We need reforms. But reform does not mean to sell out everything - Mamata Banerjee

Yes, we need reforms. But reform does not mean to sell out everything to satisfy some sections of individuals. In a democratic set up, reforms must reach upto the poor and common people and the beauty of democracy lies on realizing its responsibility towards the common people.

Developed countries have many social sec...urity schemes. In our country, we do not have elaborate social security schemes or safety valve mechanism for protection of the interest of the common people.

A series of unilateral and anti-people decisions might help in raising Sensex points only for the time being. I agree that Sensex must be stable, but at the same time, policy and planning should not be used to impose back-breaking burden on the common people. If black money is unearthed in the country, and brought back home from abroad and are used for development purposes, then Sensex will grow in an unparalleled manner.

I do not support any decision to sell out everything. This might suit one section of the government. We are determined to fight for the cause of the common people and we can sacrifice our lives but cannot compromise on it.

Can India Inc. face the truth about the Manesar violence?

 It would be sad if the ghastly violence at Maruti Suzuki’s (MSIL) Manesar plant on July 18, 2012, in which a HR manager died, were to be understood simply as a ‘murderous workers’ vs ‘rational management’ kind of an incident. There is a history and a context to this violence, and how that is understood, and acknowledged, by India Inc. will indicate how serious we are about preventing such incidents in the future.

First of all, let’s begin with a game of call-a-spade-a-spade. When your profits go up by 2,200% over nine years (MSIL’s from 2001-02 to 2010-11), when your CEO’s pay goes up by 419% over four years (MSIL CEO’s from 2007-08 to 2010-11), when you get a 400% increase in productivity with just a 65% increase in your workforce (from 1992-2000), when your workers’ real wages increase by just 5.5% when the consumer price index rose by 50% (2007-11) (figures as reported by the researchers Prasenjit Bose and Sourindra Ghosh in The Hindu), when a worker can lose nearly half his salary for taking a couple of days leave in a month – you have a situation that free market economists are programmed not to register: extreme exploitation.

As per media reports, about 65% of MSIL’s workers in its Manesar campus are non-permanent – contract labour, apprentices, trainees, what have you. While the permanent worker gets a maximum of Rs17000 per month, the contract worker gets a maximum of Rs7000. The CEO gets a little more, about Rs.2.45 crore per annum (and this is a 2010-11 figure). And unlike the worker, who gets only two 7.5 minute tea/toilet breaks during an eight-hour shift, and has to run 150 metres to pick up his tea and snack, run another 400 metres to the toilet, drink tea and piss at the same time, holding his cup in one hand and you-know-what in the other, and run back to the assembly line before the seven minutes are up (as otherwise he could end up losing half a day’s pay), the top management does not, I think, get penalised if they spend more than 7.5 minutes at a time flooding the toilet.

The backstory

Apart from the physical and economic exploitation, what the workers were reacting to on July 18 was the sustained assault on their dignity. In 2011, there had been at least three confrontations – in June, September and October — between the workers and the management. All were totally non-violent. The workers had been agitating for an independent union in place of the ineffective ‘company union’ – the Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU). After a lot of struggle, they registered the Maruti Suzuki Employees’ Union (MSEU) in October last year. But in the same month, the management reportedly got rid of the troublesome leadership of this union by offering them a VRS-type settlement.

The workers then formed a new union, the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU) with a new set of committee members. It was this union which had been negotiating with the management through 2012 – for wage increases, for transportation facilities, slowing down the robotic pace of work, and regularisation of leave benefits.

But with the MSWU apparently making little headway in the negotiations, discontent was simmering among the workers. And on July 18, when a floor supervisor allegedly misbehaved with a Dalit worker (Jiyalal), and instead of the supervisor getting pulled up, the worker got suspended, the new union was expected to deliver – to get Jiyalal reinstated. And when it began to look like they wouldn’t be able to, violence broke out.

The management has said that the workers unleashed the violence. The workers say that the management instigated it by getting hundreds of bouncers to attack the workers, who responded to that attack. But nobody seems to know what exactly happened. The truth might be closer to what a labour activist describes as a combination of karna, karwana and hone dena.

