The Rediff Special / Chander Uday Singh
Samant had lousy timing. He uncannily chose times of recession
to take the workers on a strike.
As a correspondent for India Today in the
early eighties, Chander Uday Singh investigated the life and strikes of
Datta Samant for a cover story in the national newsmagazine.
Singh, who later left journalism for a career as a labour lawyer, has
also seen Samant from the other side of the fence. This is how he
assesses the militant messiah's legacy:
Datta Samant's killing is quite mystifying to me.
Ever since he
entered politics and became a member of Parliament he had become
tame on the industrial front. In the last three or four years
he completely lost the militant image he once had. On the whole
he had been on the wane as a trade union leader. He didn't appear
to be a threat to any power bloc.
Even when he was most militant he was never a criminal type,
never a goonda. There was violence associated with some
of his activities, like the stabbing of N P Godrej, but he was
never directly involved and none of it was orchestrated violence
by Samant. I don't believe that he ever orchestrated violence.
He was never a goonda. He was not like Ramesh More or
Khim Bahadur
Thapa. And he was not a criminal masquerading as a trade union
leader. Samant was never like that. He was a militant labour leader --
often misguided, especially in the way he went about organising
strikes.
Samant was a medical doctor. He began his career as a labour leader
when he was moved by the plight of quarry workers at Chandivli
and took up their cause. They were workers who were completely
exploited and he organised them at a grassroot level, got them
basic rights and better wages.
By the late '70s he had gained a big name and he was in the
plastic industry, the engineering industry and many others. At
that time he was just fighting for a piece of the cake. By
the '80s he had stopped organising any new group of workers. He
was merely in the race for a bigger slab of the cake.
Samant was misguided because he never looked at the
financial health of an organisation or inquired after the balancesheets
or the financial details of a company. And above all he
had a lousy sense of timing. He uncannily chose times of recession
and when an industry was in the doldrums to take the workers on
a strike and he would have a major debacle on his hands. He just
never looked at the ground realities.
Take the famous textile strike of 1982. At that time he actually had the
complete support of mill workers and he could have asked them
to do anything and they would have done it. And he decided to
take them on a strike! I mean here was an industry that was completely
in the doldrums... a sunset industry. They were still using
World War I machinery. They were being grossly mismanaged. And
he decided to take these workers on a strike. It was like trying
to squeeze blood out of a stone.
And what did he achieve? Many
of the mills were nationalised, some went to BIFR and other mills
are still selling their land. He hastened the death of an industry
that would have died anyway. He gave the managers of the mills
a plausible excuse to shut down.
When I did a cover story on him for India Today in 1981,
I discovered him to be a scrupulously honest man, despite what
industrialists would say and he had an absolutely committed and
loyal following of workers from the engineering industry, the pharmaceutical
industry, the textile industry and others. I mean he straddled
the trade unions in Bombay.
I followed him for three days from 7.30 in the morning
to 11.30 at night, at breakfast, to all his meetings, to gate
meetings, to Mahindra Spicer, to Hindustan Lever, to Bayer, to
get my story and at many meetings the management objected but
he would say, "I am sorry he is my shadow. I can't get rid
of him." And it was then I discovered that he received absolutely
blind loyalty from his workers.
But then somewhere in the mid '80s all this crumbled. His image
as an honest leader deserted him. It was said that he paid huge
capitation fees to get his son into medical college in Karnataka.
He was seen driving around in a Honda Accord. His life style changed.
And it was obvious that there was more than met the eye in his
operations.
His workers started getting disillusioned. He led strike after
strike but still the workers didn't get much benefits although
they were not entirely wiped out. He was not involved with organising
any new set of workers and there are so many groups that need
help in Bombay like domestic workers or the security personnel
in co-operative building societies. Take the case of these
security guards. Most of them are paid Rs 400 or Rs 600 or at
the very maximum Rs 1,500 and they work for societies that have
Rs 30 million or Rs 40 million flats.
But none of these trade union leaders are bothered with their
plight. Samant too was not bothered with such groups, but
was involved with the same high wage workers, the same cake. He
was going for the same high profile companies, the same big bucks
( I am not talking about the corrupt big bucks). These unions
clean up 10 to 20 per cent of a settlement or Rs 1 million -- even
up to Rs 6 million or Rs 7 million in a settlement.
Having seen him earlier as a very brilliant, very committed trade
union leader in the '70s I feel he had lost sight of his
vision by the '80s. He began to have one standard approach formula for each
dispute regardless of the factors involved or the industry involved.
He never sized up the management and took a different approach
for different types of management or looked to see how the company
was being run or put in allowances for a management that did not
have deep pockets or took into account what phase a company was
in.
Take the case of PAL. Here was a company that
was just beginning to get on its feet again, that just barely
missed being wiped out. It was a company that had just come out
of being down in the doldrums and was still tottering on its feet
and had just brought out two new cars, the Uno and the Peugeot.
And then he decided to go in. They had to fight back, because
if they didn't, they would not have survived. First the plant
in Kurla was locked out and then the one at Kalyan. And finally
they brought him to his knees.
As a labour lawyer I have had an opportunity to watch him closely
and he was ultimately starting to decline.
Therefore, there seemed to be no obvious reason for anybody
to take his life.
The conventional wisdom in the business
is that once a trade union leader enters politics he loses his
bite. It was the same case with George Fernandes and S A Dange.
At one time George Fernandes could have got together
in one afternoon a crowd of 300,000 people. Today he would be lucky
to gather together 300. And it was the same with Samant.
Although I don't like to speak ill of the dead I am not for
eulogising somebody just because he is dead. In his heyday Samant
was a very dedicated, extremely good labour leader with a lot of
vision. But then he lost it. So at the end of the day
he really did not contribute anything to society.
As told to Vaihayasi Pande-Daniel
|