A Siege against the Siege What Babasaheb Ambedkar Teaches us on Strike

Strike as a term is common to the workers but is rarely discussed in relation to caste, despite the fact that caste and labour are so connected and the connection is striking. You tell me your caste, and I can tell you what kinds of work you do. Caste works as occupation with religious sanctions. Thus, strike in caste society is also a critique of religion.

The Una strike was a strike in the sense of the history of the working-class strike that happened from Chicago to Shanghai to Mumbai, but it was also a strike with a difference. It was a strike in the material as well as spiritual domains. It was against the working condition in which the workers feared for their lives. It was also against religious sanctions. The strike was not only about the ceasing of work but also an act of defilement of the sacred order that sustains the oppression.

In the Una strike of 2016, India witnessed one of the most powerful and aesthetic modes of protest in recent history. It remains unparalleled in its evocation and precariousness. It used actions that were unsettling to the authorities. It deployed the art of disgust that was repulsive to the Hindu social order. The artwork of Una stood against the notion of purity. It unleashed danger at a sublime level. It appeared with terror and awe. It exposed the hypocrisy of Hinduism. But its larger significance seemed to be much larger than what it did. It has to do with how you strike to make a strike meaningful in a specific cultural context.

If the larger significance of the Bhima Koregaon lies in the fact that the Dalits can defeat the upper-caste Peshwas by challenging caste supremacy, the larger significance of the Una strike lies in the fact that a caste society can be seized and Hindu society can be put on hold. The Una strike placed the question of cultural significance at the centre.

It would be difficult to find out the history of the first strike in India. Such history would be merely a claim. But we can be assured that it must have happened countless times in the past. If not history, it is good to have an allegory. The Indian dramaturgical text, the Natyashastra, talks about a strike. It says that Asuras were unhappy with their representation in the first-ever play, Samundramanthan (Churning of the Sea). They didn’t like their humiliating representation. They complained to God, but their plea was not heard. They went on strike. They ceased movement; they paralyzed the performance by freezing the actors and paralyzing their memory. With the cessation of memory and movement, the actors failed to perform their acts. I read this powerful allegory as a siege of a humiliating performance. The strike against humiliating representation is one of the most fundamental strikes in a caste world of representation.

The notion of a strike, though changed, remains confined to the workers’ questions. But, how do we place women’s, contractual labourers’, and sanitation workers’ strikes? How do we place daily wage labourers and migrant workers? How do we place the workers who are not on professional contracts? Neither are workers called workers, nor are owners called owners. They appear as kameen (service providers) and jajmans (patrons) in a caste society, and raiyats (servitudes) and zamindars (feudal lords) in a feudal society. They may appear as wives and husbands in a household. They can be singers, dancers, or entertainers who beg but don’t receive wages. They appear as sweepers and cleaners but not as workers and staff. As they say in Delhi, we have five staff and one sweeper.

On the other side, it was the women’s strike for equality that gave them the equal right to vote. The great anti-slavery scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois famously described the American Civil War as a ‘General Strike’. In India, B.R. Ambedkar wanted to see the Mahars (Dalits) organize a ‘general strike’ against the Watan system in Maharashtra. Rosa Luxemburg placed much emphasis on the theory of the general strike rather than the strike organized by political workers. All this may look like a forced connection, but they are so telling on strikes. Perhaps they all saw the ‘general strike’ as what Rosa Luxemburg termed ‘a means of inaugurating the social revolution’. She viewed the general strike ‘in contradistinction to the daily political struggle of the working-class’. Despite their varied concerns, they all were committed to the social revolution. What does it mean? It means besides organized workers, other sections have also used strikes as a method.

Strike: A Breach of Contract

Ambedkar engages with the question of the strike in such a threadbare way. From the basic question of what a strike is, how it relates to the right to freedom, to how it is not an act of conspiracy, he discusses its various facets. What is a strike? He says that a ‘strike is nothing more than a breach of contract of service’. He underlines that ‘when a worker strikes, all that it means is that he commits a breach of contract of service: there is nothing more in it, and nothing less in it’. A breach of contract of service is not a crime by Indian laws. He argues that ‘to make it a crime would be to compel a man to serve against his will’. He contends that to penalize a strike, therefore, is nothing short of making a worker a slave. He views the right to strike as inseparable from the right to freedom.

It has been said that there is no such thing as the right to strike. My reply is that this statement can come from a man who really does not understand what a strike is. If members are prepared to accept my meaning of the word ‘strike’ as being nothing more than a breach of contract, then I submit that a strike is simply another name for the right to freedom; it is nothing else than the right to the freedom of one’s services on any terms that one wants to obtain.

He goes on to say that if we once concede the right to freedom, we also concede the right to strike. In a leap of speech, he asserts, ‘If you accept that the right to freedom is a divine right, then I contend that the right to strike is a divine right’. He fires a salvo against the house members who were planning to curtail the strike. He says that snatching the right to strike would mean the workers would not have civil rights. In such a situation, don’t call it the ‘Industrial Disputes Bill’; better name it the ‘Workers’ Civil Liberties Suspension Act’. The curtailment of this right, in his words, will ‘bring perpetual slavery to workers’. He goes on in his evocative speech. He ends his remarks with another blast, ‘If this is not a Bill for introducing slavery amongst workers, I would like to know what sort of Bill would introduce slavery’.

