The Crisis of 1974: Railway Strike and the Rank and File

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This book on the Indian Railway Strike of 1974 looks at the history, the role of the rank and file in the strike, and the fate of the strike itself. Even as one of the most distinctive aspects of the strike was the autonomy of the rank and file, the significance of the struggle had much to do with the nature of the time. The country was in the midst of a general political crisis, sections of the peasantry were in revolt, and there were expressions of solidarity from the industrial working class. However, the strike leadership was not resolute and decisive, and failed the rank and file. In the absence of a political vanguard, the uprising was left without a determined subject. The railwaymen did not transform India, but established for the first time in the political history of post-independence India the autonomy of the political practice of masses. Suddenly, the strike had opened up a vision whose infinite nature unnerved both the party or order and the parties of constitutional opposition.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ranabir Samaddar

Ranabir Samaddar, Director of the Peace Studies Programme at the South Asian Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu, was formerly Professor of South Asian Studies, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata. He is the author of a three volume study of post-colonial nationalism in South Asia, Whose Asia is it Anyway: Nation and the Region in South Asia (1996), The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999) and A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947-97 (2001), and of Memory, Identity, Power: Politics in the Jungle Mahals, 1890-1950 (1997), an account of the politics of community formation in the Jharkhand region.

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Bibliographic information

Title
The Crisis of 1974: Railway Strike and the Rank and File
Author
Edition
1st. ed.
Publisher
ISBN
9789384082963
Length
198p.,
Subjects