Indian parties to defy strike ban

By Subir Bhaumik
BBC News, Calcutta

Strikes in India cost government and industry millions of dollars

Political parties and trade unions in India's eastern state of West Bengal say they will disobey a court order declaring strikes illegal.

They have announced three strikes in West Bengal over the next fortnight despite the Supreme Court order.

The court had imposed a ban on the right of government employees to strike because of the disruption it caused.

Strikes by workers in India cost the government and industry millions of dollars each year.

Communist-ruled West Bengal loses 40-50 working days and its businesses incur huge losses every year.

The first strike called in defiance of the ban will take place on Monday and was announced by the small socialist party, the Socialist Unity Centre of India.

'Democratic right'

The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the main opposition Trinamul Congress parties have called for separate strikes in protest against the recent increases in fuel prices.

We are ready to go to jail to uphold the right to strike and hold processions Mamata Banerjee, Trinamul Congress

The ruling Left Front chairman, Biman Basu, has said that all the parties in the Communist-led coalition viewed the right to strike as a basic democratic right.

But it is not easy for the Communists to take on the courts while running the government in West Bengal.

The state government has said it will honour a recent Calcutta High Court ruling that government employees absent from work on strike days will lose a day's wages.

On two previous occasion, the Left Front has backed out of a direct confrontation with the courts on the issue of the right to hold processions on working days and to strike.

"But we will maintain our standpoint - that the right to strike and the right to hold processions is a basic right of our people and we cannot be denied this," the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Anil Biswas said.

A ruling coalition partner, Forward Bloc, has also criticised the court order.

"These court orders sound like fiats from a bygone colonial era," its leader, Asoke Ghosh, said.

Apology

Businesses in West Bengal are critical of the strikes, saying they hurt investments.

"The tendency to call strikes at the drop of a hat must go if Bengal is to get investment," Nazeeb Arif, a senior official of the Indian Chamber of Commerce said.

The Supreme Court ruled last year that "no political party or organisation can claim a right to paralyse the economic and industrial activities of a state or the nation or inconvenience citizens".

The ruling related to cases arising from a major strike in India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, as a result of which the state government sacked 176,000 employees.

Most of the employees were reinstated after a Supreme Court intervention but only after providing a written apology and pledging not to take part in strikes in the future.