100,000 Indian workers on strike
One hundred thousand electricity workers are on strike in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, in protest against state government plans to privatise the electricity board. The strikers, who began their action on January 14, have faced fierce repression by the authorities.
The Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, which rules UP, has announced that it plans to split the State Electricity Board into three corporations and then privatise them, retrenching 25,000 employees. The state government also announced its intention to sell off several subsidiary enterprises and billions of rupees worth of board property and infrastructure, all at a fraction of their market price.
The government also wants to raise electricity prices, from two rupees per unit to four and a half rupees per unit, and to end the free supply of electricity to India's "untouchable" caste, the dalits.
The government has defended the necessity of the sell-off, saying that the board is in dire financial straits. However, the board could pay off most of its debts if its biggest defaulter — the UP state government — paid the 130 billion rupees ($4.5 billion) it owes the board.
The state government has attempted to placate the workers by stating that their existing service conditions will be preserved, regardless of the restructure. But the strikers are opposing the split, and the eventual privatisation, on principle.
The High Court of the state, in Allahabad, has declared the strike illegal and has ordered the government to take strong punitive action. Six thousand strikers have been arrested, demonstrations have been baton-charged by police and the Jaunpur District Court has already imprisoned 12 strikers for six months.
The state government has sacked all of the board's workers and announced that it will start a fresh recruitment on February 1.
Solidarity from other workers in UP has come pouring in, much of it organised by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and its trade union front, the AICCTU. Demonstrations have been held outside the UP Assembly building in Lucknow, and in many districts. A nationwide day of solidarity with the striking workers was held on January 24.
The UP electricity strike coincides with labour unrest across India, which the CPI-ML has described as a "veritable strike wave". Port and dock workers in 11 ports stopped work for five days in January in opposition to government plans to replace five-year wage agreements with 10-year agreements. State government employees in the western state of Rajasthan are in the second month of their strike.
"For the first time in 10 years, working-class opposition to the neo-liberal economic policies seems to be snowballing into a major nationwide upsurge", a report from the CPI-ML stated.