The permanently temporary worker

At the heart of this whole mess is India Inc.’s love for contract labour. My research tells me that manufacturing cars is not a seasonal enterprise – it happens round the year; nor is assembling a car in a factory incidental to the making of a car – it is not like gardening or mopping the factory floor; nor is it something that can be done with a few dozen workers. According to the law of the land – the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, and Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Central Rules, 1971, it is illegal to employ contract labour where “work is perennial and must go on from day to day”, “where the work is necessary for the work of the factory”, and “where the work is sufficient to employ considerable number of whole time workmen.”

It is the employer’s responsibility to follow the law, and the government’s responsibility to ensure that it is not violated. Not even the MSIL management can deny that they have been using temporary workers for permanent, core, production work. And this is not something that happens in this one plant of Maruti Suzuki. In the entire NCR region – in Manesar, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Noida – where there are thousands of factories of all sizes that carry out manufacturing work round the year, the average percentage of permanent workers in the total workforce is 15%. About 85% of the workforce is made up of non-permanent labour. And non-permanent labour includes contract workers, apprentices, trainees, etc. —- add all of them and the percentage of temporary workers becomes as high as 95% in many factories. And these workers remain ‘temporary’ for years and years. I guess you could say that corporate India’s favourite worker is the permanently temporary one.

It wasn’t always this bad. The percentage of contract labour as a proportion of the total workforce doing core manufacturing work has been steadily rising since 1991, the year liberalisation began, and today, the informalisation and fragmentation of what used to be formal or organised labour has reached absurd levels. What this means, in human terms, for the workers, is exploitation of a kind that is not much different from slave labour.

To take a simple example, many factories have what is called the ‘night shift’ and the ‘full night shift’. The ‘night shift’ is from 9am to 1am and the ‘full night shift’ is from 9am to 5 am, resuming again at 9am. Yes, 16-hour and 20-hour shifts are pretty common in the NCR, about as common as the rampant violation of labour laws. And yet, we never hear about the appalling condition of India’s working class, or about how India Inc. routinely breaks the nation’s labour laws with impunity and gets away with it. Or is it possible that this is how we want most of our fellow Indians to live? We seem to care more about one Indian winning an Olympic gold than 700 million Indians living like insects in a drain. All we hear, instead, is how ‘labour law reforms’ are necessary to improve the ‘investment climate’.

Before and after Manesar

Such extreme exploitation is bound to trigger unrest at some point, and the Manesar violence is only the latest in a long series of worker conflagrations that we have seen in the past decade – in Honda Motors, Rico Auto, Orient Craft, EIRO, Pricol and many others. And they are not exclusive to NCR – similar unrest has been seen in other parts of the country as well, and they are only set to spread even more. There are four simple take-aways from all of this:

One: the growing irrelevance of the union. The workers’ unions can only represent the permanent workers. The vast majority of the workers are temporary ones, and the union means little to them, as it does not represent them. The union has traditionally been a management tool to control the workers. But in this scenario, where the union has little leverage, the management either has to play it straight (pay fair wages, give decent working conditions and benefits) or call bouncers and goons to control the workers.

Two: there is a clear nexus between the state and the corporate managements. The two have come together to maximize the exploitation of the worker. Haryana, where Manesar is located, has not even bothered to constitute the legally mandated board that is supposed to oversee the enforcement of the Contract Labour Act. The labour department is conveniently understaffed, and the cops, like cops everywhere, protect the exploiter from the exploited.

According to the workers, not just cops, but also bouncers, local goons, private security agencies, intelligence agencies (take a wild guess who put out the story about the ‘Naxal hand’ in the incident), and even the local village headmen (many of whom are huge beneficiaries of the recent industrialisation of the area – having made money from selling part of their land holdings, from renting out accommodation to workers, from getting into the transportation business, ferrying goods and material to and from the factories, as labour contractors, and other kinds of ‘middleman’ services) have been enlisted to ‘fix’ the ‘troublesome’ workers.

Three: the average factory worker in the NCR today, particularly in Manesar, is a new breed. Corporate India is very clear what it wants: absolute control over the Indian worker. But factory workers of today are not like those workers of 20-30 years ago. They are mostly ITI-trained diploma holders, young, in their twenties, mobile-savvy, net-savvy, and don’t have the time for good old ‘Down with Capitalism’ kind of sloganeering. They don’t care for the ‘communist’ stuff any more than your standard issue MBA. Though they have been hired as contract labour, unlike, say, construction workers, they are not from dirt poor backgrounds. Many are from lower-middle or middle-middle class families; they are exposed to the mall-bound luxuries of Shining India, and they want their rightful share of the GDP they busted their ass to produce. And: they care about their dignity more than they care about their jobs, and that’s easy, because they don’t really have a job anyway – they are temporary workers hired by a contractor, see?

