From Silk Factory to SRTC

Chief Ministers are no different from Maharajas of yesteryears; when it comes to kill aspirations only guns and bamboos replace the lances and batons, Riyaz Masroor revisits the workers’ agitation of 1924
More than eight decades have elapsed since the power-sodden Maharaja Pratap Singh ordered a military raid into the Silk Factory where the unpaid workers had been protesting for long. In the spring of 1924 nearly five thousand workers in the state-owned silk factory demanded a pay hike and the dismissal of a clerk who had been running a protection racket, exploiting the poor employees.
The management agreed to a small increase, but arrested the leaders of the protest. The workers then came out on strike. It was for the first time that Kashmiri workers had burst into a rebellion against the state. The power-drunk Maharaja Pratap Singh chose to kill rather than address the aspirations. Troops were sent in to subdue the resistance against exploitation and nonpayment of dues. The workers were badly beaten, suspected ringleaders were sacked on the spot and the main organizer of the protest was arrested and tortured to death.
Eighty four years is a long span of time. We may have remembered and forgotten a number of developments through this period yet we have remained witness to the evolution of governance in the war-torn Europe and the decolonized Asia. Rulers in Kashmir have tended to relate themselves to the tides of changes coming from the East and the West.
But, when the Jammu and Kashmir Police cracked whip on the unpaid workers of the State Road Transport Corporation (SRTC) and beat not only them but also their family members it appeared as if the clock in Kashmir had got stuck in 1924.
Just a thin line distinguishes the imagery of brute force employed by the state against the unerring SRTC workers and the memories of Silk Factory raid. Maharaja’s troops rode on the war horses and pounced with lances and spears on the poor workers while the JKP cops charging against the SRTC workers were laced with modern weaponry. Newspapers carried the scenes depicting the male cops scuffling with wives, sisters and daughters of the affected employees.
Ironically the political elite have long been referring to the brute Maharja regime in order to derive legitimacy for their model of ‘popular rule’. But the treatment our agitating employees often receive in response to their demands is a telling rejoinder to the claims of our politicians.
They claim that no problem can be solved by use of force or violence yet they promptly order ‘violence’ against the poor workers agitating for their rights. We have seen cops chasing the activists protesting the tax hike during Farooq Abdullah’s rule; Mufti’s three-year regime witnessed teachers being assaulted and humiliated as they demanded an end to pay anomalies; and we are witnessing the worst part of state’s inefficiency to address the problem of a transport corporation comprising just five thousand employees.
Experts would certainly come out with their take on the government’s inability to fix the problem yet the attitude the state has been assuming against the working class in the state is too retrograde to term the newer dispensations as somewhat different from the Maharajas of the past.
If some purported Kashmir experts resist the tendency of overstretching the Kashmir conflict back to Mughal era they would certainly understand how greatly the suppression of Silk Factory agitation by the Maharaja has influenced the resistance movement in Kashmir. The government too must not forget that the Silk Factory agitation had spawned a homegrown nationalism, of which Sheikh Abdullah would later become an advocate as well as an adversary. More importantly the famous 1931 movement in which the state forces perpetrated massacres in almost all parts of Kahsmir started just seven years after Silk Factory raid.
The government may argue that 2008 is not 1924 yet it has to substantiate it by the ways through which it addresses the problem. After all the conscious citizenry including Saidudin Shawl and others were pursuing degrees in Punjab and Lahore when the aspirations were being booted down in the Silk Factory. When they returned home they grew restless to mobilize people against the injustice.
They wrote to British Viceroy Lord Reading, perhaps the first Kashmiri memorandum to Western powers, protesting repression and seeking intervention. “So far we have patiently borne the state's indifference towards our grievances and our claims and its high-handedness towards our rights, but patience has its limit and resignation its end,” reads the memorandum.
When the Viceroy forwarded the petition to the Maharaja he promptly deported Saidudin Shawl under charges of sedition.
Exactly after 84 years the state, currently run by those who believe the Maharaja was a despot and the Britain a colonizer, appears no different than the Maharaja who muffled the Silk Factory workers and later deported Shawl. Thrashing teachers, engineers and doctors; beating SRTC workers and slapping the brute laws upon them are an obvious continuity to a despotic mindset, which we are given to believe was long buried.
If the state has been immune to the ideological transformation how can anybody argue that peoples aspirations have died down and cannot revert back to rebellion. This was evident recently when a group of SRTC employees alleged that the government was protracting the policy over the issue just to shift focus from the human rights violations.
The ruling congress leaders should feel guilty because their favorite leader and first woman Prime Minister of India, late Indhira Gandhi had wished that “the clock should not be turned back”.
If the smoldering anguish among the working class of Kahsmir ever turned to yet another rebellion the future historian will have to choose only one conclusion: Either the clock was mismanaged or it was terribly wrong.

Feedback the author on rmasroor@gmail.com
(First appeared in Srinagar-based Rising Kashmir)