Now at the age of 51, P.N.Samant had decided to live in Bombay and accept the job he had been offered at Apollo Mills. Before doing that, he was looking, forward to a quiet period of rest. While his younger brother Datta had been making headlines and going to prison as the fire-breathing labour leader of the Bombay-Thane industrial belt, P.N., or Dada as he soon came to widely be known, had been doing his bit in Gwalior. Diametrically opposite to Datta in his personality and background, Dada did however have a closer knowledge of the ways of mill maliks (mill owners), trade unions and the working class struggle. Not for the first time in his life Dada's active involvement with trade union had got him thrown out of his job. 

A veteran trade union worker, P.N.Samant had played an important role in Bombay during the first railway strike of 1960. Displaying the same daring and drive with which his younger brother earned notoriety a decade later, P.N.Samant had quietly slipped through a cordon of armed guards whose job was to prevent strike leaders from getting near the trains which were being operated by non-strikers. Standing on the platform, P.N.Samant made a fiery speech and, for a while, prevented the "black legs"* from running the trains. The five-day all-India strike fizzled out without securing any benefits, despite support from employees of the Central Government and the Post and Telegraph Department. In a consequent wave of retaliatory action by the government, P.N.Samant found himself on the street without a job. In the following two decades he worked at various supervisory levels in textile mills and tried with only limited success to avoid union activity. 

 By 1980 P.N.Samant was working as a technical officer at Jiyajee Rao Cotton Mills, a Birla enterprise in Gwalior, and involved in helping workers fight against the management policy of deducting large portions of the salary as fines. One thing led to another and soon P.N.Samant had formed a union to. oppose the recognized union. which was affiliated to the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC). A year later Samant had managed to get the fines refunded to the workers but once again he was on the street, without a job. But Samant , had maintained his links with the mills in Bombay, where he first worked as a textile technician. Thus .when he had to leave Gwalior there was a job waiting for him at Apollo Mills in Bombay. However, younger brother Datta and his new band of followers had other plans. 

Soon after P.N.Samant reached home on October 26, Datta came over for what was not just family or social visit. Dr. Samant had just addressed his first gate meeting of textile workers. 
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* A term for strike-breakers who defy the strike call and enter the mills. 

Briefly, Doctor, as he was widely called, related the events of the past few days to his brother and described how this had led him to the threshold of the textile industry. Without hearing any of the details from Samant or the other union officials and workers who had accompanied him, Dada said: "Don't take up textiles, you'll fail miserably." 

Anyone familiar with the history of labour struggles in the Bombay textile mills since the birth of unions, and particularly over the last four decades, would immediately understand why P.N.Samant was so emphatically certain about his brother's imminent failure. Probably. the single most significant reason for the senior Samant's scepticism was a knowledge of how the odds have always been firmly stacked against the textile workers and even the strongest upsurge stifled. Consequently it is all the more remarkable that despite seemingly crippling set-backs, the textile workers, 'girni-kamgar' in Marathi, have repeatedly risen to battle against these odds. 

The earliest trade unions in India were formed in the textile industry. The relatively articulate Bombay textile worker was  once regarded as the vanguard of the Indian labour movement. But the concept and practice of work stoppage by workers as a mode of protest in Bombay's textile mills predates the formation of unions and any legislation regulating the collective bargaining process. In 1923 the workers themselves set up a union with the encouragement of the Governor of Bombay, Sir George Lloyd. It was called the "Girni Kamgar Mahamanda1". But strikes in the textile mills predated even this union. This was largely due to the tradition of indigenous shop-floor level organisation among the workers. Despite the Mill Owners 

Association's (MOA) firm policy to dismiss any worker who struck work, intimidated other workers or conspired with them in the factory, the workers continued to collect in unions and assert themselves. V .B.Karnik noted in his book Strikes in India: "If inspite of all this opposition and threats of dire consequences, workers resorted to strikes it only shows how unbearable the conditions must have been which compelled them to take recourse to that step." 

There is no complete record of the total number of work stoppages that have occurred in the mills but the first prolonged general strike in the Bombay textile mills took place in 1928. Led by the then budding young communist trade unionist S.A.Dange, the strike lasted six months. This record remained unbroken till the 1982 strike. Earlier in 1924, there had been a two month long strike on the bonus issue, which had failed. There was another work stoppage in 1925 but that was more of a lock-out than a strike. In that case the millowners, in an effort to have a certain excise duty abolished, imposed an 11.5% wage cut and refused to withdraw it till the government conceded the industry's demands. When the government agreed to abolish the excise duty the millowners withdrew the wage cut and workers returned to the mills. 

Shortly after this, in 1926, the Bombay Textile Labour Union was established under the leadership of N.M.Joshi. Though N.M.Joshi's BTLU was the first city-wide union, it was dominated by moderates and did not truly reflect, or articulate, the innate radical character of the textile workers. Even the communists, when they first entered the textile industry, found themselves overwhelmed by the worker's own initiative. "The strike was not our creation, but we were the creation of the strike. An organisation had not brought about the general strike of 1928, but the strike had brought forth an organisation."l, S.A.Dange told the court during his trial in the Meerut Conspiracy case in 1931. In more ways than one the 1982 strike seemed to repeat history. In both cases the strike was total. Both times the millowners categorically refused to negotiate with the "upstarts". In 1928 it was the communists and in 1982 it was Datta Samant, who were regarded as a deadly menace. 

Even in 1926 the seventeen demands put forward by the joint strike committee were flatly rejected by the MOA .2 In both strikes, separated by half a century, the differences between the two sides were too wide to be bridged and large quantities of unsold stocks made the millowners more determined to hold firm. But the 1928 strike ended more amicably than the 1982 strike. The basic issues in 1928 were the lowering of wages and a rationalisation scheme. Finally, the millowners agreed not to extend the rationalisation to new mills, to undo the wage cuts and submit the union's charter of demands to a commission of enquiry. The communists, who had just entered the textile industry with their Girni Kamgar Union, held daily meetings during the strike and thus gathered strength. Apart from providing information about the latest developments in the strike these meetings educated workers on the theory and history of the working class struggle. Thus, G.K.Lieten writes: "The G.K.U. had become a powerful worker's-based body and became within a few months after the strike, the only effective union left in the field... the most distinct feature was the sense of unity and self-control it generated among the workers". At a demonstration held the day after the strike ended, workers pledged to prepare for a well organised strike in the future. This sense. of victory and jubilation was not lost on the millowners. 

The owner of Bombay Dyeing, Ness Wadia, wrote to Dange: "Men are to be advised that they must give up their idea that they are masters in the mills... (millowners have) once and for all determined that we will exact discipline and stop the men going on lightning strikes."3 In pursuance of this policy, millowners prohibited labour union officials and their agents from entering the mill compounds and gradually an atmosphere of confrontation was generated. The dismissal of a mill committee member in Wadia's Spring Mill finally triggered off another strike in April 1929. According to Karnik this strike "was provoked by millowners in order to give a crippling blow to the G.K.U."4 

The ensuing course of events followed a pattern which was to be repeated over the next few decades. The millowners withheld wages of the last month that the workers had been in the mills prior to the strike. New hands were recruited to frighten the striking workers who were then cornered into making the difficult choice between class interest and individual interest. But the most significant factor, which would remain common to such struggles over the next half century and find its high point in 1982, was the role of the Congress party. Lieten writes: "More important therefore in the final unsuccessful petering out of the strike was the massive repression and attitude of the Congress and the Indian bourgeoisie."5  Just as in 1982-83 the millowners and supportive political leaders would call for a war on the Samant menace as the main issue of the strike, ignoring the demands and true issues involved, in 1929 the political elite supported actions taken by the MOA to cope with the communist "menace."6 

The strategy of this segment was to treat the strike not as a genuine Industrial dispute but as a power-grabbing tactic of the communists in 1929, and Samant half a century later. With the G.K.U. membership exceeding the Congress party's membership in Bombay city by almost 500% the Congress finally set up a textile union in an attempt to counter the influence of the communists. Thus Lieten concludes that the Congress: "was bent on, and to a great extent succeeded in beating back the advance of the independent working class movement of which the 1929 textile mill strike was the culmination."7 

After 1929 the textile unions remained weak. Dick Kooiman wrote in the Economic and Political Week1y: "without shared economic grievances the workers' strike actions reverted to their traditional and particularistic character. On the Communist side, existing organisations broke up and ideological hair splitting led to further disruptions."8 Several competing groups attempted to unite the workers and call for a strike but none were successful until 1933-34 when the millowners imposed large-scale wage reductions. A united front of several left,," wing labour politicians, even from the Congress and Socialist fold, called for a strike. But the 1934 strike failed and the temporary united front of the left wing leaders did not result in lasting solidarity. 

However, the millowner's and the government's efforts to control even the scattered communists and other 'disruptive' elements in the textile trade unions continued. In 1934 the Bombay Trade Disputes Conciliation bill was submitted to the Bombay Legislative Council. R.D.Bell, general and home member said in the council: "I wish to make it quite clear that this is not a covert effort on the part of the government, it is a perfectly open effort, it is a deliberate attempt on the part of government to exclude these extremist labour leaders and communists from intermeddling in the affairs of the textile industry of Bombay city."9 Subsequently the number and duration of strikes till 1940, was lower than in the 1920s and most struggles were lost by the workers. Thus Kooiman concludes: "By the 1934 Act the government aimed at giving statutory regulations for labour interests to be represented by certified spokesmen and labour disputes to be fought out within officially prescribed limits." Just how closely the show came to be managed by the government is illustrated in the role of the labour officer who was appointed under this act and "appropriated duties that rightfully belonged to the trade union. Unions that sought his assistance in getting the workers' grievances redressed soon discovered that his embrace was a deadly one despised as a government union, the workers left it. But a union that fought him (labour officer) with all its might, like the G.K.U. hardly fared any better. The labour officer proved much better qualified to negotiate with the employers and to settle disputes in favour of the workers preventing the union from building strength... T o sum up, the labour officer was more successful in undermining the new leaders (unionists) than in eliminating the old ones (jobbers). The result was retardation in the growth of an organised working class movement which, at least in the case of the communist unions, was the explicit intention of the government."lO 

The stage was thus set for the enactment of the Bombay Industrial Disputes Act  (BID Act) of 1938 which further sought to control the militant element, especially as represented by the communist led unions, and for all practical purposes outlawed strikes. It also represented the growing trade union aspirations of the Indian National Congress which was in turn supported by the industrialists. Despite the communists' exhortations to all trade unions to boycott the Act, the workers made ample use of its machinery of conciliation and settlement. Four years later the Congress rose to its peak with the Quit India Movement while the communists suffered a fatal set-back due to their decision to support the British war effort. This considerably diminished their following in the textile mills. The Congress, making the most of this opportunity set up its own textile union, the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS) in 1945. 

Under the BID Act the RMMS, with the status of approved union had access to official records in side the mills which gave it an advantage over the communists, who were left picketing outside the mill gates. ll  The BID Act was a comfortable arrangement for the millowners and the government since it ensured peaceful and cordial handling of "labour problems" It thus became necessary to preserve this status quo. The result was the Bombay Industrial Relations (BIR) Act of 1946* which bore all the essential features of the BID Act but. went a step further and made the recognised union the sole bargaining agent thus giving. the RMMS monopoly control over the textile workers. Recognition was to be determined not by secret ballot but by membership dues, to be examined by the Registrar of Unions with vast discretionary powers 
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* For further details refer to The Tenth Month -a Fact Sheet of the Centre for Education & DocumentatIon, Bombay. 

in the final decision. It created a legal structure whereby the only possible legal strike would have to be called after the failure of conciliation but before the matter was referred to adjudication. A failure to follow the prescribed procedure would lead to automatic derecognition of the recognised union. 

