broken through outright military terror and the inability of the workers leadership to respond. "In a little over two weeks," wrote the May 18 Bombay Economic and Political Weekly, published before the end of the strike, "more than 20,000 persons have been arrested, most of them under DIR and MISA. (Defence of India Rules and Maintenance of Internal Security Act, emergency regulations providing for detention without trial -- INPRECOR.) Railway workers have been thrown into jail simply for not reporting for work. Others have been arrested for no more than attending meetings in support of the strike. More active support for the strike has, of course, become a grave crime. The police and the paramilitary forces like the Border Security Force and the Central Reserve Police have been systematically terrorising the railway workers. Houses of workers have been raided in the dead of night by armed policemen and workers have been offered, at gun-point, the choice between returning to work immediately or being arrested on the spot. Large numbers of workers have been thus forced to go into hiding, which has turned the wrath of the government against their families, especially those living in railway colonies." The railway colonies -- concentrations where rail workers and their families live -- were transformed, according to three members of the Indian parliament, into "spectacle(s) of a deserted town in war-time. " Throughout the country, water and electricity supplies to the colonies were turned off; families of striking workers were evicted from their homes. The May 17 Hindustan Times reported from New Delhi that the "railway authorities have passed eviction notices on 353 staff quarters in various colonies. The families have been given 12 hours to vacate the quarters or face eviction by the police. ... Neighbours of the evicted families said police did not even allow them time to take out their belongings. :.. The evicted families have shifted to unknown places, as the neighbours and others in the colonies were terrified tu provide them temporary shelter in their quarters." the police to hunt out railway employees and take them to places of work at the point of the bayonet." One of the leaders to be taken into custody during the arrests was our comrade G. J. Nair, convenor of the Bombay NCCRS. The NCCRS was a coalition of unions including the All India Railmen's Federation led by the Socialist party, the AITUC led by the Communist party of India, and the CITJ led by the Communist party of India (Marxist). It was formed around six by UPALI COORAY demands relating to the grievances of the 1,700,000 national railway workers. The most important of these demands were that wages of railway workers be brought into line with other government and public workers and that a bonus payment of one month's wages be granted, again in accordance with the practice for other public workers such as those of the Life Insurance Corporation and Air India. But the exact details of the railway workers' demands are less important than the fact that the railway workers -- like all other workers -- have been suffering from galloping inflation. Their real wages have declined and their standard of living has steadily deteriorated. And their working conditions are appalling. For example, they are paid no overtime until they have worked at least 116 hours in a two-week period. So it is not surprising that the vast majority of the population supported the cause of the railway workers. A survey conducted by Bombay University students and reported in the May 22 Times of India revealed that more than 70 percent of the population supported the rail strike. Police brutality and the high-handed action of the government in arresting railway leaders were condemned. But despite this broad mass support, the railway workers were defeated. Was this inevitable? And what lessons should be drawn from the defeat? It is clear that the militancy of the workers, the support and sympathy of the masses, and the strategic importance of the railroads to the national economy provided unusually favorable conditions for a victorious struggle. So the strike was by no means doomed to defeat in advance. With a decisive leadership and adequate preparation the workers could have •beaten the Indian government. The fact is that the workers were defeated because of their vacillating, weak, politically opportunistic, and divided leadership. From the very beginning the Congress party government of Indira Gandhi made it clear that it was not prepared to make any concessions to the railworkers. The Indian ruling class had decided to take on the rail workers and decisively defeat them. A victory for the strikers would have signalled a new stage in the class struggle, which had been relatively quiescent since the government "pacified" the West Bengal strike. Other sections of the working class would have been encouraged to struggle to improve their living conditions had the railway workers won. The "socialist" Indira Gandhi quickly demonstrated that her regime was well aware of the stakes involved. On May 2, even before the strike started, 300 leaders of the railway unions, including some members of the NCCRS, were arrested while negotiations were going on between union officials and the government! So even before the strike was launched a large number of central and local leaders of the union were in jail, detained under the various security regulations. This should have tipped the workers leaders off to the fact that the ruling class had opted for a head-on confrontation and that the only way the workers
