Bapu’s labour union cheats jobless mill workers of crores

AHMEDABAD: At a time when Gandhian Anna Hazare is set to begin a fast against corruption, a Gandhian institution in Ahmedabad has been accused of fraud.

Mahatma Gandhi started Majoor Mahajan Sangh in 1920 to fight for the rights of textile mill workers and even undertook a fast to convince mill owners to give the workers higher pay.

Today, the sangh is being accused of subverting Gandhian values. Police in Ahmedabad has accused leaders of the labour union of siphoning off crores of rupees meant to be compensation for jobless workers of 29 closed textile mills. The FIR, filed on Saturday, has named Raman Patel, president of the sangh, its secretary Manhar Shukla, chartered accountants Amal Datt & Associates, private lender Mohanlal Shah, Bapunagar Mahila Co-operative Bank and the HC appointed official liquidator as accused.

According to the FIR, savings accounts were opened in both cooperative and nationalized banks in the name of people who had never worked in a textile mill and the money withdrawn.

The scam came to light when Mansukh Parmar, who retired from Calico Mills in 1988, filed a complaint of fraud and embezzlement with the Navrangpura police. He told the police that when textile mills closed down in 1999, the Central government had come out with a scheme of giving the workers 18 months salary as compensation.

The sangh was asked to identify beneficiaries of the scheme and Parmar was on one of the committees identifying workers. Parmar alleges Calico Mills had 4,949 workers who were entitled for compensation. However, the sangh prepared a list of 5,757 names, 808 workers more than the actual number. He alleged that he was thrown out of the committee because he objected to this anomaly.

The sangh passed on the inflated list to the liquidator who issued cheques without verifying the names. Parmar had said in his complaint that instead of handing over cheques individually to beneficiaries, the liquidator gave all the cheques to the sangh officials.

The sangh officials have been accused of selling the cheques to a private lender at a discount. Police officials have found that at least 284 cheques have been issued in the names of people who had never worked in a textile mill. Yet, savings accounts were opened in their names in the Bapunagar bank and Rs 1.63 crore was withdrawn.

Times View 

This scam brings shame to the name of Mahatma Gandhi, who set up the Majoor Mahajan Sangh in 1920. It is indeed deplorable that a Gandhian institution is being accused of embezzlement of funds meant for former mill workers. This is corruption at its worst at a time when today's Gandhi, Anna Hazare, is leading a fight against this scourge.

The woes of being a Mahatma

The woes of Mahatmas are known to Mahatmas alone.

— MK Gandhi, Young India, April 21, 1927

Bapu could have w­ritten this to the new Mahatma am­ong us, ‘Mahatma’ Hazare nee ‘Anna’. On October 2 this year, coincidently or I believe not really, the Gram Sabha of Ralegan Siddhi passed a resolution that henceforth, the man they affectionately ca­lled ‘Anna’ will be called ‘Mahatma’. An­na Hazare pro­mptly refused to accept the honorific and as­k­ed that he be allowed to remain an ‘ordinary’ hu­man be­ing, and I would like to believe he was honest.

Bapu considered the title ‘Mahatma’ a burden. He wr­o­te reams to repudiate the honorific. “I would support any movement to drop altogether the use of the word ‘Mahatma’ before my name. My simple name sounds sw­eet without the adjective. The latter often stinks as wh­en it is applied to promote violence or untruth,” he wrote in Harijan on October 15, 1938.

Today, we see all sorts insincerely invoking his name to gain legitimacy and respe­ctability. Narendra Modi la­unched his campaign for pr­ime minister’s post with a farce he called Sadbhavana, Bapu would have cringed to see his photographs used as a backdrop on Narendra Mo­di’s stage and on the stage of the farce enacted by the Congress leaders on the road outside Sabarmati Ashram to co­unter Modi’s 5 star farce.

Bapu would have also cri­nged seeing his photograph as a backdrop on Anna Hazare’s stage at Ramleela Maidan, as day after day An­n­a roared that the corrupt s­h­ould be hanged and the tr­aitors done away with. Anna admirably managed to keep the emotions of his supporters in check for the entire period of his agitation and ensured there was no violence, but his speeches and utterances were extremely violent, from a stage where the backdrop was a large picture of Bapu.

Since April, when Anna first sat on a fast at Jantar Mantar to force the Government to act on the Jan Lok Pal Bill, he inspired people and became an iconic figure, those who manage him very assiduously built him up into an iconic figure and right from then there began comparisons with Bapu. In recent times, Anna comes closest to personifying the image of Bapu; that I agree. Since April, there ha­ve been whispers of ‘Aaj ka Gandhi’ and a campaign has been launched to turn him into a modern day Messiah, Mahatma, ably assisted by the media.

By August, he had been christened the ‘Naya Gandhi’ and slogans were raised c­o­mparing him to a tornado, which would sweep corruption away and annihilate the corrupt. ‘Anna nahi ye Aandhi hai, Aaj ka Gandhi hai’. Sounded very good but those who coined this slogan seem to be too overawed by Bapu and Indira Gandhi because she was the first Indian leader to be called a tornado, ‘Indira Nahi ye Aandhi hai!’ was a favourite slogan of her sycophants in Congress. An­n­a’s managers definitely ca­n’t claim to be original.

To me what is distasteful is the fact that ever since An­na launched his movement or, truly speaking, Anna’s supporters usurped the anti corruption segment for him, they have forced him to run a race, a race with a dead man — MK Gandhi.

At every step, comparisons have been made with Bapu, culminating in the pe­ople of Ralengansiddhi ano­inting him Mahatma on October 2, Bapu’s 142nd birth anniversary. It feels as if they are desperate to fast track An­na’s ascent to be placed on par with Bapu.

They and Anna will be better off reading and understanding what Bapu had to say about these kind of comparisons and ambitions of fol­lowers to aggrandise their leaders: “In the majority of cases addresses presented to me contain adjectives which I am ill able to carry. Their use can do good neither to the writers, nor to me. They unnecessarily humiliate me, for I have to confess that I do not deserve them. When th­ey are deserved, their use is superfluous. It cannot add to the st­rength of the qualities possessed by me. They may, if I am not on my guard, easily turn my head.”(Young In­dia: May 21, 1925.)

I hope Anna reads this, it is a warning Bapu left behind for all those who strove to be or on whom ‘Mahatmaship’ was forced.

I conclude with Bapu’s words from Young India, da­ted January 12, 1930: ‘Th­ank God, my much vau­nted Mahatmaship has never fo­oled me.”

(The writer is founder president, Mahatma

Gandhi Foundation)