Datta Samant

It is not easy to become a popular leader in Mumbai if you don't have a godfather. But a keen insight on the life and times of former trade union strongman Dutta Samant and his struggle for mill workers can be seen in Mahesh Manjrekar’s film, City of Gold. Remembers Syed Mumtaz Mir, a former mill worker: "It was January 1995 when I first met Datta Samant. In 2003 -04 when the voluntary retirement scheme was introduced, my company wrongly terminated me, because I had filed two cases against it. I met Datta Samant along with Raj Babbar, actor turned politician. Samant used his influence and I was reinstated. He was a good man and a real hero of mill workers.”

Mumtaz Mir is not the only one. Just about everyone who witnessed the 1982 mill workers strike regards the slain leader as the real hero of Maharashtra.

Says Bharat Selar, office bearer of Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti: “Today, mill workers' families are in bad shape; if Doctor Saheb had been here, things would have been different.''

Samant grew up in Deobag on the Konkan coast of Maharashtra, his background middle-class Marathi. He spent his early years in Mumbai's Ghatkopar. In the 1967 assembly elections, he was elected on a Samyukt Kruti Samiti ticket.

Remembers Bhushan, second among Datta Samant's sons who now presides over Kamgar Aghadi: "My father began his career in 1965 as a medical doctor where he helped quarry workers who toiled in the stone mines of Chandivali. In 1972 he won the election from Chandivali constituency and formed the Association of Engineering Workers and Maharashtra General Kamgar Union.”

                                                        

Come 1975 and the Emergency saw him behind bars, given his reputation as a militant unionist. But Samant's popularity increased with his release in 1977. In late 1981, he was requested by mill workers to lead them and in 1982 he formed Kamgar Aghadi along with his wife Vinita. Soon an estimated three lakh mill workers walked out, forcing the entire industry of the city to be shut down for over a year.

Samant demanded that along with wage hikes, the government should scrap the Bombay Industrial Act, 1947 and de-recognise the Rashtriye Mill Mazdoor Sangh as the only official union of the city's industries.

On January 16, 1997, he was mysteriously assassinated. The police picked up 12 boys aged 18 to 19, claiming they were the killers. After the trial, eight of them were released while four were convicted.

Bhushan believes they were just a front. "After 14 years the case remains unsolved. The Shiv Sena formed the government then, and in the list of accused was Ramesh Patil, now MLA from Maharashtra Nav Nirman Sena,'' he says. 

It's a pity in these days of globalisation no one really cares for workers like Dada Samant did. No one seems to be in a hurry to what happened to Samant either.