The jubilation infused by these revellers peaked with the arrival of an air-conditioned white Fiat car with tinted glass windows. From the vehicle emerged a burly man. His smile was reticent but his manner was purposeful. All eyes shifted from the truck to this man, clad in white, striding slowly into the crowd. The cheering which started then reached a crescendo as the big, balding man hauled himself on to the truck. The balcony of Dange's flat was empty, the windows of his room, shut tight. Below, Dr. Datta Samant was in control. Soon he was leading the seemingly small gathering out of the small lane onto the broad Ambedkar road. The policemen, who had been gossiping in small groups at the street corner dispersed to fall into position and waited for the motley crowd to pass. First came the stragglers who had remained ahead of the truck. Behind the truck came a wide river of 
humanity which surpassed all expectations and bewildered even the cynics. Long after the truck, with Datta Samant triumphantly atop, had passed on to the main road this river continued to flow uninterrupted. 

It was January 18, 1984, and the defeat which was a painful reality was nowhere in sight. The morcha wending its way through Dadar and Parel towards Byculla was like a victory march. When the truck stood at the crest of the Parel flyover I turned back to look at the river of heads submerging the three-lane road and no end was in sight. Spread throughout the one lakh strong procession were self-willed cheer leaders, chanting the praises of Samant and celebrating the determination of the textile workers. S.K.Limaye, who had over five decades of experience in organising labour stood at the end of this river, apart but .not aloof. "Unprecedented and remarkable. After all this, so much enthusiasm," Limaye said with a sense of wonder and just a tinge of admiration. 

Two years earlier, on a bright spring morning, I had first encountered the anger and superhuman determination of the textile workers in the dark hut of Lata Shelke. Lata's husband, who worked in a nearby textile mill, sat cross-legged on the metal. wire bed, which was the only piece of furniture in the one-room home. He talked with emotionally charged conviction about his boycott of the mill where he had spent all his working life. His 
neighbour, the fiery K.P.Kamble, had walked in and the conversation had soon taken a dramatic turn with his heated, impassioned tirade against the seth log and neta log. 

The blood ran hot then. The struggle had just begun. Hatred and contempt for the sangh ran through tens of. thousands of workers like an invisible, seemingly invincible, thread uniting them and keeping them firmly entrenched behind the barricades. There was just a touch of romantic adventurism in the atmosphere. The long awaited, bada kranti was at hand. "Let us kill all the big-wigs of old thoughts," . shouted Kamble to his friends, neighbours and sympathizers. 

With the uniquely stark contrasts of the affluent metropolis of Bombay, where bizarre ostentation thrives on the edges of a vast industrial area of dismal poverty and squalor, Kamble's words carried hair-raising implications. Had time run out? Was the proverbial urban time bomb of rising frustrations ready to explode? 

For Kamble and his fellow residents of Sidhartha Nagar, a slum near Worli Naka on the edge of Bombay's principal traffic artery, hitting back at the world outside, as Lata called it, would be easy. There on the six-lane road, zooming by in cars were the targets of the bada kranti. The millowners were not hated in isolation but as a class. This kranti was intended to overwhelm all perpetrators of injustice - be it the local, mafia-supported M.L.A. or a smug boss of the recognised union who lived in a colony nearby. 

I had gone to Sidhartha Nagar that day to study its neighbourhood association and understand its political intent. I came away feeling that I had encountered the edge of a devastating storm. Not only was the political awareness "acute but it seemed already in the process of activating latent discontent and frustrations into a super powered force which threatened to sweep away everything in its path. Dramatic, possibly violent, changes seemed imminent. The strike of 2.3 lakh textile workers was to be a cataclysmic event set to alter the lives of millions. There was a sense of living in revolutionary times. 

What now seems to have been naive romanticism was justified then by the obviously strong, deep rooted grass root militancy. A great mass movement, an experiment in popular participation was under way. The stage was wide and empty. Anything was possible. 
 
In retrospect the stage appears never to have been empty. The colour and pattern of events as well as the role of various players were pre-determined. There is a danger here of viewing the struggle with religious fatalism. But any element of pre-determination, or the pre-ordained, was due not to supernatural forces beyond the control of men but the inherent characteristics and intent of crucial players in the drama. The greater powers of stage management of some, over others, set the pattern which kept the balance tilted in favour of the former. 

