 1000 were killed and hundreds more injured by a stampede on a bridge over the Tigris, with the bottleneck amplified by security barriers.

Many of the victims who jumped from the bridge were pulled to safety by local people, Sunnis, who came to help. In contrast to the ideology of communal hatred and violence that is being whipped up by the bourgeoisie, poor and working people responded to the tragedy with human solidarity.

This comes at a time of heightened tension over the future of Iraq between the various factions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, all armed and dangerous, as they squabble over the constitution. Under Saddam the minority Sunni bourgeoisie had the upper hand and were able to seize most of the wealth. Now the Kurdish and Shia parties want ‘autonomy’, and the revenues from the oil produced in their areas, leaving the Sunnis high and dry and isolated in the middle. Unable to find a compromise between Islamic and secular law, between a unified or loosely federated state, and particularly between each armed gang of the Iraqi ruling class grabbing what it can get, the deadline for the proposed constitution was delayed again and again until they gave up trying to agree and proposed the constitution for the October referendum without the support of Sunni politicians.

This constitution, even if they are able to push it through the referendum in October, will not benefit the mass of the population who will continue to be exploited, when they are fortunate enough to find jobs, and to run the gauntlet of the suicide bombs of the ‘Resistance’ and the guns, prisons and brutality of the occupying force and its client government. Meanwhile the death penalty has been reintroduced and the first executions carried out.

The developing tensions in Iraq, bringing the country to the verge of civil war, are a consequence of the imperialist conflicts between various protagonists large and small. As we said at the time of the invasion 2 years ago: “the war is already exacerbating the divisions in Iraqi society, in particular between those who have allied themselves with the USA (as in the Kurdish regions) and those who have fought against the invasion. These divisions can only serve to create disorder and instability in post-Saddam Iraq, further undermining the USA’s claim that it will be the bearer of peace and prosperity in the region” (‘Resolution on the international situation’ from the 15th Congress of the ICC, IR 113). Since then the divisions and disorder have only got worse.Alex  3.9.05