WORKERS
OF THE WORLD, DIVIDE!?
On the eve of the glorious festival cum fighting day
of the world working class, we are quite sad to thus parody the clarion call of
Karl Marx, evolved in the course of generations of intrepid working class
struggles for socio-economic justice and humanist liberation. However, the
existing sad state of affairs in the country and the world over is that workers
are sought to be, and in reality also are, divided on sundry categories – of
race, gender, country and region – and tend to quarrel with sections among
themselves than putting up a united struggle against corporate plunderers. This disease has widely
spread to Andhra Pradesh also or else it would be difficult to understand the
rabid opposition to the allotment of captive iron ore mining rights to the
prestigious Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited [of
‘Navaratna’ status], a
wholly Government of India owned undertaking, running one of the largest
integrated steel plants in the world at Visakhapatnam, which by the way has
also thereby expressed its intent “to set up commensurate value addition facilities such
as Beneficiation Plant, Pelletisation Plant, Steel Mill, depending on the
quantum of iron ore reserves available
at Bayyaram (Khammam District) and other proposed allotment of mines in
Warangal and Karimnagar districts.” And
the sadder part is the participation of misguided workers of the region in, and
the espousal by the ‘left’ parties/groups of, this unjust agitation which hurts
more the interests of the working people at large than in any way contributing
to the progress of the region/state. We endorse the view that any labor
movement worth its name “must
be multiracial, multi-gender,
multi-aged, skilled/non-skilled, …… LGBT-inclusive, and so on…” and as such strongly condemn such anti-people, anti-labor moves by
vested interests and misguided parties/persons and call for broad and
harmonious unity and struggle of working persons irrespective of all divides.
In contrast, we really appreciate the campaign by Manda Krishna Madiga
espousing the just causes of all old persons and widows, many of whom may be
present or former workers, which good effort has also drawn applause from all right-thinking
persons cutting across all sectional/political divides. §§§
