Time was when Parel-Lalbagh, home today to one of Mumbai’s toniest commercial districts, hummed to the sound of textile mills, some of which were nearly 100 years old. This was the city’s mill district with lakhs of workers employed in its many factories producing cotton textiles.

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One fateful day, it came to a grinding halt, never to reopen.

The immediate provocation was the Great Bombay Textile strike which began on 18 January 1982 and involved some 250000 workers across 65 mills. They represented what was believed to be the single largest unionized labor force in one city in one industry anywhere in the world and were led by Dattatray Samant, already famous for having extracted a generous wage hike for workers of the Premier Automobile plant. Based on this achievement he had been chosen by the mill workers, till then largely represented by the INTUC-affiliated Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh to lead their fight against the Bombay Millowners Association for higher wages and a bonus.

For Samant, a doctor by training, it was as much about the fight against textile tycoons as it was about increasing his sphere of influence to the more potent dock and port unions. It was this that alarmed the establishment, though Samant was believed to be close to controversial Maharashtra chief minister A.R. Antulay. The government now sided with the mill owners and refused to negotiate. This broke the back of the year-long strike and eventually it fizzled out.

In the aftermath, 50 of the mills shut down permanently rendering over one a half lakh worker jobless. Eventually not a trace of the mills would be left in the city. Samant’s ambitions as a labor leader also disintegrated and subsequently even his political power waned. By the time of his tragic assassination in 1997 by underworld thugs belonging to the Chota Rajan gang, he had settled into relative obscurity though he kept working for the labor unions.

The strike led to a transformation of the city’s skyline as what was essentially a rough and tough industrial district eventually got gentrified. For many mill owners the strike was a gift since it allowed them to close down mills that had been making losses for years thanks to their mismanagement and refusal to invest in modernizing them. It freed up the land which was more valuable than anything the mills would produce and led to the redevelopment of the entire area into what it is today, a shopping and office district. Capitalizing on the growing demand for real estate to house offices, malls and entertainment centres, the builder-politician nexus in the city drove prices of the land to stratospheric levels.

It was also a serious blow to the labor union movement in India and as liberalization gained ground workers across industries lost their bargaining power eventually becoming mere tools in the hands of contractors and powerful industrialists.

(Edited by : Anshul, Ajay Vaishnav)

First Published:Feb 22, 2021 8:47 AM IST