And when such a worker is pushed to breaking point – not just worked to the bone, but taunted and humiliated, he is liable to lash out blindly. And when that happens, you get what happened at MSIL’s Manesar plant last week. It is not a rational or premeditated action – they gained nothing from it. Such violence serves no purpose. In fact, most of them are now busy hiding from the cops. But that is the nature of a rebellion – it is not calculated, it is not rational. And that is how we must understand the Manesar eruption: as a workers’ revolt.

Four: Capitalism is not sustainable without an independent union. If you look at the so-called golden period of capitalism in the 20th century, the US after the New Deal, up to the time Reagan and Thatcher came on the scene, it was a period marked by strong independent unions that managed to get the workers a decent standard of living, and Capital was forced to keep its ‘social contract’, as it were, with Labour. But then, this period, from the 1940s to the early 1980s, was also the period when communism had to be kept at bay; it was the period when capitalists had to show the world that capitalism is a better system for everyone (and not just capitalists) than any other system.

But today, of course, there is no alternative to capitalism, or so the masters of the universe want us to believe. And they also want us to believe there is no need for an independent union because they have a right to squeeze the worker as much as they want, and can. But history – and countless management studies – has shown time and again that a union which enjoys the confidence of the workers is the best tool that management can ever have to ‘control’ the workers. Hire temporary workers, take the union out of the picture – well, you’ll rake in super-profits for a while, but you’re going to have to pay a heavy price later in terms of worker unrest, and the kind of incident we saw at Manesar last week.

Yes, it is true that India’s labour legislation right now is a total mess. We have about 55 central labour laws and more than a 100 state laws, and they are all mostly observed in the breach. It is also argued that these laws make it unreasonably difficult to lay off a worker, and this is cited as the reason why employers want to keep their permanent workers to the bare minimum. The legislation in question here is the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which requires companies employing more than 100 workers to seek government approval before firing anybody or closing down.

While this provision should be debated, with equal participation from all the stakeholders, India Inc. needs to look at it less as an unpleasant provision to be eliminated or circumvented, and more as a necessary reminder that a business enterprise always has a social dimension that is as important as profit, and which it ignores at its own peril. Trample on workers’ livelihood and dignity, and your profit is basically blood money – it won’t say so in the balance sheet or the P&L statement, but it will show up somewhere, later, if not sooner. It could be the money you pay to bouncers and private security agencies; or the money you spend on surveillance equipment; it could be an expensive lockout; or it could be the brain tumour caused by all the curses of your downsized workforce; or it could even be the death of one of your managers.

Instead of shedding crocodile tears about the worsening ‘investment climate’, the oligarchs who make up Indian Inc. and their MBA underlings would do well to engage in some soul-searching. For a change, they can ask themselves: Should I continue to treat the Indian worker simply as a cost factor that has to be reduced to zero, or can I treat them with a little more respect, so that they too can live, and work, with dignity?

Can India Inc. face the truth about the Manesar violence?

 It would be sad if the ghastly violence at Maruti Suzuki’s (MSIL) Manesar plant on July 18, 2012, in which a HR manager died, were to be understood simply as a ‘murderous workers’ vs ‘rational management’ kind of an incident. There is a history and a context to this violence, and how that is understood, and acknowledged, by India Inc. will indicate how serious we are about preventing such incidents in the future.

First of all, let’s begin with a game of call-a-spade-a-spade. When your profits go up by 2,200% over nine years (MSIL’s from 2001-02 to 2010-11), when your CEO’s pay goes up by 419% over four years (MSIL CEO’s from 2007-08 to 2010-11), when you get a 400% increase in productivity with just a 65% increase in your workforce (from 1992-2000), when your workers’ real wages increase by just 5.5% when the consumer price index rose by 50% (2007-11) (figures as reported by the researchers Prasenjit Bose and Sourindra Ghosh in The Hindu), when a worker can lose nearly half his salary for taking a couple of days leave in a month – you have a situation that free market economists are programmed not to register: extreme exploitation.

