CALCUTTA, 13 November 2004 — The Communist Party of Indi-Marxist (CPM) has sounded the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition federal government to enact a law in Parliament recognizing strikes as a legitimate form of protest.
West Bengal’s CPM-led Left Front government is smarting under Calcutta High Court’s order to notify all general strikes as illegal and deduct salaries of government employees who don’t report for duty during a strike.
State Chief Secretary Ashok Gupta said yesterday that a notification declaring shutdowns unconstitutional and warning government employees that their wages if they failed to turn up during a strike, would be soon published in newspapers as per the high court’s directive.
Although the senior-most provincial bureaucrat seems to have fallen in line, Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya expressed his unhappiness by flatly refusing to comment on the High Court’s verdict.
On Thursday, Justice Pratap Kumar Roy and Justice Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya held the ruling CPM responsible for introducing “strike culture” in West Bengal while disposing off a public interest case against three general strikes in a row.
Although the strikes on Nov. 17, Nov. 22 and Dec. 3 have been called by Socialist Unity Center of India, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and Trinamool Congress respectively to protest against the hike in prices of petroleum products, the judges severely criticized the CPM for spreading the virus of strikes in West Bengal.
Reacting to the landmark verdict, senior CPM leaders said that even the International Labor Organization (ILO) has laid down that all sections of people, except defense forces and certain government employees, have the right to strike.
They said that the only antidote for growing judicial disapproval of shutdowns is to pass a law in the national Parliament upholding the right of political parties to resort to strikes.
CPM leaders say that the UPA might oblige the Left party whose support is crucial for its survival. But analysts say that convincing the Congress party or Bharatiya Janata Party will not be easy at all.
Significantly, the High Court took a cue from a string of recent anti-strike judgments across the country.
In 1997, Kerala High Court blazed a new trail when its ordered strike organizers to pay damages to affected persons. The verdict was reiterated by Justice Shyamal Sen of Calcutta High Court forcing the West Bengal government to issue a notification that year which is honored only in the breach.
And since July this year, when Bombay High Court ordered Shiv Sena and BJP to pay 2 million rupees each for calling a strike, the higher judiciary in India’s most strike-prone city — Calcutta — was under mounting pressure to act.
