Kanika Datta: The Left's phoney wars

SWOT

I don't know how often leaders of the Left parties leave the sylvan environs of Lutyens's Delhi to visit the Okhla Industrial Area on its outskirts, but it would probably be a good idea if they did so more frequently. As one of the hubs of small- and medium-scale manufacturing around the National Capital Region, it should be a strong, natural constituency of the Left.

In more ways than one. From garments to engineering and software and furniture, Okhla is a microcosm of thriving Indian enterprise that has built itself a lucrative global reach on the back of cheap and plentiful labour, low overheads and the brilliant ability to assimilate technology transfers cost-effectively. Yet, working conditions here are far from "global" in the non-pejorative sense of the term.

Drive in from the manicured capital, and the scene is almost Dickensian""rows and rows of slums constitute the majority of worker accommodation, the air is foetid with pollution and streams of goodness knows what effluents run riot. It is clear that if workers had the means to exercise a choice, working in an Okhla factory would not be top of the pops.

Yet the Okhla scenario is so rampant in almost any part of industrial India that inured Indian citizens rarely remember to refer to them. Just as much as they scarcely register the plight of construction workers that dot the urban landscape""or landless agricultural workers. All these categories of workers come under what is known as the unorganised sector in India. This is the sector that constitutes almost 90 per cent of the Indian labour force. Yet, no statistics are needed to prove that they count among India's most disenfranchised and unprivileged as far as basic human rights go.

Now, it would be thought that such areas would be fertile ground for the Left, which purports to fight for the cause of labour and the poor in India. Yet, curiously, I have rarely heard the Left expressing grief and anguish about the plight of such workers, though numerous government commissions have highlighted their predicament often enough. Their cadres and leaders are far more in evidence in and around the factories and call centres of Gurgaon and other such hotspots of Big Business manufacturing, where working conditions are relatively (indeed markedly) good, in an effort to highlight dodgy labour practices by wicked foreigners and Indian capitalists

This is not to suggest that such vigilance is unnecessary""left to themselves, foreigners and Indian industrialists would probably succumb to the very human urge to maximise profits by taking as many liberties with working conditions as small-time local entrepreneurs. And certainly, there is evidence of this too""not least in the Left stronghold of West Bengal, where factory conditions in even large industrial enterprises can scarcely be described as models of environmental excellence. Many will recall McKinsey's report of the early nineties that famously talked about how workers in an Uttarpara factory lacked access to a basic like drinking water and toilets.

But should these larger organised sector factories be the sole focus of Left concerns? This is a basic contradiction in Left-Speak and Left action that has always been difficult to understand. Or easy to understand if you follow the practicalities and realpolitik of labour politics.

As a constituency, the unorganised sector doesn't really have a mass voice. Typically, its workers get laid off every so often so that employers can avoid registering them as "permanent" workers on their rolls. They get paid rather less than the minimum wage and their votes represent a transaction with small-time local politicians to get electricity and water in their hovels, a privilege that eventually contributes to India's remarkably high transmission and distribution losses in the power sector.

As for construction and agricultural workers, being mostly migrant, it would be difficult to rely on them as a durable vote-bank. In contrast, the organised sector is easier to rally and can be more dependable in terms of delivering votes.

This is lazy politics and the Left has always been prey to it. That is why today, we now have a situation in which organised sector labour, which accounts for a minuscule portion of the total Indian labour force, enjoys unwarranted protection even as the predicament of the unorganised sector has steadily worsened.

The irony of all this is that no purpose is being served with this lazy politics. Labour's voice is not only being drowned out in the maelstrom of liberalisation, but manufacturers are being increasingly constrained by pointless restrictions on hire and fire""precisely because workers have no safety net, a fact that a pensions bill will address only partially.

Instead of stalking the call centres, which are stoking the economy in so many myriad ways, even a small start in an Okhla would mark a giant step for labour rights.

The views here are personal