SENIOR trade union leader, R Sreenivas was released on August 16, after spending 16 years of jail life in Bangalore Central Prison in the ‘BPL Case’. ‘BPL Case’ continues to be an iconic case in the contemporary history of the trade union movement in the post-liberalisation period.
4000 workers worked in the ten industrial units of the BPL on the outskirts of Bangalore. There was no union in the factory until 1998, when workers organised under the banner of BPL Group of Companies Karmikara Sangha, affiliated to CITU. The poor working conditions even after working for years and the contractualisation were the two main planks and workers joined the union in large numbers. With the rising tide of workers’ militancy BPL challenged the affiliation of the union, claiming that all ten units are separate legal entities and hence there cannot be one overarching union. The Karnataka High Court squashed this claim. BPL management continued to use all possible legal tricks to disrupt the union functioning. A section of workers continued to be loyal to the management and this was used as a ploy to engineer the incidents of March 25, 1999, when a private chartered bus carrying some of the employees of BPL, was stopped at Annepalya and set on fire using kerosene. Police listed 47 trade union activists in the FIR- including president and secretary of the union (R Sreenivas was union president). Supreme Court judgement points to many legal flaws in the entire procedure. The entire episode is a grim reminder of the tactics used by the MNCs to disrupt working class militancy.
Sreenivas was 53 when he was jailed in 1999. He is 69 today. What remains unchanged though in these 16 years is the fact that he continues to be working class hero, in the true sense of the term.