The Flag They Agreed to Hate

Militant unionism in Bengal, the people who sneer at it, and what their sneer is made of

The first union I ever saw was a room. It stood near the railway workshop gate in Kharagpur, a low building with a red flag on a bamboo pole and a blackboard where somebody had chalked the date of the next meeting. From the outside it looked like nothing. From the inside, if you were a fitter's widow whose pension file had gone missing, or a casual labourer whose contractor had vanished on payday, or an apprentice who had been told to work through the night without a rest break, it was the only room in the town where you could say what had happened to you and expect the saying to have a consequence. Someone would write it down. Someone would walk with you to the office. Someone would stand at the gate until the contractor came back. That is what a union is, before it is anything else. It is a place where a worker's sentence lands.

I carry that room with me because of how often I now hear it described as the thing that destroyed Bengal. The description comes from two directions that otherwise share nothing. It comes from the English-speaking liberal drawing rooms of Kolkata and their diaspora extensions in the Bay Area, Singapore, London and Auckland, where the word union is a punchline and the CPIM years are shorthand for load shedding, bandhs and the flight of capital. It also comes from the WhatsApp groups of the Hindutva uncle, where the same three decades are retold as the era of goondas, Marxists and Muslim appeasement. The champagne liberal and the saffron uncle disagree on Gandhi, on Nehru, on beef, on the mosque at Ayodhya. On Bengal's unions they speak with one voice, and they have been speaking with it more loudly for fifteen years, as the accelerated neoliberal reforms of the Manmohan Singh years gave way to the accelerated Hindutva of the Modi years. The agreement is the finding. When two political formations that claim to be enemies converge on a single object of contempt, the object is worth looking at closely, and so are the people who hold the contempt.

The unions did concrete things, and the concreteness matters because the sneer depends on abstraction. The Centre of Indian Trade Unions was founded in Kolkata in 1970, and across the jute mills of Hooghly, the engineering works of Howrah, the railway workshops, the tea gardens of North Bengal and the port at Haldia, CITU and the other left unions built a register of organising that workers across India would later borrow. The eight-hour day exists on paper in every labour law in the country. It exists on the shop floor only where somebody enforces it, and in Bengal the somebody was a union. Provident fund contributions that employers quietly skipped, gratuity withheld on retirement, wages docked for machine breakdowns the worker did not cause, dismissals for the crime of attending a meeting: each of these was contested, file by file, gate by gate, through a structure that gave the least powerful person in the mill a way to be heard. The Communist Party's Subodh Banerjee, as labour minister in the 1967 United Front government, gave the gherao a legal life, and the liberal memory of the gherao is of managers trapped in their offices. The worker's memory is of the first time a manager had to listen. In the vocabulary I use in my own work, the union was voice infrastructure, the material arrangement through which people at the margins get to speak into the structures that shape their lives. Before there can be a right, there has to be a room in which the right can be claimed.

The rural face of the same register is the part the drawing room never mentions, because the drawing room's grandfather often owned the land. Operation Barga, launched in 1978, recorded the tenancy rights of roughly a million and a half sharecroppers, most of them Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim, so that a landlord could no longer evict a family for asking for its lawful share of the crop. West Bengal, with about three per cent of India's land, distributed roughly a fifth of all the ceiling-surplus land redistributed in the country. Panchayat elections from 1978 put village-level government in the hands of people who had never held any. All of it ran on the same principle as the union room at the railway gate, applied to the field: a worker's claim, written down and made to count. For the landless labourer in Bankura or Murshidabad, the CPIM years were the years the family stopped being evictable. That is a different memory from the one traded over single malt in Alipore, and it belongs to far more people.

The charge against the unions is that they drove capital out and turned an industrial state into a backwater. The charge requires no economics, only contempt, which is why it travels so well. Eastern India's decline began before the Left Front existed and was written in Delhi. Partition severed Bengal's jute mills from the jute fields of the east. The freight equalisation policy of 1952, which the Union government kept in place until 1993, priced coal and steel identically anywhere in India, stripping Bengal, Bihar and Odisha of the locational advantage of sitting on the country's minerals and handing it to the western states, where industry then went. The licence raj allocated capacity by political favour, and the favour flowed elsewhere. The Left Front governed a state whose industrial base had been hollowed by decisions it did not make, and it governed it under a fiscal arrangement that punished any state stepping out of line with the Centre. Unions organised the workers who remained. Blaming them for the departure of the jobs is like blaming the fire brigade for the fire, and the people who make the accusation know enough economics to know it. They make it anyway, because the union was the part of the story that involved workers talking back.

