WB: State Employees to Go on Strike on March 10
Subinoy Moulik
SIGNS of the protest-base broadening are prominent in West Bengal. The more the autocratic Trinamool Congress regime descends into tyrannical attitudes and practices, exposing its mercilessly anti-people character, the stronger will be the strength of people’s protest and resistance. For more than a decade, employees who earn their salaries from the state government exchequer have suffered deprivation of rights, intimidation, harassment, unfair and wrongful transfer and humiliation. Finding things getting beyond endurance with the government rigidly turning a deaf ear to the needs and wants of the employees, the West Bengal Coordination Committee of Government Employees and like-minded organisations have called for a unified strike on March 10. The demands of the strike are the payment of pending dearness allowance, filling vacant posts with clarity, regularisation of casual employees, eliminating divisive politics in the state and reinstatement of democracy.
The Trinamool Congress government considers dearness allowance payable to the employees not as an entitlement but as a gift of kindness. So, DA is announced very rarely without any correlation with the market price and inflation rates. Earlier, in the Calcutta High Court in a filed affidavit, the Trinamool government had declined to give DA to its employees, citing it as a non-mandatory exercise to give DA at the central rate. Around 35 per cent of DA is already pending with the government, which means an average employee is losing Rs 12,000 to 18,000 per month. The current unprecedented unified protest of state government employees constitutes a condensed sign that cumulative deprivation has gone beyond the limits of tolerance.
VALID REASONS
There are indeed valid reasons for exasperation. Some days ago, in a public meeting, the chief minister had insulted the employees by comparing them to dogs when they demanded fair disbursement of DA. But the fact remains that the salary of the state government employees is ridiculously low compared to the central government employees and even compared to other state government employees in the country. A divisive stratagem has been adopted to prevent the protest movement of employees from escalating. The leaders of the employees’ organisations have been transferred to distant districts in a brutal vindictive manner so that a resilient movement may not be organised. Moreover, leaders and activists have been harassed, constantly threatened and intimidated. Naturally, a general feeling of uneasiness and dread has been felt by almost every employee. But they had never been dispirited. They were just waiting for an opportunity to strike back.
After the avenues of the protest movement were blocked by administrative tyranny, the employees had sought judicial intervention to resolve the issue. Cases in state administrative tribunals in this regard dragged on for years. The government made every effort to prolong the cases with various excuses and delaying tricks. Finally, the case went to the high court. A single-judge bench ruled that DA is a right of employees. The government went to a division bench. There too, after a long hearing, the verdict was in favour of the employees. But the Trinamool government, which is intrinsically against the interests of the employees, was hell-bent on not giving dearness allowance under any circumstances. Therefore, they challenged the high court’s verdict in the Supreme Court. The verdict there is still awaited.
Till today they have spent crores of rupees and engaged renowned lawyers in one case after another just to thwart the demand of the pending DA. The aim of the government is crystal clear. It shall not be giving the employees their fair dues and spend that money on games, fairs, festivals and as largesse to its favoured local clubs and other such organisations which are a strong bloc of consolidated support that comes handy during elections.
TIME TO STRIKE BACK
Enduring such deprivation and humiliation day after day is no mean task. There is a limit, however, to tolerance. Steadily and irreversibly the mentality to fight back has been strengthened, overcoming the barrier of fear. The situation took a dramatic turn, when on February 15 while presenting the state budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year in the assembly, the minister of state for finance made a spur-of-the-moment announcement of a 3 per cent hike in the dearness allowance for current and retired state government employees, including teachers. This she did by bypassing the written budget statement reportedly on receiving instructions from the chief minister. Incidentally, the budget proposals presented before the house do not contain the additional DA announcement.
Far from being mollified or propitiated by this miserable display of “alms-giving”, the employees felt insulted and infuriated. They dismissed the quantum of hike as too little and too late. The agitation for outstanding DA spread beyond the confines of direct state government employees to all sections of the people receiving salaries from the state government treasury. The unity of employees and teachers started to form. A joint platform was created by all the organisations concerned. Continued sit-ins and hunger strikes began. There was a huge protest rally in Kolkata. A 48-hour pen-down strike was observed. An overwhelming number of state employees and teachers attended office but did not work for two days. Despite threats of strict action by the government and even threats of termination of employment, most of the employees remained undeterred. In the past 11 years during the Trinamool regime, the employees’ movement has never seen such a huge response.
As no administrative response to their demands was forthcoming, the state employees have called for a strike in the midst of this growing and spreading movement. Challenging the government, especially the chief minister, the strike of the employees is going to take place in the state on March 10. Preparations have started in earnest. No matter how much the government threatens, how much it tries to be vindictive, no matter how hard the police try to break the strike, the employees are determined that they will succeed.
