{"id":217510,"date":"2014-05-17T17:45:24","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T12:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=217510"},"modified":"2014-05-17T17:45:24","modified_gmt":"2014-05-17T12:15:24","slug":"mukul-sinha-death-of-an-activsit-comrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/mukul-sinha-death-of-an-activsit-comrade\/","title":{"rendered":"Mukul Sinha: Death Of An Activist-Comrade"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"11
11 July 1951 \u2014 12 May 2014 | Photo: Kadambari<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nAn accountant with a centuries-old religious trust in Gujarat, Bharat Bhatt, then 33, graphically remembers the pleasant yet nippy winter evening in 1988 when he walked into a trade union office in Ahmedabad. A sister-in-law\u2019s brother had brought him to meet the union\u2019s leader, a soft-spoken lawyer named Mukul Sinha. That 15-minute encounter would change Bhatt\u2019s life forever.
\nWearing a half-sleeved bush-shirt and smoking a cigarette, Sinha heard Bhatt narrate the woes of the 600 employees of the unwieldily-named Seth Anandji Kalyanji Pedhi Akhil Bharatiya Jain Shwetambar Murtipujak Shree Sangh Pratinidhi. Most staff were priests in its five Jain temples in Gujarat and one each in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Sinha asked who ran the trust. When Bhatt named a billionaire industrialist, Sinha said: \u201cUsko dekh lenge<\/em> (We will take care of him).\u201d
\nThe tale is both funny and serious. While earning tens of millions annually in donations from the Jain faithful, many of them the typically rich flying over from domiciles in Europe and North America for a quick t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate with the gods, the trust paid its staff a piffling average of Rs 300 a month. Sackings abounded. Those ill or in other urgent circumstances had only the gods to turn to. Just weeks before Bhatt walked in Sinha\u2019s door, a Congress party-linked trade union the employees had allied with had backstabbed them and sold out to the trustees. The sister-in-law\u2019s brother had once worked with Sinha and knew of his tested prowess as a union negotiator and lawyer.
\nI heard this story in 2009 at Ahmedabad during a trip for TEHELKA for which I then worked. Mukulbhai<\/em>, as I called him, guffawed and, pointing at Bhatt, said: \u201cI told him we are incorrigibly atheist and asked if he really wanted us to work with them.\u201d Everyone sitting around us at the office of Jan Sangharsh Manch, their civil resistance outfit, cackled as Bhatt grinned. The answer was yes, they wanted Sinha to get them a better deal from the miserly crorepati trustees. Two days after we lost Mukulbhai<\/em> to cancer this week, I telephoned Bhatt and shared a laugh going over the very surreal victory that the very un-priestly Mukulbhai<\/em> wrought for the struggle of the priests.
\nFounded in the 17th century by a businessman who had descended from Mughal emperor Akbar\u2019s royal jeweller, the trust was chaired for half of the 20th century by the family\u2019s patriarch, textile magnate Kasturbhai Lalbhai, who owned Arvind Mills. At the time Mukulbhai<\/em> cudgelled up for the union, Lalbhai\u2019s son, Shrenikbhai, had taken over as the trust\u2019s chairman. Mukulbhai<\/em>\u2019s trade union work since the late 1970s had already led him to cross swords with Lalbhai\u2019s businesses. The group\u2019s lawyer was taken aback to see him arrive for negotiations with the management. \u201cCome on, Mukul,\u201d Bhatt remembers the lawyer say in exasperation, \u201cat least spare our temples!\u201d
\nNegotiations ate up an entire day and the night that followed. At 5 am, exhausted representatives of the management, who included not a few businessmen travelling from Mumbai, offered blank cheques. \u201cWe told them we don\u2019t want their money,\u201d Amrish Patel, a comrade who, too, was present, told me with a laugh when I asked him over the phone this week to recall that fairytale. \u201cWe told them they have to give the workers\u2019 dues.\u201d As the talks flopped, Mukulbhai<\/em> called a strike.
