General strike january 209/1/2023 15 crore or 150 million people is a little less than one half of the population of the United States of America, about 4 times the population of Canada and three fifths of the population of all of South India (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, Andaman and Nicobar islands, Lakshadweep and Puducherry combined). It is perhaps worthwhile to put this staggering number in perspective. On January 8-9, in the absence of observers from the Guinness Book, with little to no media coverage during or after the event, with an estimated 15 crore people participating- 1500 times the record-breaking size of the gathering in Kota, Indian labour may have conducted the largest general strike in human history. Instead of following the Prime Minister’s perfect solution of yoga, they chose to stick to a bargaining device used for centuries all over the world and has given us such things as the eight hour work day, weekends, minimum wages, overtime, and safety standards. This distress was of course felt by the country’s working classes well before the publication of the Business Standard report and they had made an attempt on January 8-9, 2019 to bring the public’s attention to it. Data from the National Sample Survey Office’s Periodic Labour Force survey, withheld from release by the Government, revealed that India’s unemployment rate in 2017-18 stood at a 45 year high of 6.1%, increasing almost three-fold from its 2011-12 value of 2.2%. “Yoga has the perfect solution to the problems we face, either as individuals or in society.” Īs it turns out, an explosive report first published in Business Standard on Janudetailed one such problem the citizens of our country were facing at that very moment on both the individual as well as social level. “Yoga is beautiful because it is ancient yet modern,” declared Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an event held at the Dehradun’s Forest Research Institute. He, along with the then chief minister of Rajasthan Vasundhara Raje, were awarded a certificate declaring that the Kota district administration along with Patanjali Yogpeeth had organized the largest gathering of people performing yoga worldwide. Baba Ramdev led a yoga session for over one lakh people in the city of Kota, Rajasthan. On the fourth International Yoga Day, June 21, 2018, as representatives of the Guinness Book of World Records observed, yoga guru and co-founder of Patanjali Ayurved Ltd. The Kisan Long March of 2018 and the workers’ General Strike of early 2019 are evidence of this. This uprising, which is of a scale unseen since the 1970s is not merely a reaction to the isolated event of the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 but should be seen as the culmination of the stresses felt by various sections of the society due to severe agrarian distress, an unemployment crisis, and an apathetic ruling dispensation. India too has witnessed several uprisings, the most recent of these being the anti-CAA/NRC/NPR demonstrations happening all over the country. Hong Kong, France, Iran, Iraq, Chile, Lebanon, Malta, Bolivia and Puerto Rico are a few such places. Ģ019 has been called “the year of protests” because of the number of popular movements around the world in resistance to authoritarianism and in demand of just and equitable living conditions. The hope is that such a critique would help in demanding that the mainstream media cover issues of direct benefit to its audience as well as encourage alternative media platforms to rectify this deficit, writes C. In the light of the upcoming general strike on January 8, 2020, this article looks at media coverage of the general strike of 2019. Often however, in a reversal of this expectation, chosen issues are covered to generate public interest. An uncontroversial expectation is that media should cover issues of public interest. The role of a free media in such popular struggles to is hard to overstate.
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