The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, is an important milestone in the history of India`s working people. It is a victory snatched from a series of administrations `committed` to `simplifying` labour laws to make them more `flexible` fraudulent expressions for the two hundred-year-old practice of hiring and firing at will, which the working class movement has had to fight against. From that perspective, the struggle to get this legislation passed can be seen as part and parcel of the struggles to guarantee employment to different sections of the people. In fact, recently France saw an intransigent neo-liberal government driving its people to near revolt with its determination to push back employment guarantees won by the working class, singling out a section of workers the youth and imposing the laws of the jungle such as hiring and firing at will again. Not surprisingly, the people fought back and won.

Back in India, no one should, therefore, labour under the illusion that the pro-liberalisation forces, either of the NDA or UPA combines, were at any pains to pass an Act that is a slap in the face for their policies. Nor should we be under the illusion that the mobilisations conducted by small, motivated groups with narrow or no mass base achieved the passage of the Act as it is.

In fact, the law originally framed by the government was little more than eyewash. First, one of the members of a family holding the same ration card (and by that they possibly meant the non-existent BPL cards) was entitled to a single job. Second, the work offered was for 100 days but it was stated that the districts could be changed at will after a year, ensuring that the measure would be a dead one by the time people got to know of it. Third, the government attacked the very concept of a minimum wage in the original draft, hoping to destroy yet another important concession that the working class had won over half a century ago, by legislating an arbitrary wage.

The Left refused to partake of the loaves and fish of office. It forced the UPA government, which was dependent on the Left`s support, to declare allegiance to a Common Minimum Programme, of which the passage of a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was an important element. My own meeting with the Standing Committee convinced me that it was primarily the determination of the Left Members of Parliament at the Standing Committee stage and subsequent debates that ensured the Act`s quick passage through both Houses. Of course, there was mass pressure from the other constituents that helped them in their effort.

There was also a third element that we ought not to ignore. This was to be a safety net for a peasantry that would inevitably be dispossessed by latifundists and agro-monopolies in accordance with the neo-liberal principles of growth. The approach of the organised Left has constantly been to link this Employment Guarantee Act with pressure to implement land reforms. The approach of the “reformers” is to pretend that the dispossession of the small peasantry is inevitable following the archaic laws that develop capitalism. These laws work towards a narrow monopoly of ownership of land and dispossession of the mass of peasants, who could then be driven off to attack those less fortunate than themselves, become fodder for empires or the genocidal hordes of colonial forces, dispossessing others just as they themselves had been dispossessed. None of this is unavoidable.

From hindsight we know that every aspect of these destructive tendencies can and must be fought with a powerful worker-peasant alliance that can transform the land question and the social ownership of resources to the best advantage of the masses. One can only look at the legislation as a very small step in this direction. To see it either as a panacea or as a genuine “safety net” would be an illusion that would cost us dearly.

Still, whatever its limitations, it must be implemented. The most important thing is the message that this demand-based law must get to the people in concrete ways. In the Nandurbar district of Maharashtra, the All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU) alone has submitted some 30,000 applications for work. A mass movement of this kind all over the country would awaken people to the fact that they have a right to live and the State has the responsibility to ensure it.

That is why the Left insisted that the Act not be restricted to any one category of unemployed, to be chosen by the State. Every member of every rural household willing to do manual work has the right to apply if he or she has had no work for 15 days, and it can be done on a plain sheet of paper. The State cannot refuse to register the demand. The consciousness of this primary right among the poorest is our first victory.

Moreover, following registration it is the duty of the State to ensure that work or unemployment relief be forthcoming. If it does not, this Act must be clubbed together with the Right to Information Act to scrutinise the muster rolls in one`s community and to see to it that every unemployed household gets its due. Further, the law as it stands now, is forced to pay the national minimum referral wage of about Rs 65 or the minimum wage, whichever is more. So, while in itself the Act is not earthshaking, with supporting labour legislation, it can become a powerful instrument in the hands of the rural labour and prevent their marginalisation.

The Act by itself is no more than a piece of paper. But once it is articulated in the context of other legislations and instruments of struggle, and especially in the perspective of social transformation through class struggle, it acquires a revolutionary content. Our duty as trade unionists is to ensure that it gets that content on the ground. And there is sufficient force out there to ensure its success. So we should do all we can to work for it.