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.

For Hind Motors the Uttarpara facility, which manufactures Ambassadors, is no longer the key to survival. It now has plants at Indore, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, where it makes engines, transmissions and their components, and automatic transmissions and their parts. It supplies these parts to the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers. In its own product stable, it has a plant in Tamil Nadu that makes the Mitsubishi Lancer and Pajero. For the sprawling Uttarpara complex itself, HM has plans to set up auto components and information technology parks — a diversification move that also involves real estate development on the prime Uttarpara factory land.

With Indian roads having been invaded by various local and foreign brands, the Ambassador is no longer the king it once was — in fact, not even in the government sector, where a white Ambassador had been for decades the only vehicle used. Old timers recall how in the mid-’70s, when the Indian government raised petrol prices following the global oil shock, the then Congress government of Siddhartha Shankar Ray in West Bengal set up the Naba Gopal Das Commission to look into how HM could be saved. It had recommended that, since state had no control over petroleum prices, the government should ensure that there were enough orders for the Ambassador. Ray, in turn, convinced Indira Gandhi to give the Ambassador a monopoly. That was how the Ambassador came to account for a big segment of government orders.

But the days of such protection are over. One of West Bengal government’s recent orders for official cars favoured the Toyota or Scorpio over the Ambassador. At its peak, HM produced 20,000 Ambassadors a year with a workforce of 17,000, in the mid-eighties. But that era has ended. Presently HM’s workforce is in the region of 4,500, after a series of voluntary retirement schemes were offered to workers.

The key to the current imbroglio is the battle for power between the CITU, on the one hand, and the CPI’s AITUC and a breakaway group of the CITU union, on the other. At the factory level, the CITU union got only 36 per cent of the votes in the last elections, while the HM’s and Hyderabad Industries Ltd’s Sangrami Shramik Karmachari Union is the sole bargaining agent, with 62 per cent of the votes. The SSKU, floated by dissident CITU leader Gobinda Chakraborty, is in turn backed by the AITUC — specifically, Gurudas Dasgupta, the MP.

CITU knows that the HM showdown will be the key to its survival in the new Bengal, where the Buddhadeb Bhattcharjee government has managed to bring in four vehicle projects —-Tata Motors’ small-car project, Russian truckmaker Ural, Indonesia’s Salim group and a Bengali entrepreneur, each setting up a two-wheeler company. The automobile sector is clearly booming in the state and that is why the CITU is so keen to establish its uncontested presence in it.