In this context, the over 16-month long strike of over two lakh workers in 60 mills, the largest an longest such struggle in India-was subordinated to the fact that the worker's refusal to produce made no difference to the market. The thousands of crores lost by the owners were ,secondary to their relief and jubilation over the death of those mills which 'deserved' to perish. The millions of man days lost were overlooked in the satisfaction of knowing that 'surplus' labour had been eliminated without payment of any dues or compensation. The defeat of the strikers was celebrated by. millowners as a victory of their firm resolve in the face of an anarchist assault. 

At Shram Shakti Bhavan in Delhi, where the government's labour policy is formulated, the bada kranti that had failed to materialise was seen as a 
minor skirmish. It was seen as a necessary safety valve device which released pressure and ensured preservation of the status quo. There was added satisfaction in the knowledge that this achievement had been aided by supposed opponents of the status quo. The left central trade unions, who had once proclaimed, this struggle of the textile workers as the Armageddon of the Indian working class, now preferred to play down its importance and significance. The culture of political expediency did not permit them to acknowledge the full dimensions of the struggle, which would compel them to confront their role in its eventual failure and the historical implications of this missed opportunity. 

For the 'burly man of Ghatkopar'*, more commonly held responsible for the failure of the struggle, there was escape in rhetoric and the promise of further struggle. For the workers, who actually managed the strike, there was hope in the .Doctor's promises. More significant, however, was the heightened perception of the deep foundations of the status quo and a firm conviction that economic demands could never be fully won without first winning the battle on a political front. The more articulate among them were back to seeking alternatives which could mobilize forces to counter criminal and gangster elements in the political and trade union leadership. 

The rank and file went back to fighting for a living and looking for ways to get the best out of .the status quo, re-establishing links with patrons and benefactors, often even at the cost of their self respect. 
______________________ 
* Ghatkopar is an eastern suburb of Bombay and then the constituency 
Dr. Samant represented in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly. 

At a time when the ruling elite remains isolated , from the happenings and voices at the grassroots what does the apparent failure of such a struggle imply? True, the Bombay textile strike was not a 'burning issue' like the Punjab or Assam agitations. But it reflected certain basic maladies inherent in the industrial relations machinery and the attendant dilemma of industrial workers. Yet, to view the textile strike purely as a labour-industry dispute is to ignore its full dimensions and implications for the future. 

In the realm of trade unions as in politics, there , was a perception among the rank and file of having exhausted all options. The people of Sidhartha Nagar were disaffected not only with all political parties and struggling to fill the lacuna in different ways, but they were also exploring every possible avenue in the quest for more representative and competent trade unions. The recognised union having failed to perform its basic function, the workers had tried and found lacking-the other established trade unions of different ideological hues. The strike was thus a protest and a reaction, against not just, the 'unrepresentative and oppressive' recognised trade union but also the established central trade unions of both left and right which over the last four decades failed to provide adequate solutions to the workers' innumerable problems. 

The result was a popular upsurge, managed almost entirely by the workers themselves, and merely spearheaded by Dr. batta Samant. This popular tendency at the grassroots and its articulation was not limited to Bombay or even to the trade union sphere. It was then a political reality of vast geographical spread in India. That the sporadic activation of this tendency can be swiftly suppressed does not undermine its importance for the future. Whether each show-down builds up to an Armageddon is another matter and not particularly relevant to the task on hand. 

It is important to study and understand the attitudes, perceptions, and the role of the different players, especially those whose acts ran contrary to their professed goals and larger aims. Thus, in the. context of the textile strike, the role of the left trade unions is of vital importance and offers clues to the major hurdles in the path of more effective articulation of the popular tendency which seeks more representative and just forms of organisation, 
administration and government. 

The strike was widely projected by the government and industry as an extended wild cat strike organised by Dr. Datta Samant with his mephistophelean abilities to mislead workers by conjuring up images, of unrealistic benefits. It is always more convenient and simple to reduce such an issue to a single personality and dismiss it accordingly. But Samant, the man, is different from Samant, the phenomenon. That phenomenon did not create the textile strike. The unrest and resultant upsurge among the textile workers were, instead, manifestations of the factors which generated the Samant phenomenon. The textile strike was, in many ways, the inevitable climax of the Samant phenomenon. 

The mammoth morcha of January 1.8, 1984, illustrated that the spark of anger first ignited over two years earlier was still alive and fire simmered just below the surface. But, away from the euphoria of the morchas, had the unprecedentedly long strike been futile or had it prepared ground for the long cherished bada kranti?