When Hindustan Motors Ltd, the grand-daddy of India’s automobile industry, declared suspension of work at its Uttarpara plant in West Bengal on April 11 following union trouble, the response from most would have been, “There goes CITU again!”

But that would have been a wrong reading. For one, the much-maligned CITU, the CPM’s labour union, has actually come out against the plant’s closure. For another, it is the smaller players in the union sweepstakes that are seeking, and getting, a greater say in today’s Bengal. Their strategies — violence and militancy — to achieve this are often the very same that Marxists had employed in the past.

But whatever may be the means, the trouble on the factory floor has been taking its toll on the state’s image. Corporate managements and would-be-investors may just be beginning to think that they can no longer control the situation by merely ‘managing’ CITU, even as the West Bengal government makes desperate attempts to project the state as investor-friendly. Hind Motors or Nandigram are not the only examples of such violence. In the tea plantation industry, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) is sounding disc-

ordant notes. In the jute industry, where the Hind Mazdoor Sabha and AITUC are just as powerful as CITU, the latter no longer rules the roost. At the broader level, even though the CPM as a party is way ahead of the CPI when it comes to vote share (36.92 per cent versus CPI’s 2.07 per cent in the last state polls), at the national level the CPI’s trade union wing, the AITUC, keeps reminding its big coalition partner in the state that when it comes to numbers the AITUC is ranked third while the CITU comes fifth.

... contd.