A cat among the pigeons always raises a flurry of feathers. The feathers Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has ruffled most by his comment on bandhs are those of his own party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The apparatchiki of the party in New Delhi have reiterated that the “right to strike by the working class [is] a fundamental right”. It needs to be pointed out to the party pundits that there is a major difference between the right to strike and the right to call a bandh. This is not a semantic quibble or a piece of casuistry. In an industrial or business unit, the workers, in the case of a major dispute with the employers or the management, have the right to strike. But a bandh is a general strike, which affects the entire society and brings all activities to a complete standstill. During a bandh, people utterly indifferent or even hostile to the cause for which a bandh is being called are compelled to comply with it and stay at home. This is why a bandh is fundamentally undemocratic as it never takes into cognizance the views of all the people affected by it.

Even a strike (defined as a stoppage of work in a single industrial unit) tends to take on undemocratic dimensions. To be democratic, a strike must have the consent of all the workers. The word, all, is emphasized deliberately to indicate that a strike call must have the consent of not just the unionized workers or of the workers present in a particular meeting. Any such meeting and voting should also ensure that no outsiders are present. In other words, the majority of workers in an industrial plant should decide collectively if a strike is the best course of action in a given context. Unfortunately, in most strikes in India, this simple principle is never adhered to. Most strikes are called by a union that owes allegiance to a particular political party or a larger trade union body, and the leaders of the trade union body or the political party decide to go on strike. The assumption is that the trade union body or the political party knows the interests of the workers more than the workers themselves. What can be more undemocratic than this, in practice as well as in theory?

The general strike — call it bandh, hartal or by any other name, it will smell as odious — has an undemocratic element embedded in it. It is difficult to think of a situation where the majority of society actually supports a bandh call. Most stay at home out of fear or to enjoy a surprise holiday. This passivity is then interpreted by the concerned political formation to be tacit support for the bandh. Apathy and cynicism are taken, for the sake of sheer political expediency, as support and enthusiasm.

What is crucial is not to lose sight of the fact that Mr Bhattacharjee was talking about bandhs and general strikes. This will automatically rid the issue of a lot of unnecessary controversy. Mr Bhattacharjee may well discover that he has spoken to the deaf.