\nDowning tools meant no showers or change of clothes for the gods. No lamps lit, no prayers made. No darshan, no blessings. The jet-set scrambling in for a flying encounter with the divine bristled. In six days, the union had won. \u201cWe have signed six agreements since,\u201d says Bhatt. Wages now nearly match the Sixth Pay Commission\u2019s recommendations. Dearness allowances, gratuity and increments are generous. Sackings are rare. Any time the management acts funny, the priests go slow. How on earth do priests go slow? \u201cThey take hours to bathe and clothe the gods,\u201d Mukulbhai<\/em> told me in 2009, grinning. \u201cBefore daily darshan can start, it is time to shutter down.\u201d
\nMukulbhai<\/em> shot to national prominence only a decade ago as he filed court cases on behalf of the victims of the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 in which more than 2,000 Muslims were killed. He also began representing the families of the mostly Muslim men and two women who Gujarat Police shot dead in the mid-2000s in what came to be known as \u201cfake encounters\u201d. But inside Gujarat, his renown with the civil society and the working classes dates to his sacking from the State-run Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) after he had briefly worked there as a probationer and had quickly become a troublemaker for trying to unionise the employees.
\nIn 1977, Mukulbhai<\/em>, only 26 years old, started a union at PRL. Soon after, he helped found a workers\u2019 union at the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB). There he met Narendra Patel, an older comrade, and the two stitched up a lifelong relationship. (Amrish is Narendra\u2019s son.) In 1980, they started the Gujarat Mazdoor Sabha, which today boasts 25,000 members. In 1982, when the Centre tried to push a law to bar unions in governmentaided institutes, Mukulbhai<\/em> fired up thousands as part of a national protest and forced the Bill to be abandoned.
\nEmerging thus as a formidable union leader, Mukulbhai<\/em>, still only 33, launched an umbrella outfit in 1984: the Federation of Employees of Autonomous Research Development Education Training Institutes. Becoming popular by its tongue-in-cheek acronym \u2018Feardeti\u2019, which in Hindi would mean \u201cstrikes fear\u201d, it included unions at the who\u2019s who of the public sector: NDDB, National Textile Corporation, Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad), Gujarat Cooperative Oilseeds Growers Federation Limited, National Institute of Design, and Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social Sciences.
\nAs his successes drew private sector unions, he launched the Gujarat Federation of Trade Unions in 1989, quickly sweeping up most private and public sector unions such as of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, the Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Service, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission, electronics giant Hitachi and textiles major Raymond. Increasingly aware of the everyday struggles of workers beyond the workplace, he and his comrades simultaneously launched the Jan Sangharsh Manch to take the fight to the heart of a class-based system.
\nReporting in Gujarat connected me with him in 2008 and we began to interact often. In February, I phoned him for his views on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s claims of governance. Finding Mukulbhai<\/em> a tad less ebullient, I asked him if he was unwell. He was surprised I did not know he was diagnosed with cancer in the lungs last year. \u201cMay be I forgot to tell you,\u201d he said casually. I asked him for more information. Equally casually he said chemotherapy was taking care of him. But I have never seen you smoke, I said. \u201cI stopped smoking long ago,\u201d he said with his typical short laugh.
\nI wanted to join Mukulbhai<\/em>\u2019s funeral but there isn\u2019t going to be one. Researchers at a cancer hospital he gave his body are splicing it up now. A lifelong Leftist, Mukulbhai<\/em> had lately withdrawn from most union work. Except the Jain trust staff\u2019s that wouldn\u2019t let him go and so he stayed its president until his last. \u201cI believed in god and Mukulbhai<\/em> always made fun of me for it,\u201d Bhatt told me with a chuckle. \u201cHe would tell me bhagwan nasha hai, isse chhod do<\/em> (god is an intoxicant, forget him). He taught me so much, including atheism. I don\u2019t anymore believe in the nasha<\/em> of god.\u201d
\nletters@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ajit Sahi finds why comrades aren\u2019t mournful but rather are full of great memories after the passing away of rights lawyer Mukul Sinha <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":217512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[8626,593,8435,9024,8473,8730,9025,7925],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217510"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}