Now that the Assam assembly election dates have been announced for 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is wasting no time in political signalling. He wore an Assamese gamucha when taking his first Covid vaccine shot Monday at Delhi’s AIIMS hospital. And even though the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens have got the national spotlight when it comes to issues in the northeastern state, parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress are lining up to seek votes from Assam’s 30-lakh tea garden workers and address their grievances. Or at least, promising to.
Long considered a Congress bastion, the BJP has made considerable progress in reaching out to workers five years ago. And even though Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal has been criticised for not fulfilling the 2016 promises of land pattas and ST status for the workers made by Modi, the BJP is the only party today that has a strategy for the tea gardens. But what about the will?
Apart from featuring in the Assam tableau on Delhi’s Rajpath this Republic Day, the tea garden workers have been out of sight and out of mind for most governments.
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New Delhi has promises
The BJP has a concrete plan for the tea workers’ material welfare. Following up the Chah Bagicha Dhan Puraskar Scheme with the latest allocation of Rs 3,000 to the workers, Rs 12,000 to every pregnant female worker, and the interim increase of the daily wage by Rs 50, the party has assured that such schemes will continue, with free breakfasts and midday meals to children, along with a 10 per cent reservation in colleges. Their eternal adversary, the Congress has only promised to hike the daily wage of tea garden workers. During his recent visit to Assam, Rahul Gandhi said wages will be increased to Rs 365 a day if Congress comes to power. But increasing wages is not enough. Tea workers have been largely ignored in the Assamese identity debate by various regional parties. Aware of how the tea tribes occupy a middling zone in such axioms of belonging and how Assamese sub-nationalism has ignored them, the BJP has been quick to assert how the tea workers are the “true sons” of the soil while also giving adequate political representation to them. Three BJP MPs – Pallab Lochan Das, Rameshwar Teli and Kamakhya Prasad Tassa — are from the tea garden community.
The adibasi tea garden community makes up 17 per cent of Assam’s population, and illiteracy is rampant. The largest trade union of tea workers, Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS), protested this January and put across an 11-point list of demands, which includes Scheduled Tribe status and separate autonomous council. The workers are also seeing a flurry of visits from New Delhi ahead of the assembly election. With PM Modi being the latest to say in Assam’s Dehkiajuli that forces abroad were conspiring to tarnish the image of Indian tea. He said, “Every tea garden, every tea worker will seek answers from those political parties behind the conspirators.”
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman set aside Rs 1,000 crore in the 2021 Budget for the welfare of Assam and West Bengal’s tea workers. But the identity of the tea garden worker continues to be centred on the cheap labour they have provided. A labourer’s daily wage till recently stood at the paltry sum of Rs 167, being increased only by Rs 30 in the last five years – breaching the assurance of the BJP government that they would increase the salary to Rs 351. However, on 20 February, the Sonowal-led government raised the amount by a meagre Rs 50 to Rs 217, in a bid to pacify the disgruntlement. Interestingly, this happened only after Rahul Gandhi’s visit and promise. Priyanka Gandhi is visiting Assam this week, and perhaps will promise new things to the community. Tea garden workers know it will amount to nothing but hasty tokenism.
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Tableau to reality
The theme of the 2021 state tableau on Republic Day may have been “Assam Tea — Backbone of The State Economy”, but the representation was far from reality.
The tea garden community is a monolithic term that encompasses a wide, multi-ethnic heterogeneity of adibasi tribes employed in tea plantations.
They were first brought to Assam in the 1840s by the British from central India. As historians Jayeeta Sharma and Nitin Sinha have written, these migrant workers became a commodity of cheap labour, transforming what the colonial state saw as hilly jungles of waste to manicured gardens of capitalist extraction.
These immigrant ‘coolies’ were favoured for their hard manual labour against the local tribes because their lack of choice was translated as willingness to work under harsh exploitation with little pay. But even as the reins of power changed hands from the colonial state to that of the Indian government, life in the gardens continued to remain bleak.
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The community is yet to be granted ST status, even though their adibasi counterparts in other parts of India have been deemed so. In a region where much of the population has been demarcated on their tribal identity, the case of these adibasi workers stands as an instance where their indigeneity continues to be a battlefield of belonging. This negation of tribal status has been tied to the community being identified primarily on the basis of labour, linked to realities of extraction and exploitation. The living conditions of women are a far cry from the rosy-cheeked replicas of the Assam tableaux: working in the gardens since the crack of dawn, women face the brunt of long hours of labour under harsh weather, with little access to drinking water, sanitation facilities and childcare. Unsurprisingly, mortality is at an all-time high and illiteracy is rampant, with many young girls dropping out of school and numerous boys continuing to be employed in the garden factories for long hours with negligible safety gears.
A 2017 Women and Child Development Ministry report notes that 89 per cent of tea gardens don’t have sanitation facilities. More than 84 per cent of women tea workers have to work through their periods.
And even though the state uses verdant pictures of tea gardens for tourism, the adibasis have long been removed to the margins. The line between appropriation and representation stands blurred. The voices from the tea gardens have made clear that much remains to be done on the plantations of Assam. Increase in salary as a means of financial improvement has to be ascertained not in terms of benevolence, but in terms of rights. If the cup of Assam tea is the backbone of the state’s economy, it is only at the cost of a bitter brew of exploitation and mistreatment in the gardens.
The author is a graduate in history and is based in Guwahati. Her interests include history and literature, especially of northeast India. Views are personal.