From Wage Protest to 'Conspiracy': How Noida Workers' Struggle Was Criminalised
This is the second in a series of articles on the recent protest by industrial workers in Noida for higher wages and improved working conditions. The series analyses what happened before and after April 13, the state and industry’s response and the conditions of work that provide the context. The report is based on ground reporting – interviews by the authors and independent media coverage. Read the first, third and fourth articles in this series.
Across Noida’s industrial sites, there was a conspicuous police presence: personnel in riot gear, waiting buses and an atmosphere prepared less for dialogue than for control. In several locations private security prevented workers from approaching factory gates, while police attempted to disperse gatherings by pushing people back and, at times, using canes and batons. In some instances, when workers tried to enter the factory premises, simply to compel the management to speak, they were met with force from private security guards; resistance gave way to scuffles and police intervention further intensified the confrontation. Workers also alleged that the burning of vehicles, which many of them said was very unfortunate, was used to justify stronger action against protesters.
Outside the iLC factory in Phase 2, Noida, one woman worker was struck on the head and collapsed. Her injury became a moment of visible anguish. Workers described being unable to bear the sight of a co-worker, whom they regarded as peaceful, being beaten so severely, when all they were demanding was for the management to listen to their grievances. What followed was a rapid escalation.
Angry workers clashed with police and security. More workers, including another young woman, were injured as the police began a lathi charge. The injured woman was later taken by her father to J.R. Chaudhary Hospital in Sector 50, Phase 2. As per the workers’ accounts, this episode condensed the larger experience of the day: a protest that had begun peacefully, with demands to be heard, was instead met with force, injury and repression.
At several protest sites, police were seen cordoning off roads and factory approaches, preventing workers and media persons from reaching the gates. As the crowds grew restless, officers resorted to lathi charges. Video footage also shows police providing cover to the factory management staff, forcibly arresting workers, pushing them into waiting buses and threatening journalists attempting to document the arrests – for instance, at Dixon Technologies and Subros Thermal Solution in Phase 2.
Official narrative: ‘External elements’ and conspiracy claims
Even though workers had gathered peacefully and voiced long-standing grievances, and even as several were detained by the police, the administrative discourse by evening had begun moving in a different direction: away from the conditions that had produced the protest and towards an account of unrest as the work of outside instigation.
In a press statement late on April 13, the Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police said that “provocative” and “external” elements behind the violence were being identified and traced, while warning that strict legal action would follow. This language was significant not only for what it claimed, but also for the direction in which it was pointing. By introducing the term “external elements,” it began to shift public attention from labour grievance to conspiracy. The implication was not merely that some violence had occurred at a few sites. It was also that the disturbance was being interpreted through the lens of infiltration, provocation and hidden orchestration, rather than through the visible and widely articulated distress of workers themselves.
In the days that followed, this line of interpretation further deepened, with the protest increasingly described not as an expression of accumulated anguish but as something manipulated from outside. Thereby, making it easier to recast a predominantly peaceful workers’ mobilisation as a problem of law and order, subversion and criminal design.
April 14: Crackdown, surveillance and mass detentions
April 14 (Ambedkar Jayanti) was a statutory holiday, and the administration, backed by the police, used the intervening night and day to reassert control. The authorities carried out large-scale arrests, registered criminal cases, conducted route marches across industrial clusters, deployed forces at various sites and relied on CCTV and other electronic surveillance to identify those involved in the protest.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty. Photo: Intifada P. Basheer and Azam Abbas.
Our team observed heavy police presence and extensive barricading across industrial areas. We also saw small groups of workers gathered near their residential colonies in Phase 2; they described minor skirmishes outside a few factories that the police quickly dispersed. Route marches continued from early morning.
By the afternoon of April 14, the "external element" line of interpretation had begun to take firmer institutional shape. In a press statement, Laxmi Singh, Commissioner of Police, Gautam Buddh Nagar, claimed that several WhatsApp groups had been created over the previous two days and workers were being added through QR codes, which, in her account, indicated the possible presence of an “organised and well-orchestrated syndicate.” She also stated that those accused of instigating unrest had been identified and arrested and further arrests would follow. More significantly, she added that investigators would examine the funding sources of those detained and would take action if support was found to have come from outside the state or even from outside the country.
With this, the administrative narrative moved beyond the earlier language of “provocative” and “external” elements and began to root itself in a more elaborate account of organised networks, digital mobilisation and possibly foreign-backed conspiracy. The effect was to further delink the protest from wage demands and workplace distress, placing it increasingly within a security framework.
Arrests, FIRs and families searching for the missing
In the same statement on the afternoon of April 14, the Police Commissioner said that more than 300 people had been arrested and seven FIRs had been registered in connection with the protests. This figure, “300,” was repeated over the following days.
Our probe, however, revealed that while around 300 workers were officially admitted to be taken into custody, hundreds of others, including women, were picked up and detained at various locations without any official record. The families of those missing searched throughout April 14 and in the days that followed – at factories, the Phase 2 Police Station, the district court in Surajpur and Luksar jail in Kasna.
Family members told us they were repeatedly turned away from the factory gates and directed to the Phase 2 Police Station, where the police shooed them away, threatened them with arrest and sent them on to Surajpur Court, Luksar jail, and elsewhere. Many families kept circling these locations, covering over 30 kms, without receiving any information about their relatives.
Picked up without arrest memos: Accounts from families
Families repeatedly said that those taken away in the aftermath of the protest included not only factory workers, but also people who had neither participated in the demonstrations nor, in some cases, had any connection to them at all. Some detainees were reportedly as young as 15, picked up from a nearby park, rather than from a protest site. An e-rickshaw driver and an egg vendor were said to have been taken from Phase 2, while another student was picked up when he came to deliver food to his father who worked as a driver at a factory. One man searched desperately for his wife, who, according to the family, had gone out only to shop for an upcoming wedding in the household.
The scenes outside the Phase 2 Police Station, and later outside the court and prison, were marked by confusion, exhaustion and a mounting sense of dread. Families moved from one location to another asking for names, searching, waiting for scraps of information and trying to determine whether their relatives had in fact been detained, where they had been taken and under what charges. What appeared again and again in these accounts was the anguish of not knowing: parents searching for children, husbands for wives, siblings for each other, each moving through administrative spaces that offered little clarity and even less reassurance. The violence of the crackdown extended beyond those picked up; it was sending out a chilling effect. Many workers were seen leaving the city with packed bags.
Navsharan Singh is an independent researcher and activist. Atul Sood teaches at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Rakhi Sehgal is an independent labour researcher with over two decades of association with the trade union movement.
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