Labor, Democratization and Development in India and Pakistan

Christopher Candland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134089215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this first comparative study of organized labor in India and Pakistan, the author analyses the impact and role of organized labor in democratization and development. The study provides a unique comparative history of Indian and Pakistani labor politics. It begins in the early twentieth century, when permanent unions first formed in the South Asian Subcontinent. Additionally, it offers an analysis of changes in conditions of work and
terms of service in India and Pakistan and of organized labor's response.

The conclusions shed new light on the influence of organized labor in national politics, economic policy, economic welfare and at the workplace. It is demonstrated that the protection of workers has desirable outcomes not only for those workers covered but also for democratic practice and for economic development.

1
ORGANIZED LABOR AND DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION

First of all, we must have the Government thoroughly with us, heart and soul.¹

G.V.Joshi

Political regimes—democratic or authoritarian—shape social organizations and mold the state itself. Political regimes also frame the relationships between those social organizations and the state—the administrative apparatus of government. Accordingly, most labor studies emphasize the impact of political regimes on the organization and representation of labor. Few labor studies show how labor organizations and labor institutions help to produce or reinforce political regimes. This book considers the influence both of organized labor on political regimes and of political regimes on organized labor. This chapter focuses on the former, the impact of organized labor on political regime formation.

Unions and workers themselves helped to shape political regimes as well as economic institutions, and the state itself. Everywhere, political regimes have structured labor institutions and labor organizations to suit their needs. At the same time, but less well acknowledged or understood, workers and unions have themselves influenced political and economic development. Even in the predominantly poor and rural economies of India and Pakistan, where labor’s bargaining power is low, workers and their associations helped to determine significant economic and political outcomes.

The history of union opposition to authoritarian governments of all kinds in the South Asian Subcontinent is as long as the history of union organization itself. Workers resisted colonial rule. They shirked the regimentation of factory work when the British established manufacturing shops. Workers gave employer associations in colonizing economies reason to fund study of the problems of absenteeism and backward-bending supply curves for labor (workers wanting fewer hours at higher wages) in the colonial world.² In South Asia, workers used the organization formed through factory work—including working class neighborhood associations—to close down industry and crowd colonial jails.

Unions also protest undemocratic decisions by elected governments. The most public displays of trade union support for democracy in India and Pakistan are on the streets in opposition to authoritarianism. Unions are supportive, sometimes vitally, to peace-activism, anti-communalism, and promotion of international human rights. Nearly every major union in India and Pakistan opposed the decision of their governments to test nuclear weapons in May and June 1998. Unions complained specifically about the lack of public input into such a momentous decision.

In independent India, labor helped to ensure a tradition of regular elections to public office and helped to make elections more meaningful. Unions educated workers about politics and mobilized them to support prolabor parties. Workers then used their unions to ensure that elected representatives enacted policies that would promote social welfare.

In Pakistan, workers and unions could not persuade elected representatives to adopt a constitution or prevent the 1958 military coup. But when Field Marshal Ayub Khan provoked organized labor with official celebrations of the first decade of military rule, workers and others protested and wrested from the military a commitment to hold national elections. Workers’ organizations build networks among individuals from differing ethnic, linguistic, national, and religious backgrounds. Workers’ organizations are essential to making economic life democratic.

Political regimes

Many think of India as a democratic polity and Pakistan as an authoritarian one. The characterization is correct but not complete. There are strong authoritarian institutions in the Indian polity and strong democratic institutions in the Pakistani polity. At any given moment, millions of Indians are under some form of military or paramilitary rule, a practice in existence since British government. In Pakistan, despite frequent and sometimes decade-long periods of military rule and suspension of civil and political rights, regular elections for municipal government have continued.

India’s coalition of dominant proprietary classes

A century of contest and representation through elections shaped social organizations and institutions. Regular elections for public office have been held in India since the late nineteenth century, decades before India’s Independence from British rule in 1947. The British Viceroy’s Legislative Council and the Provincial Legislatures, established by the 1861 Indian Councils Act, were partially elected. By 1884, some members of municipal committees were elected. The Government of India Act of 1919 brought elections for limited self-government to the provincial level. These pre-Independence elections were conducted on a restricted franchise.

The Indian government has held regular elections for national and state (i.e., provincial) office, on the basis of a universal franchise, since 1950. Mrs. Gandhi declared an Emergency and suspended civil and political rights in June 1975. The Emergency was not lifted until February 1977, when her elder son Sanjay persuaded her to declare elections. But when she was defeated in the election intended to solidify her rule, she conceded to the voters. Thus even India’s temporary break with electoral politics indicates the resilience of electoral politics in India.

