By Sneha Rajaram
We’ve been watching awestruck as women tea plantation workers in Munnar made history day after day on their strike for a higher minimum wage in the last two months. They started in the first week of September. Their numbers grew, they did not back down, they kept Kerala’s traditionally male-dominated trade unions from swooping in and co-opting their struggle. In mid-September, they formed their own trade union, ‘Pembila Orumai’ (‘Women United’), and successfully negotiated a bonus hike. In mid-October, they triumphed with a wage hike. And just before that, they announced their intention to contest in the Kerala panchayat elections.
Pembila Orumai’s Gomathi Augustine, formerly with the All India Trade Union Congress, won from the Devikulam panchayat block division Nallathanni. And Pembila Orumai now has two seats in the Munnar panchayat.
But none of this could happen without the Left feeling left out and threatened, it seems. Trade unionists pelted stones at the striking women workers in late September. As Newsminute reported, now CPM trade unionists have attacked Gomathi Augustine and her family on a victory rally – Gomathi was unconscious and had to be hospitalised. Worse, the police seems to have registered a case against her for being involved in the scuffle.
This isn’t the first time the Left has attacked women in Kerala, either. Remember Chitralekha, a Dalit woman who drives an auto rickshaw, who was harassed by members of the CPM’s Centre for Indian Trade Union (CITU) for the last decade. And another woman in politics, the chairperson of a Community Development Society at the panchayat level, was harassed after her decision to switch membership from the CPM to the BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party), as this report by the Centre for Development Studies tells us:
The case of a prominent BSP woman activist in the north Kerala district of Kasaragod, a CPM stronghold, illustrates this quite well – her account of the violence she endured in her move from the CPM to the BSP. Such violence, as she implicitly points out, is provoked not just by defiance of the dominant political party’s political directions, but also by the attempts of subordinate castes to acquire symbolic capital that helps to build group solidarity. Her account of how the irate CPM activists broke up their efforts to hold a cultural festival to revive the community’s culture, and her livelihood activity, a group effort of her self-help group, testifies to this.
Both these instances, as well as the attacks on Pembila Orumai, are doubly damning – because they appear to be gender-based as well as caste-based. And we know it isn’t just left-wing political parties who treat women like garbage. Perhaps a group of women should band together and form their own party – oh wait, that’s precisely what Pembila Orumai has done. Big smug smile, everyone.