Join the fight to free the framed-up Maruti Suzuki workers!
By
the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
25 March 2017
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), strongly denounces the life sentences imposed on 13 Maruti Suzuki auto workers in India and the three-to-five years’ imprisonment of another 18 workers by an Indian court on March 18.
The SEP calls on workers in Sri Lanka, India and internationally to come forward to defeat this frame-up. We fully support the campaign launched by the ICFI to demand these workers’ immediate release. We urge all working people and youth to sign the online petition launched by the World Socialist Web Site for their defence, and to fight for the widest possible support for this campaign.
These brutal sentences are a travesty of justice. Not a single charge has been proved. The only “crime” of these workers was to fight the horrendous conditions at their factory near Delhi.
They have been falsely convicted for the death of Awanish Kumar Dev, a human resources manager at the Japanese-owned Maruti Suzuki car assembly plant in Manesar, Haryana. Dev unfortunately died four and half years ago in a fire that erupted on the factory floor during an altercation consciously provoked by the plant management.
The prosecution’s case was such a sham that even Gurgaon District Court Judge R.P. Goyal, in his judgment, conceded that the police colluded with the company management and fabricated evidence. However, repeatedly mangling the law, the judge shifted the burden of proof from the prosecution onto the workers: his conviction of 13 workers on murder charges was based on their “failure” to prove their innocence.
The fatal fire was an outcome of a…