‘Many Straws Make a Nest’

Harsh Thakor

Sher Singh’s death, on January 25th at the age of 75, left an irreparable loss to the labour movement in Faridabad and the areas around NCR Delhi. Wherever there was a labour struggle going on, the workers would find Sher Singh participating with heart and soul.

His character blended the tenacity and courage of a soldier with the originality and imagination of an artist. Rebelling against conventional norms and innovating new methods characterised his life’s work.

Even if one disagreed with him, he was ever tolerant and opened avenues for a critical debate. He had immense patience even with those who did not respond to his outreach and messages.

Ideologically he was at cross roads with many of his colleagues harbouring deep disagreements with him on the issue of labour organising.

He profusely professed and engaged in breaking away from all past conventions in trade Union movement, with his work sowing seeds to breed innovative experiments.

Everyone who visited him in the Autopin slum, Faridabad, felt at absolutely at home with him. One could meet him at any time, without any prior appointment.  The slum was small and cramped, with low ceilings, just like hundreds of thousands of similar places around the country where the working poor made homes for themselves in wretched surroundings.

Sher Singh was brought up in Hisar, with his father serving in the British Army. He had the rich grounding of excelling in an elite military school in Belgaum; higher education in BITS Pilani and elsewhere. He earned his baptism into political activism during the Emergency. He recounted his incompetence and failures in working for social and political change, with his views and activism being shaped by agreements and disagreements with fellow travellers.

 Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar [FMS] was the epitome of innovation. Publishing it every month without a break since 1982 and then distributing it among workers in Faridabad, Okhla, Kapashera, and Manesar along with his colleagues was his most commendable achievement.

FMS mainly concentrated on the lives and concerns of daily wage workers.

 After ceasing publication of FMS during Covid, he engaged on a mission of interacting with workers and friends of workers across the country, resurrecting his youthful spirit of yesteryears. He began   documenting important materials from previous issues while sharing them with people on WhatsApp. For the last 2 years, he was regularly touring the whole of India and kept narrating his journey and conversations with labourers on WhatsApp.

His German colleagues had made a film on his work, ‘Many Straws Make a Nest’: A Documentary about Proletarian Unrest in Delhi’s Industrial Belt.’

His analytical critique of the bureaucracy and rigid structure of the central and established trade unions drew many students/youth towards formulating alternative trade union concept and politics.

Long before the intervention of social media, scores of people were drawn by Sher Singh’s personality and charisma. When referring to trade union movement, he diagnosed that in this phase of the capitalist era when the Factory Fortress System was replaced by an Industrial Hub like IMT-Auto Hub, the union of organised and unorganised workers would serve no purpose.

Sher Singh affirmed that there should be a common ground or place where formal and informal workers can assemble and share their experiences and ideas.

He was equally critical of harbouring personality cult of leader in trade unions as well as analysis of mysterious spontaneity.

Sher Singh was sceptical of unrepresentative and hierarchical unions, where the rank-and-file workers had no role other than following the diktats of the leadership. Instead, he advocated self-activity among the workers, a key theme running through the length and breadth of the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar archive.

He advocated “Morphic Resonance”, suggesting organisation could function without conventional meetings, speeches and leaders. His slogan was “Synergy, Exchange, Dialogue, Invitation.”

A pamphlet (online) titled A Ballad Against Work, published by Majdoor Library in Autopin Jhuggi conveys the changing nature of employment and how the workers reconciled themselves with such changes. It navigated acts of resistance against the backdrop of the dynamics of the country’s broader labour movement.

He played a pivotal role in steering of the Maruti movement. In June 2011, when Maruti workers staged a sit-in strike for 13 days inside the company, everyone, including the progressive media, acknowledged that Maruti workers had established control over the factory.

Sher Singh reported in his magazine and in conversations that “In June 2011, the workers of A and B shifts together eradicated the control of the company and the government from the factory.”

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 35, Feb 23 - March 1, 2025