May Day in Kashmir |
At first light in Shopian, a young father leaves home quietly so as not to wake his children. He already knows the questions that await him on return: Did you find work? Did you bring money? At the town’s clock tower, he joins a line of men waiting to be hired for the day. Some will return with wages; many will not. For them, uncertainty is routine, not exception.
“I come every morning. If I get work, we eat. If not, we wait,” he says, without anger—only resignation.
This captures the reality of labour in Kashmir: visible everywhere yet protected nowhere.
Observed globally, May Day is rooted in struggle. It commemorates movements such as the Haymarket Affair, where workers demanded fair hours, dignity, and basic rights. More than a century later, these demands remain only partially fulfilled.
The critique of Karl Marx remains strikingly relevant in this context. Marx argued that under systems of economic inequality, the worker becomes increasingly alienated—separated from the value of his labour, from security, and ultimately from dignity. His observation that “the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces” resonates sharply in regions where labour sustains the economy but remains structurally unprotected.
Across India, over 80 percent of the workforce operates in the informal sector. In Jammu and Kashmir, more than 36 lakh........