As the workers emerged from the Congress sway after 1945, the socialist trade unions gathered strength in Bombay and workers responded to their call for organisation on a class basis. The Mill Mazdoor Sabha, an affiliate of the central trade union Hind Mazdoor Sabha, was formed and in 1950 called a strike under the leadership of Ashok Mehta. The two-month long strike was based on the bonus issue and proved unsuccessful. The police opened fire and lathi-charged workers offering satyagraha on several occassions and 12 workers died in this struggle. 

Ashok Mehta, who in 1982 was a retired man living at a rose farm in the outskirts of Delhi, recalled the strike with regret and unhappiness. "One should not launch a strike unless one knows how to get out of it, but I am a great democrat and the workers insisted on a strike. The workers remained in the city, didn't go to their villages and the strike went off well but there was no way of winding it up with some gains". Though bonus was the principle issue, like most struggles of the textile workers this strike followed a course set by the prevalent political forces. Mehta believes. that the upcoming first general election was a major consideration in the government's firm refusal to settle the strike with any credit or benefits going to the Socialists. 

"The Congress was not willing to strengthen our hands, so the strike didn't succeed. It was not a strike launched for a show of strength. It was a democratic decision of the workers and my failure was In not, having sufficient workers trained enough to know how to launch a strike, run it and call it off. After that, some of my key workers went back to the communists and some retired and returned to the villages. They were a fine group of workers but their immaturity and mine led to these mistakes." Among the mistakes which Mehta recalls was the failure to give priority to the question of recognition. Though it was one of the issues, Mehta says that to the younger leadership it was not the paramount issue. In retrospect Mehta would come to consider this a grave error and believe that if they had persevered, the government would have found it awkward to deny recognition. 

This strike exposed a fundamental flaw in the BIR Act which gives certain rights to the 'representative' union without providing a sound basis for determining recognition. From the perspective of the government this could not be construed a 'flaw', for the Act was moulded to ensure continued power to the RMMS. It could be argued that if this were the case, why had the Congress governments allowed unions in other BIR regulated industries, such as BEST, to successfully challenge the recognized union. But none of the other industries were considered a strategic sector like the textile mills. The general attitude and policy was such that the Bombay High Court, in 1950, turned down a plea by striking workers that their fundamental right was being violated by the order prohibiting them from picketing at mill gates. The High Court rejected this on the grounds that the fundamental rights of loyal workers were violated by picketing. In Strikes in India, V .B.Karnik described the BIR Act as "the most advanced piece of legislation on industrial relations. Apart from creating an elaborate machinery for the settlement of Industrial disputes it also established Labour Courts to deal with individual grievances and breaches of awards, agreements and usages. It also created representative and approved unions which were given certain powers including the power to collect union dues and post notices. The most important feature of the Act was that unions were made the sole bargaining agents in the local area. Under this Act employers were also compelled to follow the course of conciliation and arbitration before making changes in working conditions. Many features  the BIR Act were later incorporated in the industrial Disputes Act* of 1947." 

But the greatest fallacy of the BIR Act was that under its provisions there was almost no way that workers could go on a legal strike. A legal strike can be called only when the government falls to refer a dispute to an industrial Court or Wage Board. Noted Karnik: "The declared intention of the Act was to obviate strikes." 

It was wIth thIS letter of the law In mind that MOA Chairman Hareshchandra Maganlal could say that: "The industrIal peace and harmony Witnessed by our industry has been largely due to the BIR Act Which, through the Instrumentality of a representative union, has been facilitating collective bargaining arrangements on behalf all the workmen in the Industry."12 
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* A Central legislation 

In making this statement Maganlal was ignoring historical facts. There has been at least one major strike in the textile mills every decade and brief work stoppages on the bonus issue are an annual affair. In keeping the recognized and pliable union in power the BIR Act has created only an illusion, on paper, of 'industrial peace'. It is the instrument used to curb any workers' organisation, internal or external, which arises to challenge the RMMS. 

