 Hello and good evening. We have with us today Raki Seigal who is the executive council member of the new trade union initiative and an active trade unionist. We are speaking specifically on the recently delivered Maruti workers judgement in which as many as 13 workers were given life imprisonment and total of 35 workers convicted and of course 117 are quitted. Thank you Raki for having this conversation. Thank you. First of course the Maruti workers judgement itself 18th March and what it meant, what it says when it particularly talks about the collective conscience and the make in India campaign, it appears that without any evidence you have 13 workers being convicted to life imprisonment. The judge from Chandigarh also from the Chandigarh High Court also said the same thing that we need to keep in mind the investors concerns and their sentiment and therefore this bail cannot be given. The same thing was repeated by the special prosecutor Mr. Hooda when he came out of the courtroom that the investors can now be confident that quote unquote rule of law exists in Haryana and anyone creating trouble will be dealt with like this. So this has a chilling effect on because as you can see the 13 who have been given life sentences are 12 union members and one Jialal who is a Dalit worker who actually made the complaint on 18th July 2012 about caste abuse that he had received from one of the managers which started the entire incident of that day. So in a way it's saying caste abuse does not matter and in fact it is also saying you cannot organize trade unions in this belt because it dents the investor confidence and therefore. And I also want to link it to what what Chief Minister Hooda had said during 2011-2012 when the union was agitating to form themselves into an independent union. He actually categorically said we will not allow a union to be formed or registered in the Maruti plant in Manesar which is goes against the constitutional guarantees which goes against trade union right which in itself. If the employer said it would be an unfair labor practice and here is a state functionary as high as a chief minister saying this so and that was the previous government that was the previous government. So there I mean honestly there is no difference when it comes to labor rights and trade union rights between the various governments as long as they wedded to big capital and corporate capital. Their attitude towards labor rights is going to be the same and that's what we've been seeing for the last at least 15-20 years to maintain your figment of being a democratic nation. In vis-a-vis the international community you will allow 2% of your workers to be in the organized sector and under so-called coverage of labor laws whereas 98-97% of your workers and this is the crux of make in India. In fact Professor Shurajit Mojumdar from JNU has an argument saying that make in India and labor rights are incompatible. They will always be in conflict because the only competitive advantage that India has is cheap labor. And how do you continue to keep cheap labor and also docile given that the living condition of the workers is so dire is through repressive repression of labor rights and any demand for labor rights. Can you just tell us from the point of view of the workers who have been convicted, where are the loopholes? The loopholes are in the fact and you know the four or five points that even the judge raises in the judgment. The fact that firstly the identification of the so-called accused, the contractors identified them alphabetically and as the defense lawyers raised the issue, were they standing alphabetically but in court they could not recognize them, could not identify them. Neither could Deepak Anand who is the HR manager who actually filed the FIR complaint. That is one. They have arrested workers even before the FIR. The workers were formally filed. So that in itself shows fabrication. Prosecution has argued that workers were found with door beams. Now a door beam is a huge piece of metal. Firstly, how did they leave the factory gate with the door beams? There is no complaint from the stores of Maruti that there are door beams and shockers which are missing. And there are numerous. You've gone to Kethal with these door beams in public transportation. Isn't the first thing that accused would do is throw away the weapon if indeed that was the weapon? There are discrepancies between the sketches that were supposedly made at the time of recovery and the size of the door beam. There is the issue of how is it that in a room where Avnish Dev, the manager who died tragically was found dead, the entire room is charred but there is undamaged matchbox cover. And the judge actually writes in the judgment that the prosecution is not making the argument that the matchbox cover lit the fire. So how is this particular judgment and a series of developments in the sector? It is actually aimed at where different sort of institutions are being used to actually break the back of worker organization. The right to organize with dignity and worse than that to take back the victories of the struggle fought over 150 years. So how does this all well with the new development model made more aggressive under Modi of course but was already there before? Correct. And what it means for the large section of Indians which are the working class? What is really the message that is being sent out and it's being sent out for numerous years is that you cannot organize. And in fact if you look very closely at the way that the workers have been raising their demands, that workers are actually trying to assert their citizenship rights. And they're trying to say that we as citizens we will sit at the table equally with our employers. A futile mentality that seems to pervade our employers is, if you try to organize, if you don't do what we are doing, what we are asking you to do, this is the fate that you will meet after after the 18th July incident. There was the media kept quoting or kept putting out stories about Maoist penetration of urban areas. The minute you raise the specter of Naxalism and Maoism then it