INDIA’S BELEAGUERED TRADE UNION MOVEMENT AND LABOUR RIGHTS JURISPRUDENCE IN COLONIAL AND IMMEDIATE POST-COLONIAL LEGAL HISTORY THROUGH THE WORKS OF BASAWON SINGH

Abstract

India was a captive market of the British Empire. Its forced colonial modernity led to a stunted industrial and capital growth apart from a stunted legal and constitutional development. The colonial subjecthood led to a severe lacuna in the rights of industrial labour as part of labour rights and a severe violation of fundamental human rights of labour in India. Such exploitation of labour was also done by India’s nascent “native” industrialists and management. Labour rights jurisprudence suffered. In this context, Indian nationalists who were fighting against British colonial rule, had also developed a political programme often inspired by democratic and socialistic ideas to usher India into a free and more egalitarian society. One such major figure who tirelessly worked for labour rights was Basawon Singh. This article focusses attention on his activities as a leading trade unionist of the country from colonial late-1930s to post-colonial late-1940s and beyond, and hopes to showcase how some of the issues and challenges of those times might still be unfortunately relevant in our own to expand inalienable fundamental human rights. The work is thus global in its appeal for its anti-colonial struggles but also due to resonances in the nature and tensions of state formation, and in the conception of the structure of ordering such post-colonial economy and polity in order to both de-colonize it but also to improve fundamental human rights, indeed labour rights jurisprudence.