As per media reports, about 65% of MSIL’s workers in its Manesar campus are non-permanent – contract labour, apprentices, trainees, what have you. While the permanent worker gets a maximum of Rs17000 per month, the contract worker gets a maximum of Rs7000. The CEO gets a little more, about Rs.2.45 crore per annum (and this is a 2010-11 figure). And unlike the worker, who gets only two 7.5 minute tea/toilet breaks during an eight-hour shift, and has to run 150 metres to pick up his tea and snack, run another 400 metres to the toilet, drink tea and piss at the same time, holding his cup in one hand and you-know-what in the other, and run back to the assembly line before the seven minutes are up (as otherwise he could end up losing half a day’s pay), the top management does not, I think, get penalised if they spend more than 7.5 minutes at a time flooding the toilet.

The backstory

Apart from the physical and economic exploitation, what the workers were reacting to on July 18 was the sustained assault on their dignity. In 2011, there had been at least three confrontations – in June, September and October — between the workers and the management. All were totally non-violent. The workers had been agitating for an independent union in place of the ineffective ‘company union’ – the Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU). After a lot of struggle, they registered the Maruti Suzuki Employees’ Union (MSEU) in October last year. But in the same month, the management reportedly got rid of the troublesome leadership of this union by offering them a VRS-type settlement.

The workers then formed a new union, the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU) with a new set of committee members. It was this union which had been negotiating with the management through 2012 – for wage increases, for transportation facilities, slowing down the robotic pace of work, and regularisation of leave benefits.

But with the MSWU apparently making little headway in the negotiations, discontent was simmering among the workers. And on July 18, when a floor supervisor allegedly misbehaved with a Dalit worker (Jiyalal), and instead of the supervisor getting pulled up, the worker got suspended, the new union was expected to deliver – to get Jiyalal reinstated. And when it began to look like they wouldn’t be able to, violence broke out.

The management has said that the workers unleashed the violence. The workers say that the management instigated it by getting hundreds of bouncers to attack the workers, who responded to that attack. But nobody seems to know what exactly happened. The truth might be closer to what a labour activist describes as a combination of karna, karwana and hone dena.

The permanently temporary worker

At the heart of this whole mess is India Inc.’s love for contract labour. My research tells me that manufacturing cars is not a seasonal enterprise – it happens round the year; nor is assembling a car in a factory incidental to the making of a car – it is not like gardening or mopping the factory floor; nor is it something that can be done with a few dozen workers. According to the law of the land – the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, and Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Central Rules, 1971, it is illegal to employ contract labour where “work is perennial and must go on from day to day”, “where the work is necessary for the work of the factory”, and “where the work is sufficient to employ considerable number of whole time workmen.”

It is the employer’s responsibility to follow the law, and the government’s responsibility to ensure that it is not violated. Not even the MSIL management can deny that they have been using temporary workers for permanent, core, production work. And this is not something that happens in this one plant of Maruti Suzuki. In the entire NCR region – in Manesar, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Noida – where there are thousands of factories of all sizes that carry out manufacturing work round the year, the average percentage of permanent workers in the total workforce is 15%. About 85% of the workforce is made up of non-permanent labour. And non-permanent labour includes contract workers, apprentices, trainees, etc. —- add all of them and the percentage of temporary workers becomes as high as 95% in many factories. And these workers remain ‘temporary’ for years and years. I guess you could say that corporate India’s favourite worker is the permanently temporary one.

It wasn’t always this bad. The percentage of contract labour as a proportion of the total workforce doing core manufacturing work has been steadily rising since 1991, the year liberalisation began, and today, the informalisation and fragmentation of what used to be formal or organised labour has reached absurd levels. What this means, in human terms, for the workers, is exploitation of a kind that is not much different from slave labour.

To take a simple example, many factories have what is called the ‘night shift’ and the ‘full night shift’. The ‘night shift’ is from 9am to 1am and the ‘full night shift’ is from 9am to 5 am, resuming again at 9am. Yes, 16-hour and 20-hour shifts are pretty common in the NCR, about as common as the rampant violation of labour laws. And yet, we never hear about the appalling condition of India’s working class, or about how India Inc. routinely breaks the nation’s labour laws with impunity and gets away with it. Or is it possible that this is how we want most of our fellow Indians to live? We seem to care more about one Indian winning an Olympic gold than 700 million Indians living like insects in a drain. All we hear, instead, is how ‘labour law reforms’ are necessary to improve the ‘investment climate’.

