Between Hammer and Anvil

Anita stood unaccompanied, with a plastic bag containing home-cooked food, on the lawn outside the district jail in Noida’s Kasna village. A widowed single mother, Anita had come there looking for her missing 18-year-old son. Six days prior, on 10 April, workers across companies in Noida’s Special Economic Zone had launched protests to demand wage hikes, dignified working conditions, an eight-hour work day with double pay for overtime, and mandatory days off every week.

The strike had drawn thousands of precarious workers, especially women, and compelled the management of several companies to engage in talks with trade unions and workers, before the Uttar Pradesh Police shut it down, on 13 April. A fact-finding report by a lawyers’ group and two student political groups found that over a thousand workers and other people, including children, went missing that day. Anita’s son was one of them—his cousin had just informed her that the police had detained him. Amid the throng of hundreds of other people who had come to the jail in their search for family members, friends and fellow workers, Anita tried to remain composed despite the tears in her eyes and the worry lines on her face.

In the entire episode since 10 April, according to workers, activists, trade unionists and lawyers I spoke to, the role of the police and the state government is deeply questionable. Media reports and witnesses offered varying accounts of how and when the police began lathi-charging and tear-gassing what had been an essentially peaceful protest. In the lane leading to a factory of the Motherson Group, in Sector 84, I met Dilip Kumar, a Dalit migrant from the Mau district, in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Despite being a graduate, Dilip works as a checker, which is one of the lowest ranked jobs at his company. He recalled that, on the morning of 13 April, the company’s night shift workers were stopped from exiting under the management’s presumption that they would join the protesters amassing just outside the gate. Simultaneously, day shift workers were stopped from entering the premises.

As the atmosphere grew heated, workers inside and outside began protesting. The police lathi-charged the crowd—perhaps because, Dilip said, they felt it was uncontrollable—and workers retaliated. “They were in a mood to find an excuse to act and remove protesters,” Dilip recounted to me. News soon spread that the police had beaten women workers, and that a woman worker from Bihar had been shot twice in Greater Noida’s Ecotech area. Outraged workers intensified their protest and attempted to block a highway, and were swiftly met with more police violence. Several workers and activists even questioned the narrative that workers pelted stones at security personnel on 10 April, with some suggesting that violent disruptions may have been planned with the aim of discrediting the peaceful protest and getting it shut down.