CALCUTTA — This kaleidoscopic city of 15 million people stopped dead last Tuesday. Flights were canceled at the airport. The streets, ordinarily throbbing with traffic and humanity, were almost empty. And thousands of shopkeepers like Wazeed Khan shuttered their stores in observance of a familiar Indian ritual — the shutdown strike.
Deshakalyan Chowdhury/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The shutdown was called by trade unions to protest inflation and privatization, but these sorts of strikes have become so frequent that the specifics hardly mattered to Mr. Khan, who like many Indians has come to regard them as little more than a nuisance, if a costly one.
“This never helps the people,” Mr. Khan said. “Never. We are losing business. And this happens frequently. Some months it happens several times.”
Few democratic rights are more cherished in India, or considered more essential as a release valve for societal pressures, than the right to protest. India won independence from Britain on the strength of the civil disobedience campaigns led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, and has taken great pride in how this peaceful freedom movement created the world’s largest democracy.
But as India’s clamorous politics have steadily fragmented with a proliferation of political parties, the shutdown strike, known as a bandh, has increasingly become an object of public scorn and disillusionment. Political parties, competing in a crowded political field, often use bandhs to flex their muscles or carve out turf by proving they can shut down a city or even the whole country.
Today, many Indians see these bandhs as symbols of dysfunction rather than of political vitality. Unlike other forms of protest, the bandh can inflict huge economic losses, often to the common working person in whose name such strikes are called.
“The bandh is no longer a symbol of the people’s angst,” wrote Suhel Seth on the morning after the Calcutta strike in a front-page column in The Telegraph, the city’s leading newspaper. “It no longer represents the frustrations of the governed. Instead, it is a symbol of our weakening polity.”
No corner of the country is spared. Strikes, large and small, are conducted across India’s social spectrum, from Maoist insurgents in the countryside to bug sprayers in New Delhi. At one of New Delhi’s most prestigious universities, professors have disrupted classes for weeks to protest plans to shift to a semester system.
This month, in the state of Rajasthan, doctors at government hospitals, angry about an episode with the local police, stopped treating patients; they called off the strike last week after national criticism, and the deaths of some patients.
But it is the political parties that can paralyze a major city, or even the entire nation. In February in the country’s financial capital, Mumbai, a right wing party, the Shiv Sena, called a bandh to block the opening of a movie, a move interpreted as a challenge to the state’s Congress Party government. Congress leaders, their political prestige as well as civic order on the line, dispatched thousands of riot police officers at great public cost to ensure the movie could be shown.
In July, opposition parties, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., staged a nationwide bandh to protest fuel price increases by the government. Opposition leaders, having effectively shut down much of the country, proclaimed victory, even as critics saw the strike as a politically motivated effort by the B.J.P. to demonstrate its national relevance. Business groups estimated that the economy suffered roughly $650 million in losses, with much of the burden falling on the low-income wage earners most vulnerable to inflation.
Beyond strikes, the same shutdown ethos has also spilled into the Indian Parliament, where disruptions and opposition walkouts forced repeated adjournments in the recently completed session. Meira Kumar, the speaker of Parliament’s lower house, the Lok Sabha, warned that “the trend of disrupting the proceedings days on end is alarming, and if not checked, will ultimately lead to unforeseen consequences.”
India’s Supreme Court has issued rulings against bandhs and, in certain cases, has fined political parties for conducting them. Yet the bandhs continue. Critics do not argue that India needs to curb protest, and such a step seems unlikely, given the central place of free speech and dissent in India’s democracy.
India boasts its own protest vocabulary: there is the sit-down strike (sometimes a hunger strike) known as the dharna; the protest march, or virodh pradarshan; the blockade of a government or political office, known as the gherao; and many others. But the bandhs, which call for the closing of businesses and government offices, and for a public boycott of work, cause the most disruption and seem to have lost the most public favor.
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