Before and after Manesar

Such extreme exploitation is bound to trigger unrest at some point, and the Manesar violence is only the latest in a long series of worker conflagrations that we have seen in the past decade – in Honda Motors, Rico Auto, Orient Craft, EIRO, Pricol and many others. And they are not exclusive to NCR – similar unrest has been seen in other parts of the country as well, and they are only set to spread even more. There are four simple take-aways from all of this:

One: the growing irrelevance of the union. The workers’ unions can only represent the permanent workers. The vast majority of the workers are temporary ones, and the union means little to them, as it does not represent them. The union has traditionally been a management tool to control the workers. But in this scenario, where the union has little leverage, the management either has to play it straight (pay fair wages, give decent working conditions and benefits) or call bouncers and goons to control the workers.

Two: there is a clear nexus between the state and the corporate managements. The two have come together to maximize the exploitation of the worker. Haryana, where Manesar is located, has not even bothered to constitute the legally mandated board that is supposed to oversee the enforcement of the Contract Labour Act. The labour department is conveniently understaffed, and the cops, like cops everywhere, protect the exploiter from the exploited.

According to the workers, not just cops, but also bouncers, local goons, private security agencies, intelligence agencies (take a wild guess who put out the story about the ‘Naxal hand’ in the incident), and even the local village headmen (many of whom are huge beneficiaries of the recent industrialisation of the area – having made money from selling part of their land holdings, from renting out accommodation to workers, from getting into the transportation business, ferrying goods and material to and from the factories, as labour contractors, and other kinds of ‘middleman’ services) have been enlisted to ‘fix’ the ‘troublesome’ workers.

Three: the average factory worker in the NCR today, particularly in Manesar, is a new breed. Corporate India is very clear what it wants: absolute control over the Indian worker. But factory workers of today are not like those workers of 20-30 years ago. They are mostly ITI-trained diploma holders, young, in their twenties, mobile-savvy, net-savvy, and don’t have the time for good old ‘Down with Capitalism’ kind of sloganeering. They don’t care for the ‘communist’ stuff any more than your standard issue MBA. Though they have been hired as contract labour, unlike, say, construction workers, they are not from dirt poor backgrounds. Many are from lower-middle or middle-middle class families; they are exposed to the mall-bound luxuries of Shining India, and they want their rightful share of the GDP they busted their ass to produce. And: they care about their dignity more than they care about their jobs, and that’s easy, because they don’t really have a job anyway – they are temporary workers hired by a contractor, see?

And when such a worker is pushed to breaking point – not just worked to the bone, but taunted and humiliated, he is liable to lash out blindly. And when that happens, you get what happened at MSIL’s Manesar plant last week. It is not a rational or premeditated action – they gained nothing from it. Such violence serves no purpose. In fact, most of them are now busy hiding from the cops. But that is the nature of a rebellion – it is not calculated, it is not rational. And that is how we must understand the Manesar eruption: as a workers’ revolt.

Four: Capitalism is not sustainable without an independent union. If you look at the so-called golden period of capitalism in the 20th century, the US after the New Deal, up to the time Reagan and Thatcher came on the scene, it was a period marked by strong independent unions that managed to get the workers a decent standard of living, and Capital was forced to keep its ‘social contract’, as it were, with Labour. But then, this period, from the 1940s to the early 1980s, was also the period when communism had to be kept at bay; it was the period when capitalists had to show the world that capitalism is a better system for everyone (and not just capitalists) than any other system.

But today, of course, there is no alternative to capitalism, or so the masters of the universe want us to believe. And they also want us to believe there is no need for an independent union because they have a right to squeeze the worker as much as they want, and can. But history – and countless management studies – has shown time and again that a union which enjoys the confidence of the workers is the best tool that management can ever have to ‘control’ the workers. Hire temporary workers, take the union out of the picture – well, you’ll rake in super-profits for a while, but you’re going to have to pay a heavy price later in terms of worker unrest, and the kind of incident we saw at Manesar last week.

Yes, it is true that India’s labour legislation right now is a total mess. We have about 55 central labour laws and more than a 100 state laws, and they are all mostly observed in the breach. It is also argued that these laws make it unreasonably difficult to lay off a worker, and this is cited as the reason why employers want to keep their permanent workers to the bare minimum. The legislation in question here is the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which requires companies employing more than 100 workers to seek government approval before firing anybody or closing down.

