what does kedar ask his mother to bring for him?
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The mind is a winding river, its churning waters both cluttering and cleansing many shores and various ports of call. The broad outlines of the 1958 strike by the steel workers of Jamshedpur are still there in my memory; I was all of ten years of age at the time. The strike was a spontaneous uprising under the banner of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), the labour arm of the Communist Party of India (CPI), still an undivided entity then. The incumbent union – affiliated to the INTUC, which owed allegiance to the Indian National Congress – gave out that the strike was a Communist conspiracy to take control of things. The strike was mercilessly put down by a ruthless State machinery which was in the hands of the Congress in both Patna and New Delhi. Many lives were lost as the police fired on a peaceful gathering of striking workers; many times more lost their jobs.
The working class movement in Jamshedpur never regained its former glory. The workers lost their independent voice and, henceforth, the captive INTUC union that the Tisco management had left no stone unturned to save, gave an even more servile account of itself than before. One remembers that the management was quick to claim that the strike resulted from differences within the workers, and that it had nothing to do with it. However, facts on the ground told a different story; a story that has not been sufficiently pursued but has nonetheless become an inseparable part of the oral history of Jamshedpur. If scholars and researchers in the area of labour and industrial relations had done their bit, perhaps the nation would have been better informed about the strike in the unforgettable summer of 1958 and its brutal suppression.
The striking workers could not have asked for abler leadership than that provided by Kedar Lal Das and his associates, notably Barin De, Ali Amjad and Dr. Udayakar Mishra. My journalist-father, like thousands of others in Jamshedpur, held the CPI leader in the highest esteem, simply because he deserved no less. An ascetic in the old Communist mould, Kedar Babu, as he was generally addressed by people, dressed simply and ate little. He decided to remain unmarried early in life and lived all his years with an elder brother and his family. He spoke little but when he spoke, people listened to him intently because they knew they were in the presence not of rhetoric, common to most leaders regardless of their affiliation, but of wisdom realized in the heat of making the people’s cause his own. I remember father saying, “Kedar Babu is fire within, ice without.”
When Kedar Das died many years after the 1958 eruption, at least a lakh of people, not all of whom agreed with him on everything, accompanied him on his last march with full-throated cries of “Comrade Kedar Das, zindabad! Comrade Kedar Das amar rahey!” The last time the people of Jamshedpur had seen such a scene and heard such a chorus was when Professor Abdul Bari had died. With Kedar Das’ death, the Left was left with no one at the top who commanded the kind of prestige and popularity that he did. In the resultant vacuum, Rightist elements entered the Jamshedpur scene with an agenda that held no good for workers and their families.
Scores of journalists from all corners of the country descended on Jamshedpur during the strike. They were taken care of handsomely by the public relations department of Tisco, then headed by one Dilip Mukherji who in course of time joined The Statesman in Calcutta, only to leave it for The Times of India. The well-oiled publicity wing of the company worked overtime to feed the visiting scribes with its version of events. Half-truths competed with utter falsehoods to paint the strikers in demonic colours. My brothers and I, not to mention our mother, could see father’s private anguish at the way facts were being distorted and distributed for public consumption. Perhaps what saved father from himself was that the Press Trust of India (PTI), which he served as a ‘stringer’, had sent a senior ‘staffer’ from their Calcutta office by the name of Sudhir Chakraborty to cover the strike. Father heaved a sigh of relief for he had a well-earned reputation to protect, but his unhappiness remained.
Any worthwhile chronicle of the strike must necessarily mention some incidents that have so long been restricted to the realm of oral history. Not everything about every event gets to be recorded – that is not humanly possible; that is not the way history grows. Some seemingly small but significant incidents often fail to make it to the books, but manage to get transported from one generation to the next by that most potent and lasting vehicle of social communication – word of mouth. I have a feeling, perhaps encouraged by a sense of exaggerated self-importance, that if I fail to mention at least two incidents relating to the strike, they are certain to get lost for want of a chronicler. And the plebeian’s loss will be the patrician’s gain.