India’s corporate class is no less cretinous than its ruling class. Worse, it harbours evil thought leaders who would like to enforce modern slavery – with working hours of 70 or 90 a week – in the guise of increasing productivity and hastening national development.
They believe that if people are not working like slaves, tethered to toil and driven like rats in a maze for most of their waking hours, they would sit at home and stare at their wives or husbands. These corporate czars also erroneously believe that a day in the life of a person who is not wallowing in millions is limited to working and staring at his or her spouse, which they, of course, would never deign to do. Obviously, their reproductive output, if any, must have been achieved without the least foreplay.
Men, and women, who think that all there is to life is to toil must be utterly unschooled in ways necessary for healthy human development. For they know not how to occupy themselves with reading or writing, hearing, singing or playing music, or engaging in any sort of healthy leisure activities. Perhaps, they do not believe in anyone being joyful, happy, staring at nature, walking along a seashore, gazing at mountains and stars, and such activities that cannot be financialised and captured for their capital hoarding and aggrandisement and, at the same time, passed off as the “country’s economic development”.
Therefore, it is no wonder that their spouses cannot bear to see them and they flee to take refuge in their morgue-like, steel-and-glass offices; and, want to separate their employees from their home, spouses and all activities outside the stockade where they can be commandeered and driven as forced labour for 10 to 14 hours a day.
‘Forced’ labour
Article 23 of India’s constitution prohibits forced labour. The Indian Slavery Act, 1843, also known as Act V of 1843 (passed in British India under East India Company rule) outlawed economic transactions linked to slavery which is what forced labour amounts to when people have no choice but to accept for their survival whatever working conditions are imposed by an exploitative corporate aristocracy.
Actually, the term ‘forced labour’, which is what these tycoons are pushing for, was coined some 100 years ago as a euphemism for ‘slavery’, which they felt may not be appreciated by others of their exploitative class. If one person is controlled, coerced and exploited by another for labour, then it is, without doubt, slavery. Slavery is pre-constitutional and pre-dates all constitutions. So is the right to life. In India, as in many other parts of the world, the right to livelihood is inseparable from the right to life – loss of the means of livelihood means loss of life. It is only for sheer survival that workers accept unfair, unjust, inhuman and exploitative wages and working conditions on terms dictated by the capitalists and their collaborators – which is enforced as law by the state. Such a corporate-state nexus would ideally like to reduce all labour to gig workers, which is but a short step after whittling down full and regular employment with fair wages and benefits to contract labour for the sole purpose of denying workers their fair, legitimate and legal dues.
Since the late 1980s, all countries have been afflicted by the neo-liberal contagion of growth without equity or human development. India has been racing ahead on this path from the time of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao with Manmohan Singh as his finance minister. This has resulted in anti-labour legislation and scrapping of worker-friendly laws, rules and regulations, paradoxically, in the name of “labour reform”. Also to the fore during the last 40 years were political forces that intimidated workers, assassinated trade union leaders and flourished as hatchets of business and industry.
Historically, the world over, all slave-driver type spearheads of the capital hoarding and looting classes have been collaborators of authoritarianism and fascism. George Fernandes, as industry minister in the Janata Party government, called India’s business and industry leaders ‘rats’– predatory pests that burrow deep into the vitals of the world to destroy humanity. Doubtless, there were, and are, exceptions like Viren J. Shah and ‘Hamara (Rahul) Bajaj’. Such stars have either fallen or fading. Now, bloodthirsty predators are on the prowl and ruling the roost.
*Shastri Ramachandaran, a journalist who worked with leading dailies in India, Europe and China, is author of Beyond Binaries: The World of India and China.