While this provision should be debated, with equal participation from all the stakeholders, India Inc. needs to look at it less as an unpleasant provision to be eliminated or circumvented, and more as a necessary reminder that a business enterprise always has a social dimension that is as important as profit, and which it ignores at its own peril. Trample on workers’ livelihood and dignity, and your profit is basically blood money – it won’t say so in the balance sheet or the P&L statement, but it will show up somewhere, later, if not sooner. It could be the money you pay to bouncers and private security agencies; or the money you spend on surveillance equipment; it could be an expensive lockout; or it could be the brain tumour caused by all the curses of your downsized workforce; or it could even be the death of one of your managers.

Instead of shedding crocodile tears about the worsening ‘investment climate’, the oligarchs who make up Indian Inc. and their MBA underlings would do well to engage in some soul-searching. For a change, they can ask themselves: Should I continue to treat the Indian worker simply as a cost factor that has to be reduced to zero, or can I treat them with a little more respect, so that they too can live, and work, with dignity?

In volte face, Centre to accept minimum wages for NREGA

The Centre is set to accept ‘minimum wages’ under the job guarantee scheme, apprehensive that taking such action later, on the possible directives of the Supreme Court, would show it as reluctant to give higher wages to the poor. Rural development ministry will soon seek Cabinet approval to make wages of MGNREGA at par with Minimum Wages Act prevailing in states. It marks a government volte face after it moved the apex court against a Karnataka High Court ruling that wages under the job scheme could not be less than minimum wage rate fixed under MW Act. At the core of the dispute is a provision in MGNREG Act (clause 6-1) which empowers the Centre to notify wages, irrespective of the MW Act. The provision, in essence, states that the job scheme was not bound by the “floor remuneration” to be paid to workers, a fact disputed by social activists. While a harried government feared the Karnataka HC order would increase the cost of the central scheme manifold, many including RD minister Jairam Ramesh felt that challenging the HC order would be seen as denying higher wages to the poor. It would be politically counter productive. The initial reaction, not encouraging, in the apex court seems to have nudged the Centre to be proactive in bringing the MGNREGA in sync with MW Act. It is feared that a negative verdict could leave the Centre stranded, having to bear higher costs of the job scheme without the credit of giving increased wages. However, the Centre may be playing a little game to guard against arbitrary hikes in minimum wages by states to extract more money from Delhi. It has proposed to amend clause 6-1 to read that while Centre would notify the wages, it would ensure that “the first time” these wages are not less than MW Act. At the same time, it wants to tweak the clause about funding pattern. Instead of committing the Centre to “meet the cost of amount required for payment of wages”, the RD ministry wants it to read that Centre would meet the cost of wages as determined by the Centre (under 6-1) It means that after ensuring that wages fixed are not less than MW Act, the Centre would be at liberty to not hike the wages even if states revised their minimum wages. It would deter the states from assuming that hike in MW Act would automatically fetch them total reimbursement of wage outgo under MGNREGA.

One of the world’s oldest surviving communist governments has crashed out in India

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been ruling West Bengal for 34 years but last night fell to what the Indian media is calling a “tsunami” – 56-year-old Mamata Banerjee who leads the Trinamool Congress.
Nicknamed Didi or sister by her followers, she’s known as a firebrand orator.
''We will establish democracy, not party-curacy,'' she told supporters outside her simple home in one of the oldest districts of Kolkata.
''This is like the second freedom of Bengal.''
In a colorful account marking the history of the occasion, the Times of India referred to the gathering at CPM headquarters in Alimuddin Street in the state capital formally known as Calcutta.
''The roar ripped into the CPIM party office, which had fallen into a funereal silence,'' the newspaper said.
''The Alimuddin Street apparatchik, far removed from reality, sat in isolated ones and twos, unable to comprehend Force Mamata. All their giants had toppled….''
It said CPIM’s chairman Biman Bose responded in a way which showed why his party deserved to lose.
''His manner was arrogant, his replies curt, even dismissive, and his entire take on the historic defeat was that the Left Front's ‘assessment had been wrong’.''
Added the Times: ''It nailed the end of 34 years of communist rule, and heralded a change from the stifling status quo.''