Given the volume and depth of analysis on Indian political regimes, it is striking that scholarship, Marxist and non-Marxist, maintains a broadly similar view.³ Publicly contested elections among competitive political parties characterize India’s political regime—the pattern of recruitment into positions of state management. But most analysts of India’s political regime agree that the state—the administrative apparatus for governance, which among modern states typically focuses on revenue collection, law and order, and policing territorial borders—is the instrument of the alliance of three dominant classes: an urban industrial elite, or large-scale industrialists, a landed class, or rich farmers, and the managerial bureaucratic bourgeoisie, or senior civil servants. Numerous students of Indian politics have characterized the state as serving these three “dominatnt classes.”

Harry Blair described the partly autonomous “government bureaucracy, the military and the intelligentsia” as the “third element in the political economy of managing the Indian system.” The other two elements, according to Blair, are industrialists and large landholders.⁴ Pranab Bardhan’s similar theory that three dominant proprietary actors capture the Indian state is better known.⁵ According to his class-based approach, state controls in the Indian economy have served principally to protect domestic capital from foreign competition, to secure state subsidies for wealthier farmers, and to secure rents and political patronage for the managerial bourgeoisie. The state is not distinct from society. Rather the state is a social alliance administered by one dominant class, the managerial bureaucratic bourgeoisie, in cooperation with other dominant classes. Bardhan uses this conceptualization of the Indian state to explain the evolution of the fiscal crisis, and its tenacity, in the contemporary Indian economy.

Pakistan’s bureaucratic-military oligarchy

The Pakistani state has extended protection to two of these same three economically and politically dominant groups, namely large landholders and industrialists. As in India, in Pakistan, the bureaucracy—the managers of the state apparatus—has been characterized as relatively autonomous from other social classes. In Pakistan, however, the military is the basis for that autonomy. Pakistan has spent most of the nearly six decades since its creation under some form of martial or military rule. Electoral democracy in Pakistan got off to a shaky start. From 1947 until 1956, the Constituent Assembly, elected in undivided India with a highly restricted franchise, served as the national assembly. Pakistan’s first independent Constitution was framed in 1956. Between the 1958 military coup and the 1988 death of President Zia ul-Haq, only two short episodes of elected, civilian political regimes emerged. The first episode occurred after Pakistan’s first general election in December 1970. The military prevented the Bengali leader Mujibur Rahman from forming a government and attacked his supporters in East Pakistan. At the military’s defeat in December 1971, the country broke up. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto assumed control of an elected government in a truncated Pakistan. The second civilian political regime was that of Ghulam Ishaq Khan (1985–88). It was party-less—political parties were banned from the elections—and sponsored by the military. Military governments ruled Pakistan from 1958 until 1971, from 1977 until 1985, three times in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and from 1999 until 2002. Martial law has been in effect for more than 30 years of Pakistan’s short history as a state.⁶

The Pakistani state is in the hands of bureaucratic and military elites. Pakistan was the illustrative case used by Hamza Alavi to advance the thesis that colonial powers left overdeveloped states in postcolonial societies.⁷ The overdeveloped state, embedded in peripheral capitalist development, promoted industrial development, despite the weakness of the indigenous bourgeoisie and to the detriment of “landowners and peasant producers.” Peripheral capitalist development demanded it. To raise revenue and to control the native population, colonial rulers created the state. Thus, the strongest elements of the state in postcolonial societies are those designed for extracting resources and policing people. “Effective power within the state apparatus lay in the hands of a military bureaucratic oligarchy.”⁸ The autonomy of the state in Alavi’s analysis derives from the colonial state’s service of foreign classes not from an alliance of domestic classes. Of course, the same could be said of India. Indeed, the British East India Company and British Crown ruled earlier, and thus longer, in most areas of what is now independent India than they did in what is now Pakistan. The Indian state should, according to Alavi, be more overdeveloped, more beholden to foreign than to domestic classes.⁹ Comparative analysis, however, allows us to see how much stronger the domestic business classes are in India and how different the basis of the autonomy of the Indian ruling classes is from that of the Pakistani ruling classes.¹⁰

Labor politics under colonial rule

Understanding colonial labor law and its purposes is vitally important to understanding the obstacles that organized labor in India and Pakistan face today. At Independence, India and Pakistan retained all colonial labor law. Rather than framing entirely new law, as a revolutionary government might do, governments in India and Pakistan merely amended colonial labor law. The details of Indian colonial labor history are well enough documented but uniformly ignor...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA SERIES
• CONTENTS
• MAPS, FIGURES, AND TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction
• 1 ORGANIZED LABOR AND DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION
• 2 THE STATE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
• 3 ORGANIZED LABOR AND ECONOMIC REFORM
• 4 REORGANIZING INDUSTRY, DISORGANIZING WORKERS
• 5 ORGANIZED LABOR, DEMOCRACY, AND DEVELOPMENT
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX