INTUC is losing its place in major international and national labour welfare bodies.
While Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been raising issues related to the rights of workers and labourers, the Congress affiliated trade union, Indian Trade National Union Congress (INTUC), is losing its relevance due to the failure on the part of the Congress leadership to enforce its decisions on the various factions operating within the body.
This factionalism has cost the trade body a place in major international and national labour welfare bodies that impact the fate of millions of workers in India.
Recently, when the Central government reconstituted the all important Central Board of Trustees (CBT) of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), there was no representative from INTUC, which is regarded as the largest union in the country, in the said body. Representatives from other trade bodies including from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), Hind Mazdoor Sabha, Communist Party of India (M)-affiliated Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), Trade Union Coordination Centre, Self Employed Women’s Association, National Front of Indian Trade Union were part of the trustee list.
In 2016, Government of India had stopped including INTUC in government panels after several groups started sending their representatives for a place in these panels, each claiming themselves as the real INTUC.
Sources aware of the matter told The Sunday Guardian that as of now, at least 23 cases seeking a decision on which the real INTUC is, that have been filed by various members of two warring groups—the Dadai Dubey faction and the Sanjeeva Reddy faction—are pending in different high courts across India. In 2018, the Supreme Court had asked both these groups to solve their dispute in front of the Delhi High Court, where a matter was already pending. Apart from the Delhi High court, similar matters are pending in Nagpur High Court, Jabalpur High Court, Kolkata High Court and Bhubaneswar High Court.
In December 2022, the Congress had announced to recognize the faction led by G. Sanjeeva Reddy as the real INTUC, while rejecting the claims of Chandrashekhar Dubey, thereby seemingly ending the nearly two-decades-old internal fight between the two factions.
The decision was based on the findings of the two-member committee that had Mallikarjun Kharge and Digvijaya Singh in it and was constituted on the directions of the then party president Sonia Gandhi in August 2021.
While announcing the decision, Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal had told both the factions to resolve all their differences amicably and immediately withdraw all related pending cases and work jointly for elections for various INTUC posts, while warning that “failure to carry out the instructions would be viewed seriously”.
The Congress leadership had also appointed a coordination committee to keep an eye on the affairs of INTUC, which has Tariq Anwar as convenor and four other members including Harish Rawat, K. Muraleedharan, Rajmani Patel and Udit Raj.
Sonia Gandhi had decided to end this dispute as she had rightly realised that the internal dispute was harming the party’s electoral plans. As per INTUC members, the body has the ability to impact voting patterns in at least 95-100 Lok Sabha seats across the country due to its combined membership, which they claim is about 7 crores.
Post the December 2022 decision, INTUC members were expecting that the cases filed by the two groups against each other will be withdrawn and a new body constituted amicably which will pave the way for the inclusion of INTUC in Central government labour bodies.
However, after more than 13 months of the decision, the two factions continue to fight each other because of which the labour ministry, despite its intentions otherwise, has been unable to include INTUC members in the multiple committees including, but not limited to, Coal India joint bipartite committee related to workers’ wages and working condition, which deliberates upon the wages and working condition for lakhs of coal workers.
Confirming that a reconciliation of any kind was yet to happen, members of both the Dubey and the Reddy factions told The Sunday Guardian that the cases filed against each other are still pending in court and members affiliated to the Reddy factions only are being given a place in the INTUC.
The Dubey faction is also organizing a meeting of INTUC workers in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh on 14 February, which may be attended by the Congress Chief Minister Suhkvinder Singh Sukhu, but will be boycotted by members of the Reddy faction.
“Rahul Gandhi has been speaking in Parliament and outside about the welfare of workers and labourers, but perhaps he is not realising that the main tool that he has at his disposal that can really work for our welfare, the INTUC, is slowly losing its relevance because of fights among big leaders. We had expected that after the much needed intervention of Sonia Gandhi, things will be sorted, but even after one year, nothing has changed,” a senior INTUC functionary told The Sunday Guardian.