A MATTER OF CONCERN FOR CPI (M) AND LEFT FRONT

By Ambar Roy

Today being a Bengali I feel myself very much uncomfortable, when I here in the media about the use of dirty slang adjectives with respect to a women from Mr. Anil a CPI- M candidate. I have also seen few clipping of Buddha babu and others and felt really disgusted about CPI - M So I have a few Questions to ask today to CPI – M party and its executives –in –charge

I will start with Buddha babu, who is a Gold Medalist in MA – Bengali from Calcutta University and BA – Hons. in Bengali from Presidency college was a bosom friend of my sister Mrs. Parvati Ganguly ( Nee name Roy) is also a Gold Medalist in BA – Hons. in Bengali from Presidency College and also a Gold Medalist in MA – Bengali from Calcutta University. I know, Madame Aparna Sen, Purnedu Majumder are also from same Presidency College and Calcutta University Students along with Buddha Babu and my sister. Inspite hailing from a Congress Family, we the Roy’s of Behala also have spend a lot of Money, Time, and Knowledge with the communist movement right from the beginning in 1950 onwards directly and indirectly.

But then what is this? Earlier, Communist used to say Kana Atullya and so on Buddha Babu along with Biman Basu, that guy Gautam and Anil all are using slang for nothing. Is it really required to disgrace the ladies of Calcutta, the women of Calcutta, the Mother of Calcutta, the Sister of Calcutta, the Daughters of Calcutta? Please answer this simple question Mr. Buddha, Mrs. Aparna, Mr. Biman, Mr. Gautam, and that guy Anil how he dare use slang against a lady like this. If Mr. Gautam can all the time say in front of TV that people should know he is a Minister, why not all the women of Calcutta filed a defamation suite against this and claim considerable damage made by that guy Anil Bose, a candidate of assembly election on behalf of CPI – M? Why not all communist mind people of Calcutta similarly filed a defamation suite against this and claim considerable damage made by that guy Anil Bose, a candidate of assembly election on behalf of CPI – M?

What CPI – M said through his nominated candidate and a so called VIP executive of CPI –M is shocking, disgraceful, harming, humiliating, uncivilized, traumatic in nature, damaging, defaming to all women of Calcutta irrespective of age.
Can Mr. Buddha, Mrs. Aparna, Mr. Biman, Mr. Gautam, and that guy Anil deny that it is only a woman who have given you all birth and shown this beautiful world? Then how can one say so. Forget about election campaign right now. You people must give my answer. I request all the people of Calcutta, specially the women folk and all like minded communist to save communism from the hands of these people with immediate effect by not giving any vote to CPI – M , so that, we the people of Bengal teach this CPI – M a lesson at-least to behave properly with women.
In the Bam Front Ministry, my brother’s son’s college mate is a present Minister. He is a very learned person and a very young man. What he will explain to his daughter, wife and mother – Buddha Babu, Aparna di, tell me.

I ask Buddha Babu, what you will tell to your daughter and your wife, if they raise a question to you in this regard. I ask Aparnadi, you might have forgotten me, my sis name is Parvati Ganguly (nee name Roy) from Behala Roy Family, an Ex Presidency and your year mate in college, Please tell me Aparnadi, do you have an answer. We all don’t have an answer to what disgraceful act that guy Anil – a CPI – M candidate did against all Bengal Women.

After all Mamata is a Nation’s leader, Hon Rly Minister, Govt. of India. How can one utter such nasty words against her, our national leader? I request all women of India to protest against CPI – M and bring justice to Women of the Nation, our National Leader and our lady of Calcutta.

It is astonishing to here from educated people like Buddha Babu , MA in Bengali and a Presidency College student, that, Anil’s speech is a sound that was heard from his left ears and people do not heard yet the sound that was heard by his right ear. Buddha Babu, I again repeat, you are my sister’s college mate in Presidency, and you are only 6 years senior to me. Moreover, with respect to educational qualification I did 2 Engr. Degree from IIT, one in Ceramics and another in Mechanical, besides, I did Quality Management from Juran Institute Management, Detroit, USA. Please try to become a Quality Man, a Quality CM and also make a Quality Political Party.

CPI –M is a political party that is ruined by people like you, and others whose names I feel bad to take. No women, girl, mother, sister, wife daughter will like that attitude expressed by you and your party member. Even the supporters, cadres and members of Bam Panthi will now leave the party of its own.

You know what CPI - M did for Bengal... No body is disrespecting CPI, Forward Block, and RSP like this. Then Why CPI – M? You and others have to tell the people.Use of Filthy language in a mass meeting in front of Bengal and Nations Women, little girls of Bengal and Nation, Mothers of Bengal and Nation, Sisters of Bengal and Nation, Daughters of Bengal and Nation will never leave you Buddha Babu and your arrogant party CPI – M.

