Modi’s “Make in India” campaign and the battle of the Maruti Suzuki workers
By
Pradeep Ramanayake
25 April 2017
It is more than a month since a judge in the northern Indian state of Haryana condemned 13 workers at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar car assembly plant to life imprisonment on trumped up murder charges. This cruel punishment was the result of a years-long conspiracy by the Japanese-owned corporation and the Indian political establishment aimed at imposing exemplary punishments on workers at the Manesar plant, which had emerged as a center of opposition to the brutal sweatshop conditions that prevail throughout India’s factories and Special Economic Zones.
The legal vendetta has been backed by both the Congress Party, the traditional party of the Indian ruling elite, and the current national government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP). The workers at Maruti Suzuki’s Maneasr plant conducted militant strikes in 2011-12 to demand an end to speed-up, poverty wages and the hated contract labour system, cutting across the drive of both the Congress and BJP to attract foreign investment through the promise of a cheap, docile workforce.
Twelve of the 13 workers serving life sentences were leaders of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU), which was established in 2012 through a rebellion against a company-controlled and government-sanctioned puppet union. The resistance of the Maruti Suzuki workers spread like wildfire throughout the massive Manesar-Gurgaon industrial belt, just outside of Dehli, where 80 percent of the workforce are young contract labourers, largely drawn from impoverished rural areas, who earn just 25-50 percent of the standard wage.
After a July 18, 2012 company-provoked…