In retrospect the 1950 strike also seems to have followed a pattern which repeats itself with macabre regularity. Frustated workers flock to a union to fight the RMMS, the Congress party adopts its ever rigid stand* and the most heroic of struggles is stifled. According to Karnik, the 1950 strike illustrated that a strike could not get a law changed. Perhaps this is what influenced the left trade unions to try a different strategy next time. In 1956 the opposition parties united on the Samayukta Maharashtra issue and were supported in their fight by the textile workers, 105 of whom died fighting for the cause. In 1960 this united force came together under the banner of the Mumbai Girni Kamgar Union and began an enrollment drive which was received by the workers with overwhelming enthusiasm. 

The front which included the CPI, the Socialist Party, the Republican Party of India, the Peasants and Workers Party and the Lal Nishan Paksha launched a major drive to win recognition. Without calling a strike this front began collecting membership fees outside the mill gates even though the RMMS continued to collect its pauvti, perforce, from workers inside the mills. After collecting proof of a sufficient membership the united group filed an application for recognition before the Labour Commissioner. To the surprise of the millowners and the government the Commissioner ruled in favour of the Mumbai Girni Kamgar Union. This was subsequently challenged in the industrial court, by the RMMS. The MGKU eventually lost the case in appeal. 
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* The Congress was historically committed to a position supportive of the millowners. In 1931 Dange recorded the 'negative' role played by the Indian National Congress and Gandhi in the first major textile strike in 1928. 
  

By 1962, only the communists and the Lal Nishan remained in the MGKU and in 1968 even Lal Nishan left to form the Kapad Kamgar Sangathana. The communists, by then, had begun to once again lose their hold. In 1966 Dange had called a strike and withdrawn it after 12 days on an assurance of a fair deal, from Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik. The socialists, namely S.M.Joshi and George Fernandes from the outset attacked this strike as "unnecessary, frivolous and bogus." The strike was called off on the Chief Minister's assurance that the government would "make the employers pay bonus for 1964 expeditiously... oppose the employer's demand submitted to the industrial court for reduction in dearness allowance, see that no worker is victimised because of the strike and the question of women and badli workers would be settled through further negotiations." 

The communists published a pamphlet to hail " their own achievement and criticised 'psuedo-friends and enemies' of the workers who had denounced the strike and its withdrawal. But the strike in fact did not get any of the benefits the communists then claimed it would. Yashwant Chavin, of the Lal Nishan which was still with the MGKU at the time and was a party to the decision to withdraw the 1966 strike, now says that the workers got nothing out of that strike. A period of further disintegration in the left trade unions followed and in 1970 the split in the communist party created CITU which established its own Lal Bauta Union among textile workers. The 42-day strike of 1974 was thus led largely by Dange. Dange lost what little hold he had, when he abruptly called off the strike at a time when other trade unions were preparing a one day token strike in support of the textile workers. The workers, who were clamouring for certain basic changes were deeply disappointed and years later remembered this as Dange's 'betrayal of 1974 '. The Rs. 4 per month wage increase gained by that strike was remembered as an insult to the workers solidarity and their 42-day struggle. 

This left the field open for a variety of trade unions to make inroads into the textile mills and in 1979 the Hind- Mazdoor Sabha tried to re-establish itself by forming the Girni Kamgar Sabha (GKS). The threatened indefinite strike did not however materialise because George Fernandes, as Union Industries Minister, arrived at a settlement through Chief Minister Sharad Pawar that the millowners would give a Rs.42 monthly increase to the workers. 

