People's Democracy

CITU Leaders Assaulted At Dunlop Factory

B Prasant

CITU leadership at the Sahagunj factory of Dunlop was brutally assaulted with razors, daggers, and metal staves by dozen-odd criminal elements in the pay and protection of the Trinamul Congress on October 30. The attack left the CITU secretary of the Dunlop workers’ union, Dipankar Roy, and the unit’s vice-president Deepak Majumdar, along with seven other union office-bearers severely injured. The union office was ransacked and then put to the torch. Had not the local people come rushing in at noticing the commotion, the lives of the union leaders would surely have been put at stake.

Roy and Majumdar had to be admitted to the Hooghly state general hospital with head injuries. Their condition was described as critical by attending physicians to this INN correspondent.

The Dunlop factory has remained in suspended animation from August this year despite the best efforts of the CITU and the Bengal Left Front government to try to accelerate the on-going process currently taking place at the level of the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). The Dunlop case was referred to the BIFR after the Chhabaria group that ran the Dunlop management declared that it was no longer possible for them to keep the factory in a running condition.

A section of the media has gone to town since the latest attack on the CITU leadership by loudly proclaiming the attack was nothing more than a "spontaneous outburst" of the suffering workers and their families against the CITU for the latter’s "incompetence" in protecting the workers’ rights. Unlike the scribes who work to the dictates of the corporate houses that employ them, the people of the locality and the mazdoors were clear in their minds when they talked about the incident to us.

For the Dunlop mazdoors, and for people of the locality, there was no doubt that the Dunlop management’s goons and the Trinamul Congress jointly initiated the pre-meditated attack. The aim was to ensure that those factory workers, who yet doggedly stay in the mazdoor quarters in the hope that the factory would re-open sooner or later, would become afraid and move away. The attackers had also hoped that the incident would provide material against the state Left Front government about "industrial unrest."

The Dunlop management was in any way getting desperate what with the BIFR hearings going in favour of the case preferred by the state government, justifying the points raised by the CITU-led union against the Chhabaria’s. Additionally, the fact that the CITU-led movement has been in receipt of support from all other Dunlop unions including the one run by the INTUC had proved gall-and-wormwood to the Trinamul Congress leadership.

As the local people told us, the attackers were armed with a variety of blunt and sharp-edged weapons when they forcibly entered the CITU union room ostensibly to deliver a petition. If, as the corporate media would have the reading public believe, the "petitioners" were "half-starved workers and members of their families," what were they doing carrying arms?

A day of protest was organised in the entire Hooghly district against the assault on the TU leaders at Sahagunj and the CITU leadership of the district addressed a series of meetings throughout the day in both towns and in rural areas, revealing the conspiracy that had motivated the assault.

The state police has apprehended 16 people who have been identified to be part of the mob that attacked the union office and assaulted the CITU leaders. Twenty-six more have been taken into custody on the charge of aiding and abetting the attack.