The Left Front's record deserves the full accounting the sneer refuses it, failures included. The party colonised the unions and the panchayats until the political scientist Partha Chatterjee could describe Bengal as a party society, where access to every entitlement ran through the local committee. The leadership was overwhelmingly bhadralok, Brahmin, Kayastha and Baidya, and a party that recorded the land rights of Dalit sharecroppers never let a Dalit run it. The Sachar Committee found in 2006 that Muslims, more than a quarter of Bengal's population, held a humiliating fraction of state government jobs after three decades of a government that called itself their protector. Then came the final act. In Singur the government took a thousand acres of fertile land for a Tata car factory. In Nandigram, on 14 March 2007, police fired on villagers resisting a chemical hub and killed fourteen of them. The Left Front fell in 2011 after it had spent five years trying to become what its critics had always wanted it to be, a government that cleared land for capital and sent police against the people on it. The liberal reading is that the unions destroyed the Left. The record shows the Left destroyed itself by abandoning the register the unions had built, and the moment it did, the drawing room applauded until the shooting started.

So the question is who holds the contempt, and the answer is a caste and a class. The person who says the unions ruined Bengal went to Presidency or Jadavpur or St Xavier's, speaks English as a first language of the mind, holds a passport with a second country in it, and descends from a family that at some point sat across a table from a union or across a field from a bargadar. Ambedkar wrote in 1936 that caste is more than a division of labour, that it is a division of labourers, a ranking of human beings that determines whose speech carries and whose does not. The militant union violated that ranking. It put a Dalit loader's grievance on the same table as a Brahmin manager's convenience and made the manager answer. The bhadralok liberal experienced that as disorder, and still does. The word cholbe na, it will not do, which the unions made into a slogan, is quoted in Kolkata drawing rooms as evidence of a culture of negation. It was in fact the sound of people who had been told for generations that their claims did not count learning to say no in public. The contempt for the slogan is contempt for the mouth it came from.

The same contempt has now acquired a government. Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 promising the Gujarat model, which was always a labour model: a state that disciplines workers so that capital does not have to. The four labour codes, which fold twenty-nine central labour laws into instruments that raise the threshold for sacking workers without permission from a hundred to three hundred, impose notice periods that make a lawful strike close to impossible, and normalise fixed-term contracts across the economy, were notified on 21 November 2025 over the objection of every central trade union in the country, and the joint platform of ten unions answered with a general strike on 12 February 2026. Even the RSS's own labour wing, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, saw members burning copies of the codes. In May 2026 the BJP won more than two hundred of the 294 seats in the West Bengal assembly and formed a government in the state for the first time, after a voter roll revision struck around nine million names from the lists. The new chief minister is Suvendu Adhikari, who rose to prominence leading the resistance at Nandigram and now governs on behalf of the party that wrote the codes. The Left Front holds no seats. The state that the liberal insists was ruined by its unions is now run by the political formation whose entire labour programme is the removal of unions from the room.

Neoliberalism and Hindutva are two faces of the same order, and the face you see depends on where you stand. From the boardroom, Hindutva is a labour discipline mechanism that delivers a workforce divided by religion and caste so that it cannot organise as a workforce. From the union office, neoliberalism is the economic programme that Hindutva exists to protect, the reason the strike is now anti-national and the striking worker a threat to the nation. The two projects share a communicative move I have spent years describing, the inversion in which the powerful borrow the language of the powerless: capital's freedom to fire becomes freedom itself, the union's right to strike becomes coercion, and the one place where a Muslim jute worker and a Dalit loader can name a common grievance as a class grievance gets reclassified as the source of Bengal's ruin. The drawing-room liberal supplied the script for that inversion decades before the BJP had the votes to enact it. When the liberal sneers at the CPIM years, the liberal is doing the Sangh's preparatory work, and has been doing it, in perfect English, for a long time.

I have watched from the other side of the world what a country becomes when it decides that unions were the problem. Aotearoa passed the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 and union membership roughly halved within a decade, and the wage stagnation, the casualised work and the housing that nobody on a wage can afford followed as surely as night follows the shift change. The register that Bengal's left unions built, the enforced eight-hour day, the contested dismissal, the recorded tenancy, the room at the gate where a worker's sentence lands, is the register every working class on earth will need again, in Kharagpur and in Palmerston North alike, as the codes and the contracts and the fixed terms arrive. The people who taught us to laugh at that register were never laughing at inefficiency. They were laughing at the sound of a labourer's voice, and the laughter and the Hindutva that now governs from Nabanna come from the same throat.