My story

• Apropos of your editorial,‘Gurgaon’s Kurukshetra’ (IE, July 2...

• Apropos of your editorial,‘Gurgaon’s Kurukshetra’ (IE, July 27), and the various reports indicating how games are played by trade unions and political parties over the poor man’s ‘dal-roti’, it pained but inspired me to write this letter. I am a victim of trade union activities (after 27 years of service). The East India Cotton Manufacturing Co Ltd, north India’s biggest textile processing unit in Faridabad, declared a lock out on September 12, 1996, under the same circumstances as that which prevailed in Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India. Due to bad

unionism, the management threw out thousands of workers and staff on the street without a paisa. Many of them are no more in this world. At that time no political or trade union leader came to help the workers and there was no media hype either.

— Bidyut K. Chatterjee Faridabad

Media watch

• Once again the media plays to the gallery, posing as a gallant knight in shining armour. It is surprising why the media is so outraged and shocked at the brutal and savage manner in which the workers of the Honda factory were beaten by the police on Monday and Tuesday. If the media was truly sensitive to administrative apathy and brutality, reporters need only to travel to the interiors of any state — the tribal and backward areas, or the mining and industrial belts of the country. The economically deprived in these parts face much more violence from the state, each and every day of their lives. Where is the press in these cases?

— Sachin Singh New Delhi

Barbaric

• May I take this opportunity to emphasise the barbaric scenario created by the Haryana police in their attack on Honda workers. We are considered to be the best followers of democracy in the world. But the Haryana incident has shook the world’s faith in Indian democracy. This untoward incident will be one of the biggest black spots in our governance and a major stumbling block in our future multilateral endeavours.

— Tenzin Sherab Dharamsala

See it this way

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• Let us not talk about how the workers who were fired at the Gurgaon Honda factory and those agitating on their behalf lost their jobs, let us talk instead about how they got their jobs and how they were able to feed their families. It sure was because of the FDI from the Japanese venture.

— Satis Bagdure Lubbock

Badly treated

• You seem to lay all the blame on the workers. What about reports of mistreatment of workers by the Japanese management? They were kicked, refused salary hikes and not allowed to form trade unions (a legitimate and just demand). Further, workers were pressurised to sign a so-called “good conduct undertaking”? Why, for a change, do you not urge the management to sign such an undertaking instead?

— Saumitra Ray Delhi

On the rampage

• A very apt editorial analysis. Communists are the culprits and are discredited for ruining the industrial base of West Bengal and Kerala. These demonstrators in Gurgaon were not peaceful. How can they start beating police, pelting stones and burning government and private vehicles? On the one hand, these people are jobless. On the other hand, those who have jobs stop working and disturb industrial peace.

— Jairaj Yadav On e-mail