somehow creates the state of exception in that area. And the rule of law can be dispensed with. Section 144 for example has been used indiscriminately and unendingly. Aafspa in the northeast, section 144 over here. 144 Lagadia which means you can't come anywhere close to the plant and the plant can continue to function with other workers. What were the Maruti workers and all of you trying to do? What was the struggle about? The struggle was that the working conditions in the Manisa plant of Maruti were onerous. Workers were not allowed to take toilet breaks. If somebody had died in their family, they were told, now they are dead, you have to finish the shift and go home. They were not being given leave to go for the birth of their own children. If they took a sick leave which is allowed under the standing orders, there were massive deductions from their wages and salaries. So lots and lots of these kinds of issues were arising. And initially the workers did approach the union in the Gurgaon plant to asking them to, to agitate on their issues. When that didn't, and they tried that for about a year, when that didn't meet with success, they decided to form their own independent union. At which point management then tried to first derail. I mean, and we see a series of leadership being thrown out being, but finally with the help of the manager actually who ended up dying on 18th. He was very pro-labour. He was very pro-labour and in fact he had helped the union get their registration. So that happened, but so once the union got registered and they submitted their charter of demand to the management, the management refused or there was a farce of negotiation. They'd be called for meetings and nothing would happen because there was already that mistrust between the leadership and the workers. Management wanted to take advantage of that. Finally, when there was some negotiation and what, and this is the threat to the entire capitalist class, which is why the Maruti movement has the significance that it does. The permanent workers were agitating the cause of the contract workers and saying that whatever we are getting, you need to give that to the contract workers who are working on the production lines next to us. So coming back to that 18th July and before that, there was heavy secretization. Cops were brought in. How did that work? So 18th July, the cops were called to the factory and they are supposedly milling around the factory gate. And apparently there's this escalation of a conflict going on. And none of the managers, and this is noted even in the judgment, none of the managers deem it fit to inform or ask for the intervention of the police and private goons who are roaming the shop floor in uniform, in Maruti workers' uniforms. They could not produce any ID cards. So, you know, and this was a similar kind of a tactic that even in pre-call that you was trying to instigate violence when the workers still continue to be non-violent. But this penetrating, this is something we all need to watch out for because if you see in the judgment, there's a very interesting interpretation of unlawful assembly where the judge is saying that even if two people out of that entire crowd has done something illegal, we're going to assume that all of you are guilty. How does the wider civil liberties movement recognize and ally with this because there has been a certain distance? There has been a certain distancing but I think we need a closer coming together and as the UN's special rapporteur on freedom of association and protest has made a plea that human rights organizations need to incorporate corporate labor rights into the core areas of their work. And I think the trade unions also need to allow. And I think what we need to understand is that each of us has a role to play in each of these struggles. The shop floor and the trade union and the labor rights will be agitated by the trade unions. I don't think there's a role for NGOs or anyone else to do that but there is a role for NGOs or civil liberties groups to kind of fact finding reports that they do to help in capacity building training of the workers in their rights, to help train paralegals. You cannot defend labor rights when there's a vacuum of democratic rights. So to see that labor rights is also part of the continuum of democratic rights. Today you have an agitation I think also. Today also we have a Chalo Mane Sir agitation where even though again 144 has been imposed to the 25th workers in various gate meetings since the 18th have been coming out and saying that we will join. So they hope to, they determined to I should say, march from their factories when the A-shift ends at 3pm and march to the De Vilal Stadium at the entrance of Mane Sir to hold a public meeting. Can we end with your one appeal to the media? I think the media should really understand the famous, they came for the communists and we were sleeping and then they came for the farmers, finally they're coming for us which is exactly what is happening within formalization of your own contracts and your own insecurity of your own employment. If you can see that logic, understand the logic of that and understand how this is underlying the neoliberal economic policies regardless of which government is in power, that this is going to eat you up. This is also eating up the future of your own children. Everyone is going to be insecure. You are no longer, if you at one time celebrated your freelance career your freelance career is not going to ensure that your households run and that your children can go to the best schools. That is the same desire that these workers have. That we should be able to provide for a dignified life for our families and for ourselves wherever we work and I think all of us desire that. So if you can see common cause with that and ensure that if media doesn't do anything else we're not saying side with the workers and the workers are always right. Ask those critical questions that will lift the veil from the kind of bogus rhetoric that is being served up to us. That is the opium of the masses. The media in particular. Thank you so much.