India: Stalinist-led unions call token protest against frame up of Maruti Suzuki workers
By
Deepal Jayasekera
1 April 2017
The trade union federations affiliated to India’s twin Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI)—are calling for demonstrations throughout the country Wednesday, April 5 as “a mark of solidarity with the Maruti Suzuki workers” and to demand their “unconditional release.”
The CPM and CPI and their respective labour federations, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), have systematically isolated the Maruti Suzuki workers. Under conditions where they have been the target of a joint company-state vendetta aimed at intimidating the entire working class and stamping out any challenge to poverty wages, contract labour, and sweatshop working conditions, the Stalinists have up until now done nothing to publicize the Maruti Suzuki workers’ plight, let alone mounted any campaign to mobilize the working class in their defense.
If the CITU and AITUC, almost five years after the frame-up of the Maruti Suzuki workers was initiated and the company purged its Manesar, Haryana car assembly plant of 2,300 militant workers, feel compelled to organize a token day of protests, it is because they recognize that there is immense anger within the working class at the class justice meted out by India’s courts.
In a legal travesty, the courts condemned 13 workers to life-in-prison last month on trumped up murder charges. Twelve of the 13 were elected leaders of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU), which workers at the Manesar plant established in 2011-12 in bitter struggle against a government-supported, company…