And When Athena Takes Up The Cudgel Of Globalisation

Throwing Away Her Blind And Scale

Athena, the Goddess and symbol of justice, had troublesome days in this half (or quarter) baked ‘democracy', that is, India . When the principal symbols of democracy, at least in the eyes of the Indian public, the parliament and legislative assemblies, all got tainted by political bosses of different colours and shades and govt. administration “led” by them, when Indian version of democracy, or, the “world's biggest democracy” looked too hollow to attract even a pinch of faith from the citizens, when the public ‘faith' on this system or rule waned to all time low, the courts of India, especially the Supreme Court, came to rescue the image. And the publicus, or the aam-admi, got at least some thing, though much ‘expensive', to put their faith on. In that phase Athena earned a halo round head. Blind on her eyes, scales in her hand, she portrayed – no one will be spared if found guilty, rest assured, Justice will be delivered. Bourgeoisie media quickly coined the term “Judicial Activism” to describe this phase; a thing by which Athena, to a good extent, “bewitched” the citizens, even the downtrodden, e.g. the workers, and embarrassed the embellished leaders of established parliamentary political parties. And what not she had to do; from repeatedly rebuking the police, to fixing the maximum weight of a school-bag of a child .....! Revolutionary communist activists, working among workers, know how difficult it is to make the workers understand the class character of the state machinery, including the judiciary; because in reality the courts served, to some extent, as their last straw, even in some of their practical economic (TU) struggle.

But activist Athena soon started to change or got to change. Activism has its logic. And our poor parliamentarians, ‘law makers', so helpless to quickly get rid of Electoral Arithmetic, could not yet make sufficient ‘strong', ‘reformed' laws regarding ‘labour' in the changed world under globalisation. The ex-BJP/NDA govt. started to work on this field and the present Cong. /UPA govt. is on the track too. But the rulers are impatient. Present day Gods, the Imperial Capitalists and native cronies want immediately to wash off their hands the old ‘paints' of Welfarism, by which they had to do to adorn themselves in the post 2 nd world war days; one of the main reasons being the fear of Spectre of Communism spreading its wings on the globe. But now they have tasted blood. The International working class struggle is defeated. And in India , they have seen very low ebb of the working class struggle for almost a couple of decades or more. By 1991 that disastrous and humiliating defeat was nakedly visible. In comes WTO. That was also more than a decade back. How long they'll have to wait! In this situation Athena took up the cudgel on their behalf. The change started slowly. In 2004 she spoke against strike, questioning the very ‘right' of the working class to do so. In Kerala, she spoke against ‘Bandh', a peculiar Indian form (or deform!) of general strike. Then in the Tamilnadu strike of govt. employees, the govt. there took ruthless action; and that got sanction from the Supreme Court. More or less these are the main ‘other kinds of' activism Athena showed in the last two years preceding 2006.

But in the spring of 2006 Athena again got restless. Within a couple of weeks came two major pronouncements. Effectively they meant: (1) Govt. can sack workers and employees closing down partly /wholly any dept. for economic reasons of efficiency (business efficiency), and the sacked fellows can not demand their reinstatement in any other dept. whatsoever. (2) Daily wage earning labourers working for a long period under any govt. dept. can not claim to become member of ‘permanent' workforce. Certainly the private sectors can apply these ‘judgements' in their works too. Lords were pleased. But their print-media servants are still uncertain as to with how much hype they should celebrate, and they showed restraint (which otherwise would have been front page banner head lines).

As things are going on, it is becoming to some extent easier to explain the class character of the “state” as explained by Lenin in his The State and Revolution. So, naturally, the bosses of the trade unions controlled by the arch reformist-revisionists, the AITUC and the CITU, are becoming ‘sad'. Their sorrow over the recent Supreme Court rulings got due place in the print-media and now that is all well known to the readers. Their effort to soak the heart of the workers by the trickled down drops of juices of Welfare capitalism, and thus to imprison the working class in bourgeoisie way of thinking are at stake.

But this is capitalism, whose motto, as regards the workers, is hire and fire, all through its history but for the short stint of ‘Welfarism'. And, even in the ‘welfarist epoch', only a section of the working class, a minority highly organised part got the benefits of their struggle. We should be grateful to Athena to show herself in her Mars-ian, warrior robe, to make apparent the true class character of courts and judicial system in bourgeoisie democracy. The working class through its fights, including those in the TU arena, will have to get rid of bourgeoisie senses of legality, bourgeoisie ethics, etc. and will simultaneously develop in them proletarian revolutionary sense of justice. Revolutionary communist activists should not miss this golden chance to help the proletariat in this urgent and important matter. But they are to keep in mind that still the halo of Athena remains to a great extent; still the old ‘glorious' judicial activism is alive. From the Best Bakery case to the imprisonment of the megastar Salman Khan, from the courts rebuff to the police in Jessica Lal case to the super fast judgement in some rape cases, etc., the old version of Athena is very much alive. And alive it will have to remain, particularly in many of those cases where the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are not at loggerheads, so as to serve this quarter baked democracy with some sizzling garnishes to its so much right-less citizens.

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