INDIA Striking Indian railway workers rally in New Delhi. could have halted the capitalist offensive was by meeting the challenge through mobilizing and organizing the entire working class and its allies. But the leaders of the CPI and the CPI (M) failed to grasp this reality or de liberately chose to ignore it. The scenario began when the negotiations between the railway union leaders and the officials of the Railway Ministry broke down and the NCCRS leadership decided to give notice that it was calling ar indefinite general strike in fourteen days, beginning May 8. But the decision was made without adequate preparation of the rank-and-file rail workers, not to speak of other layers of the class. George Fernandes and other Socialist party leaders engaged in some bravado and rhetoric, but they took no political or material steps to prepare for a prolonged strike. This would have required the broadest participation of railway workers in running the strike, setting up struggle committees representing all layers of the class, taking adequate steps to counter police violence and harassment, and preparing a leadership that could have carried on the struggle even under conditions of illegality. None of this was done. Nevertheless, the response of the masses of workers to the strike call was nearly total. The government lie machine claimed over radio and television that the railroads were functioning "normally, " but even the bourgeois press had to admit that the strike had brought the rail system, and with it a good part of the whole economy, to a standstill. (1) Other workers spontaneously walked off their jobs in solidarity with the rail workers. By the third day of the strike, sentiment for a general strike was mounting. Meanwhile, Fernandes and other leaders of the action committee who had been arrested were pleading from jail for a negotiated settlement. (2) They were still hoping that Gandhi would act "decently" and make some concessions. The leaders of the CPI and the CPI (M) were no better; they merely sent their parliamentarians to plead with Gandhi. (3) After the government had made its stand unequivocally clear, and after three days of struggle, Niren Ghosh of the CPI (M) was asking the government not to adopt an "unrelenting posture" and was assuring it that the strike was "purely and simply 20 economic. "(4) The leaders of the CPI and CPI (M) talked about a general strike to support the railway workers; but it was just words. If the CPI, for example, had been serious about its general strike rhetoric, it could have placed the resources and administration of the province of Kerala at the disposal of the strikers. Achuta Menon, a member of the CPI, is chief minister in Kerala. In reality, the CPI was embarrassed by the strike and was energetically seeking means to disassociate itself from it. When the Congress government declined to get the CPI off the hook by offering a few concessions, the CPI leadership gradually began to back out. On May 15 they expressed the view that it would be better if the strike were called off. The efforts of the leaders of the CPI (M) to find a "peace formula" fared little better. By May 20 the strike was already on its last legs. The opportunistic policies of the CPI and the CP|(M) had led the strike to defeat. It is not difficult to see why the CPI could not mass its forces behind the railway workers. It remains a prisoner of its strategic orientation, which considers Gandhi's Congress government as a force that has opted for a "non-capitalist road of development" or even for "socialism. " The CPI leaders believe that the "anti-imperialist" and "antimonopolist" Congress party should be supported and that a coalition should be concluded with it. The CPl has given a stamp of approval to Gandhi's clever "socialist" demagogy. To this day the CPI has made no self-criticism of this strategic line, nor has it made any change in it. When SP leader Madhu Himaye called on the CPl to withdraw from coalition governments in Uttar Pradesh and Kerala, where it rules in partnership with the Congress party, CP! leader Dange answered that the SP was engaging in a provocation. (5) But what about the CPI (M)? It claims to be a "revolutionary" party. Why could it not mobilize its forces? Was it that the CPI(M) put the sectarian interests of its own trade-union federation ahead of those of the railway workers because the dominant force in the railway struggle was the Socialist party? Or was it the parliamentary cretinism of the CPI (M) that made in incapable of preparing even its own forces for an extraparliamentary struggle? It also bears mentioning that the rail strike exposed the bankruptcy of the various Maoist currents that peddled their dogmatic schemas about the struggle developing "from the coun try to the town. " No revolutionary Marxist would ignore the importance of the agricultural workers, rural poor, and poor peasantry in most of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. And no serious revolutionary Marxist would insist that the struggle must always necessarily begin in the cities. But to completely abandon activity among the urban workers and their organizations to the reformists is just as impermissible. But this is exactly what the "Naxalites" did, and the result is that the majority of the urban workers remain in the clutches of the reformists. The international revolutionary movement must defend the victims of repression of the rail strike. But that defense must be combined with an attempt to build the nucleus of a revolufionary party that can challenge the reformist leaderships that led the workers to defeat. _ Footnotes: 1. See Bombay Free Press, May 9, 1974 and Times of India, May 9, 1974, "Strike in. City Total." 2. Times of India May 9, 1974, "Fernandes Ready for Talks Even in Jail." 3. Economic Times, May 11, 1974, "Elders Anxious to End Rail Strike. " 4. Ibid. 5. Indian Express, May 25, 1974.