As the union supported by the ruling party (Janata), the Girni Kamgar Sabha accepted the award and opposed further agitation on the grounds that their demands had been met. Since all the basic issues had been side- tracked, the Sarva Shramik Sangh opposed this agreement and decided that a major agitation was needed to press for basic demands such as change in the D.A. and derecognition of RMMS, scrapping of the BlR Act etc. Yashwant Chavan, recognizing that the discontent already had deep roots, set about working among the girni kamgar in anticipation of a major show down. The shramik workers, as the Sarva Shramik Sangh activists are popularly known, had no illusions about a grand campaign that would make sweeping. gains. They were acting on the fundamental premise that to wrest any rights and benefits from the millowners for the textile workers, a constant and periodically intensified struggle was required. Dange, for all his other differences with the Shramik group, held a similar view. He said in late 1983: "The textile workers have the experience to know that unless every once in a while they struggle in a very hard way and determined way the backlog of demands is never settled. That's why you find in-Bombay, every two or three years, one general strike." 

The older workers, conscious of how heavily the odds are stacked against them, accept the inevitability of defeat as well as the need to struggle as being in itself, a means of survival. Veteran trade unionists similarly acknowledge that the textile workers' situation is symptomatic of the working class' position within the current status quo and cannot be significantly altered without a major political upheaval. In the words of Lenin: "The spontaneous working-class movement is trade unionism... and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie."13 

But P.N.Samant was not thinking of Lenin's writings when he warned his brother about the fatal trap a struggle in the textile mills could prove to be. Dada was probably not even thinking about the working class struggle or the prospects for textile  workers in the near future. Dada was thinking of samant. "You will fail misarably", he had told his younger brother. Having a historical, perspective of struggles in the textile industry, Dada was not only aware of how and why the odds were against the workers but he was also familiar with Samant's trade union background. What Samant probably feared silently Dada was quick to articulate. The tactics and strategies which worked wonders in the capital-intensive multi-national industrial belt of Thane Belapur, would not necessarily have similar effects in this 'archaic industry with even more outdated labour laws. 

But to most of the valiant soldiers collecting behind the battle lines, these arguments were either alien or irrelevant. Any awareness of how heavily the odds were stacked against them was relegated to the background. Like shelke, Kamble and their neighbours in sidhartha Nagar, most of whom were textile workers, a quarter of a million men and women made ready to charge on to the battle field. The soft smile on Lata shelke's face belied the strength of her personality. Remarkably young and attractive for a mother of five children, Lata seemed to do more than echo what was said around her. She did not share the fiery militancy of Kamble but displayed a quiet determination of her own and articulately explained why she stood behind her husband in his decision to strike. "There comes a time" Lata would say, "when you just have to fight (ladnaihich padega).", Devoid of any ideological inculcation or formal education, Lata had nevertheless a heightened sense of class consciousness and dealt with the strike from this perspective. shelke's decision not to go to work thus became a fight not just against the owners of his mill and the recognized union but against the whole order which these institutions represented. No matter how overwhelming that world had seemed from her hut in Sidhartha Nagar or from the kitchen of the seth Log for whom she once cooked, it seemed conquerable .with the united strength of over two and half lakh kamgar Log (working class people). Far away from the impersonal and statistics dominated world of those who would set the odds of this battle, Lata was on the threshold of an intense personal experience. The inner resources she would draw upon through the trying times ahead emanated not from any ideology or strategy but from an almost emotional conviction which grew out of her own perceptions of life over the two decades she had been married to a girni kamgar. 

On the other hand, when P.N.Samant predicted doom for Samant on the textile front he spoke with the knowledge of history. But nothing in his experience or ideological training had prepared him for the force which hundreds of Latas would constitute. 'Doctor', as Samant was commonly called by workers and union associates, was too euphoric about the response he was receiving from textile workers to heed his elder brother's advise. He had seen the grit writ large on the thousands of faces looking up at him as he spoke to them for the first time. His juniors who had been meeting textile workers for several weeks to gauge their mood? further confirmed what Samant saw before him. There was no going back, he told his Dada. He had given his word to the workers that he would be "taking the mills". Dada's words of caution were countered by Samant's demand that the elder brother forget about his new job at Apollo Mills and take his rightful place on the other side of the barricades. For better or worse, the Armageddon of Samant's life and that of 2.5 lakh" workers who had chosen to put him at the head of their march had begun.