No shade under the red flag

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It is easy to see why. Giant mills with their cavernous red brick buildings still dot the cityscape. But they are a picture of decrepitude and despair —not a wisp of smoke emanate from the tall chimneys, three-storey high rusting machinery get sold as scrap, and monkeys jump in and out through broken window panes, making the most of the vast spaces within that have over time turned vacuous.

It is election time and as politicians of every party run helter skelter for votes, the simmering issue of the closed mills has once again come to the fore. In 1989, CPI(M)’s Subhasini Ali won the seat, not least because she had been in the forefront of the struggle against the then nascent move to shut down the mills.

In the ‘90s, as communal passions overrode much of UP, Kanpur too went the BJP way but in 1999 the Congress won the seat. In subsequent elections, the Congress won two of the five assembly segments and also bagged the post of mayor.

Congress MP Shree Prakash Jaiswal has been renominated and faces three major opponents—Satyadeo Pachauri (BJP), Haji Mushtaq Solanki (SP) and Subhasini Ali (CPI-M). This is the first constituency on the Golden Quadrilateral route from Delhi where the Congress has a vibrant presence. But with the SP and CPI(M) posed to take a chunk of the ‘‘secular’’ vote, Jaiswal might find it tough.

Retrenched workers, most of whom now eke out a living through casual labour in the city’s streets, are a formidable vote bank but are unlikely to vote en bloc. Their anger against the BJP, particularly against the prime minister, is palpable because Vajpayee had promised to reopen the mills in 1999 but over the past five years many more have shut down.

Outside Victoria Mills, several ex-workers say their vote will go to whichever party ensures a fair deal. Welfare officer A K Rai says, ‘‘We know the five NTC mills that were shut down and sold cannot be reopened. But the government can at least open one NTC mill and one BIC (British India Corporation) mill with the crores of rupees it has made from selling off the mills.’’

At the Elgin Mill dharna, where temporary workers are fighting for a just compensation, TU leader Mohammad Sami trains his guns against the CPI(M). ‘‘The Red Flag unions gave up the struggle, Subhasini is today seeking votes as a mahila leader, not a leader of the mazdoors.’’

Subhasini Ali dismisses the workers on dharna as ‘‘paid agents’’ of rival unions and to a query on the charge of betrayal, snaps: ‘‘What kind of an idiotic question is this? When the government decides to close down the mills, what can the union do? We kept them going for three-four years but if they put locks on the gates, what are we supposed to do?’’

Other CPI(M) members, less irascible than Ali, gently explain that in every TU struggle there comes a stage ‘‘when you cannot move forward—there is no point giving out false promises.’’

After 1988-89 when 65 mills in Bombay and 45 in Ahmedabad shut down, the party saw the writing on the wall and shifted its attention to the new informal sector that has mushroomed in Kanpur.

The mills have closed down but Kanpur continues to be a magnet for job-seekers of every hue — from impoverished peasants (Kanpur has as many as 84,000 registered rickshawpullers) to wannabe IITians (the city has a massive ‘‘coaching’’ industry that rivals Kota in Rajasthan). In this cauldron, primordial ties of caste and community may have displaced an earlier faith in class solidarity but Kanpur might yet surprise as it did in 1999 by ensuring one of the few Congress victories in all of UP.