Rajan Nair and Aamchi Antony
Michael Yesudas
Pimpri-Chinchwad is effectively an industrial area. And Maharashtra Industial
Development Corporation (MIDC) has provided excellent facilities and incentives
to start industries in the region. And a large agglomeration of industries calls
for some amount of union activity or other. And among all the union leaders the
most outstanding ones were Rajan Nair and N.Antony.
N.Antony, (locally called Aamchi Antony, meaning Our Antony) started his career
in a small machine shop in the area. And he soon grew into a hero for the
average underpaid worker in the area. (Their official working times are in 2
shifts. 7 to 7. And the wages are so adjusted that they get approximately
Rs 1000 or so a month.) And that was the time Antony came into the picture and
he started the basic awareness among the working class. His approach as a whole
was by and large based on Communist principles, that he imbibed during his
younger days as a chotta netavu in Kerala. And soon the impact of that on the
small scale industries was visible. Out of the 2500 small scale units in the
region 128 closed in 6 months time. And then Antony was implicated in criminal
cases and the like, and one rainy night his body was found beside one of the
deserted fields off Pune-Satara road....
Rajan Nair, (not the same Rajan Nair or Chhotta Rajan of underworld of Bombay)
grew up in Bombay, as the fifth among seven children of a tailor. He was an
employee of Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (Telco) and was dismissed
from there on the pretext that he had threatened a Security Gaurd. And he formed
a union which was called Telco Kamgar Sanghatana (TKS). And that grew into
taking absolute control of the union in a couple of years. And then came the
hunger strike, followed by the assaults of the supervisory staff even in their
houses. And the strike had slowed down the production of Telco drastically, and
the company was suffering a loss of Rs 1 crore a day. And soon the then Chief
Minister entered the scene and unceremoniously arrested over 3000 of the workers
and send them to different jails in "OnamkeRa moolas" of Maharashtra. And
within a few months time the union got split, and Rajan Nair was ousted from
being at the helm of affairs.
These are two classical cases of Unionism, that the Malayalis have done in that
industrial area. The end result? Telco "official" policy is not to allow any
Malayali in the worker grades at their plant at Pune. Bajaj Auto follows a
very similar policy. (Maybe hired as temporary employees, but then 40% of the
work force is only temporary employees. They are continuously fired and hired
once in three months) And no small scale industry will give you a job the moment
they come to know that you are a "Mallu". They will politely tell you that
"Amaala Uniongiri nokko re" (We do not want unionism)
The facts are authentic and the characters are real.
Sincerely
Michael
P.S. Please don't send any mail to this address. If anybody has any comments
kindly post it on the net, or email me mec...@jetson.uh.edu
