Trade Unions and the Left Movement in British India: Notes

Organised labour in India grew out of the mills, mines, railways and plantations that colonial capital built from the 1850s onward. Fifteen-hour days, child labour, fines and no safety rules produced first charity and reform, then unions, and at last a left wing inside the national movement. Examiners treat this chapter as a set of firsts, dates and acronyms: who founded what, in which year, and which conspiracy case put which leader in the dock.

Early labour efforts before 1918

The first efforts were led by social reformers rather than by workers themselves. Sasipada Banerjee opened a workmen's club at Baranagar in Bengal in 1870 and brought out the journal Bharat Shramjivi. In Bombay, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, a follower of Jyotiba Phule and editor of the paper Dinbandhu, started the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884. It is counted as the first labour association in India, though it had no membership register, no subscription and no office bearers in the modern sense. Lokhande's agitation fed into the Factory Act of 1881, the first such law in India, and the Factory Act of 1891, which gave a weekly holiday and limited the working hours of women.

The first real unions and the birth of AITUC

The first trade union in the modern sense was the Madras Labour Union, founded in 1918 by B. P. Wadia among the workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills. The injunction that the Madras High Court granted against it exposed how unprotected unions were in law. In the same year Mahatma Gandhi led the Ahmedabad mill workers in a strike, and out of it grew the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association, the Majoor Mahajan Sangh, in 1920, which relied on arbitration rather than confrontation. The All India Trade Union Congress, the AITUC, was founded at Bombay on 31 October 1920. Lala Lajpat Rai was its first president and Dewan Chaman Lall its first general secretary. Its immediate occasion was the International Labour Organisation, set up in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, which required every member country to send a workers' delegate; India was a founding member of the ILO.

Communist beginnings and the conspiracy cases

M. N. Roy founded an emigre Communist Party of India at Tashkent on 17 October 1920. Inside the country the scattered groups came together at a conference held at Kanpur in December 1925, from which the Communist Party of India in India is dated. Because open organisation was dangerous, communists worked through legal Workers' and Peasants' Parties, formed in Bengal in 1926 and afterwards in Bombay, Punjab and the United Provinces. The government replied with a string of prosecutions.

Roy, being abroad, was tried in absentia in the Kanpur case; Muzaffar Ahmed, Dange, Usmani and Nalini Gupta were convicted. The Meerut trial, with thirty-one accused and three Englishmen among them, dragged on for four years, and the long statements of the accused turned it into free propaganda for their ideas. Jawaharlal Nehru visited the prisoners and a defence committee was formed for them.

The strike wave of 1928 and the law

The year 1928 was the high point of labour militancy. The Girni Kamgar Union led a textile strike in Bombay that lasted about six months, and there were big strikes on the South Indian Railway and at the Tata Iron and Steel works at Jamshedpur. The government answered with the Public Safety Bill, meant to deport foreign agitators, and the Trade Disputes Act of 1929, which made strikes in public utilities harder and set up courts of enquiry. It was against these two measures that Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April 1929. Earlier, the Trade Unions Act of 1926 had given registered unions a legal personality and immunity from certain civil and criminal proceedings, and the Royal Commission on Labour, the Whitley Commission, examined working conditions between 1929 and 1931.

Splits, socialists and the road to 1947

The AITUC split twice. At its Nagpur session in 1929 the moderates under N. M. Joshi walked out and formed the All India Trade Union Federation; in 1931 the communists left to form the Red Trade Union Congress. The groups came together again between 1935 and 1938. The Communist Party was declared unlawful in July 1934. In the same year the Congress Socialist Party was formed within the Congress, with Acharya Narendra Deva as president and Jayaprakash Narayan as general secretary. The first May Day in India had already been observed at Madras on 1 May 1923 under Singaravelu Chettiar. After the Second World War the labour field divided on party lines: the Indian National Trade Union Congress was formed in May 1947 by leaders close to the Congress, the Hind Mazdoor Sabha in 1948 and the United Trade Union Congress in 1949.