Ramachandra Guha: How the murder of trade union leader Shankar Guha Niyogi hurt India |
The history of independent India is peppered with the violent deaths of prominent politicians. Indira Gandhi was murdered in her late sixties, Rajiv Gandhi in his mid-forties, Pramod Mahajan in his mid-fifties. Now add those whose lives were cut off in mid-stream by plane or road accidents – Sanjay Gandhi, Rajesh Pilot, Madhavrao Scindia, YS Rajasekhara Reddy. How might their subsequent careers have turned out had they lived another 20 years?
In my view, the premature death of the remarkable thinker and trade union leader, Shankar Guha Niyogi, arguably hurt India more than any of the deaths of the politicians mentioned in the previous paragraph. It dealt a body blow to the civil society movement in India, from which it has perhaps not yet recovered. Guha Niyogi was murdered in 1991, when he was still in his forties, killed by hired goons of the capitalists who hated him for giving workers self-respect and the belief that they could be equal citizens of the land.
I have written an anecdotal piece about Guha Niyogi before. I must now write about him again, and in a more analytical vein. This is because the sociologist, Radhika Krishnan, has just published a fine book about what his life and work once meant and might still mean. Entitled Shankar Guha Niyogi: A Politics in Red and Green, the book draws extensively on personal interviews as well as on fugitive sources in Hindi.
Our author Radhika Krishnan, Associate Professor at the Human Sciences Research Centre @iiit_hyderabad introduces her title ‘Shankar Guha Niyogi: A Politics in Red and Green’. Now available on our website and Amazon! Scan to buy today. pic.twitter.com/CH5sHu43wa
Born in 1943 in a Bengali home, Guha Niyogi arrived at the age of 19 to work in the Bhilai Steel Plant, that iconic marker of India’s road to modernity. He soon left paid employment to embrace full-time activism. He married an Adivasi lady and started organising mineworkers. He also became interested in issues of environmental justice, seeking to make state water and forest policies more responsive to the needs of local peasant and tribal communities instead of catering narrowly to commercial and industrial interests.
In 1977, Guha Niyogi helped found the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh, its name signalling its primary concern with the rights of mineworkers. Two years later, he catalysed the formation of a more broad-based organisation, the Chhattisgarh........