Ambedkar’s exposition has become more relevant today as we see increasing restrictions and near banning of strikes. What is important in Ambedkar’s formulation is strike as ‘the breach of contract of service’. ‘Nothing’ is vital here. ‘Nothing more’ and ‘nothing less’ than a breach of contract of service. This is an interesting negative formulation. ‘Nothing’ is not really about ‘nothing’. It is about opening up enormous possibilities. What happens in a breach of any contract? A party refuses to follow the rules. If a party refuses to follow the rules, the game is over. In a more extreme case, it may lead to the collapse of a system. What will happen in caste or, for that matter, women breach this social contract? It will be a transgression. Crossing the lakshman rekha. The Una strike was an act of nothing but breaching the social contract. They breached it by refusing to follow the caste rules. The slogan, ‘Cow is your mother, you perform the last rite’, was a performative utterance for that breach of contract.

The unwritten social contract usually doesn’t allow the so-called lower caste to violate these rules. One of the meanings of Shudra is that they should serve without resentment. Ambedkar’s strike — not more than a breach of contract — opens up a whole canvas of possibilities. Only when one breaches the contract does one know one’s capacity: what else can one do? Breaches often open up new vistas of freedom. Freedom in art is fundamentally about the breaches.

A strike — a direct militant action — remains the most powerful defence in the hands of the working class across the world. This is also a reason that it is facing a backlash, both at the ideological level as well in physical actions. There has been an attempt to discredit and criminalize this powerful mode of protest. It is not surprising that a strike often gets equated with a riot. It is not only criminalized by the authorities but also in the larger domain of democratic culture. The corporate regime calls it violent. Analysts call it violent. Civil society tends to denounce it. The term, strike, is becoming a parlance of military language. In recent years, the Indian authorities have talked more about the Balakot strike than the workers’ strike, and the militants’ strike in Pulwama than the Maruti workers’ strike in Manesar. From the point of meeting our demand or we will go on strike to the point of ‘perform or else’, workers’ movements are on the backfoot.

Strike: A Refusal to participate in ritualised services

A strike is another name for refusal. A strike usually happens in a formal relationship. How do we read the Una strike where there is no formal contract? But the contract is already ritualized. That makes it more formal. The refusal becomes more difficult. One is not only refusing a secular authority but is also against religions and customs. You are refusing the demigods that may follow you in your dreams. A strike is a refusal with an affirmation in which one appears in politics. The refusal is political.

Refusal is a break. It is about breathing space. It is about the pause in which you tilt the position of the Big Others. Its beauty lies not in performance but in the assertion that we will not perform any longer. We will not work. We will not move. In a strike, a pause is a declaration of freedom. The public declaration in Una that we will not perform or we will not observe the rites marked this refusal. The refusal created a crisis in existing social relationships. If it didn’t break them, it created a crack in the ritualized bond that was there for a long time.

Such refusal often faces the burnt of the caste society. Upon Ambedkar’s call, Dalits refused to eat meat from carcasses in Maharashtra in 1927. It led to the protest by the dominant Maratha communities. They threatened them that ‘they will be driven out of the villages if they do not eat carcasses’. They asked them ‘not to transgress their customary social limits’. Exactly the same happened in parts of Gujarat when Dalit communities decided that they would not skin the dead cow. The irony. Caste Hindus flogged them when they were threatening them because they refused to skin and depose the carcasses.

A strike is a protest that is not marked by movements but by pauses and breaks. It is about creating breathing space. It is about creating a new awareness of the body and relationships. It is about time to pause and reflect. After the pause, you stop seeing the ways you used to see. Things do not appear in the same way. Eyes get a new lens. The one who participates finds a new perspective.

A strike is a cessation against a constant performance, endless repetition of a machine, the infectious imitation of the caste system. If a protest is about moving bodies and rising hands, the strike is about a pause that appears as a gesture. It is about the pause that marks our postures. You pause, and a gesture emerges. When bodies pause, posture emerges. The strike is about positionality. It is the pause that creates events in history. The pause can be momentary, it can become breath-taking; it can become a memento of life.

A strike forefronts the fundamental expression of life and work. It becomes the last resort of the workers and the people on the margins. By demonizing the strike, the market regime has made the workers defenceless. But a loss of strike is not only the question of the loss of a mode of protest. It can be seen as the loss of the last expression of the oppressed.

In pragmatic terms, the loss is not possible because the people who will get exploited will also strike. But the danger is that we may lose its space in democratic expression. Civil society will protest peacefully. But what will workers do? Do we think that owners will hear their pleas? Do we think that they can sign and circulate the petition and negotiate with power? Do we think that they will speak out about their oppression in this precarious condition?

An edited excerpt from Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India.