I shall continue this till CPI –M is killed in the soil of India. This is the slogan of today in Bengal and the Nation. Buddha Babu and CPI – M Political Party cannot abuse in front of Bengal Nations Women, little girls of Bengal and Nation, Mothers of Bengal and Nation, Sisters of Bengal and Nation, Daughters of Bengal and Nation will never leave you Buddha Babu and your arrogant party CPI – M. I request all women, sister, daughter, mother and wives of Bengal people and Nations people to take necessary action in the right forum of law, the law of Land, the law of India and punish CPI – M and its leaders, members and CPI – M Political Party.

We cannot entertain such arrogance for a single time, so question of sorry does not come to picture.

Eligibility criterion of becoming a CPI – M member is as under:
He should be unsatisfied in life.

1.He should know to utter slang words in front of young girls, women, sisters, daughters, wives and mothers.
2.He should know how to black mail people by sugar coated words.
3.He should know dallally (brokerage) and how to take bribe
4.He should learn few words of communism by heart and need not understand the meaning of communism.

In Last 35 what Bengal expected from the Government hold and ruled by CPI – M.

1.The people of West Bengal thought that United Front Government and then the Left Front Govt. will provide the common people general food like Dal, Roti and Chawal at moderate rate. Answer is a “BIG NO”. Instead, the cost of common food grown up costlier than other electronic items and cars, which were owned by Left Front Members, Cadre and supporters. Naturally to survive living common people sold their land and opt for the same.

2.The people of West Bengal thought that United Front Government will provide the common people preference to small and cottage industrial atmosphere in the state. Answer is a “BIG NO”. Instead the Big Industries were shut down and then the pinch came to small and cottage industries owned by skilled persons, technical and other entrepreneurs. They removed their establishment in other neighboring states as the Big Industries did.

3.The people of West Bengal thought that United Front Government will provide the common people health care, hospital, and education. Answer is a “BIG NO”. Govt. Hospital were looted and closed down by Left Front Cadre and Nursing Home, Polytechnics were open by Left front Govt. Cadre. School teaching Quality was disturbed and a galaxy of Private Schools were made by Left Front supporter, Cadre and Members. Those students came out from these schools were admitted in Medical college, Calcutta University and then recruited in Govt. Hospital, Govt. Schools, made Judges, Magistrate and Police Officers and all Govt. Licensing Dept., administration etc.

This is how Left Front made a Game Plan in 1970’s and ruled the State with their “pettoa” people with guns, law and authority. Mamata Madame of TMC and Congress Party understood the same and OPENED THE PANTS OF LEFT FRONT in front of the people. May be so they are so ferocious and desperate today uttering anything in front of mass people in open meeting with filthiest words as per the law of land of CPI - M. However, I am sure it won’t work this way.

Every Political Party has its own way of thinking, so do Left Front. I am not questioning about the same. But, then, Left front should also consider the Base Points, the Fundamentals of Communism too some extend. And if any institution, individuals do not consider the base fundamental then it starts getting deviated from the primary issues and priority becomes the focus on secondary issues. That is exactly what happed to Left front.

I also mention herewith that improvement / development is directly proportional to Science, Arts, Technology, Engineering, Finance and Law. Left Front Government did not consider these fundamental base points and only considered its secondary points, like, schemes of housing, education, health, food, Employment, Law, etc. But, then who will do these jobs, Quality Teachers, Quality Writers, Quality Scientist, Quality Engineers, Quality Technologist, Quality Doctors, Quality Lawyers, Quality MBA and so on. Left Fronts Leaders did not accept their suggestion repeatedly in the last 35 years, Left Front Leader did not support and given a free hand to them.
So whatever so called development / growth Left Front achieved through its Ministers, Members and Cadres by the torturing , abusing , humiliating the common people (mass people) were meager, which did not happen in neighbor states of West Bengal and in overall all states of India in the last 35 years. Sensible People of West Bengal went for his education, career, earning to other states and achieved many things. Those who could not go out did suffer in the hand of Left Front.
Now majority people of West Bengal realized this and revolted against Left Front especially against CPI – M. I am sure still they have faith with other Left Parties, like Forward Block, RSP, and CPI and so on.