Speech delivered by Dr. Das, Joint Secretary of Kamgar Ekta Committee at the 4th National Convention of India Railway Employees Federation on 21 & 22 September 2025 at Varanasi
Dear Comrades,
With great pleasure, I, Dr. Das, Joint Secretary of Kamgar Ekta Committee, extend you fraternal greetings from Kamgar Ekta Committee and its Secretary Dr. Mathew. Dr. Mathew is unable to attend this conference due to some commitments which he had already given.
We extend you all the best wishes for the success of your 4th Convention. We congratulate you for your election as recognized union in NER, ECR and RCF Kapurthala.
Dear Comrades,
Kamgar Ekta Committee, known in North India as Mazdoor Ekta Committee and in South as Tholilar Ottrumai Iyakkam or Workers’ Unity Movement, took the initiative in the formation of the All India Forum Against Privatization on 4th July 2021, i.e. a little over 4 years ago. Over the last four years the membership of AIFAP has grown to 127 organizations.
National and State level unions / associations / organizations of workers across various sectors including Railways, Banks, Insurance, Electricity, Coal, Docks and Ports, Airlines, Defense, Mining, Petroleum, State government, Road transport, Refineries, Education, Telecom etc. so also people’s and workers organizations like Purogami Mahila Sangathan, , Surat Trade Union Council, Lok Raj Sangathan etc.
We have organized dozens of very well attended Zoom meetings covering struggles of public sector employees against privatization and in defense of their rights. Many national and state level leaders of various organizations have participated in the Zoom meetings. In one such Zoom meeting held recently on 20 July 2025 your Comrade Akhilesh Pandey was one of the main speakers.
We have also participated physically in various places across India in struggles against privatization. Recently on 15th April we also organized a very successful Conference in the Constitution Club, New Delhi entitled All India Conference on Privatization of Electricity and Other Sectors.
I am also very happy to inform you that our initiative bore fruit and recently a memorandum signed by nine federations and unions active in Indian Railways including your IREF and Kamgar Ekta Committee has been submitted to Chairman and CEO Railway Board, demanding withdrawal of the Railway Board Circular, which authorized General Managers of 4 Railway Zones to employ engineers and technicians on contract basis in the S&T Department. The Joint memorandum has also demanded the immediate filling up of the nearly 2 lakh vacancies in the safety departments of the Indian Railways. The railway organisations also undertook the exercise of estimating the additional posts needed in view of the increased workload. They have demanded thatt all the vacancies as per the sanctioned strengthas well as addditional needed must be filled immediately. This is a very valuable exercise annd should be conducted for all categories of IR workerzs. I am sure your Federation is up to this task. I would urge all of you to go through the detailed memorandum which is being circulated to all of you.
The initiative of AIFAP has ensured the coming together of workers across various public sectors, who are also consumers of each other’s sectors, thus helping to forge their unity against privatization of any sector.
Due to such united resistance through AIFAP, attempts to privatize ICF Chennai and BLW Varanasi have been thwarted since quite some time.
The AIFAP website in English and Hindi with more than 5 lac visitors is one of the most active websites of the working class of our country. I urge you to visit the website and contribute to it.
We have been successful in building such unity by following a simple principle – Let us all unite against our common enemy and their plan of privatization and let us keep aside our organizational or political differences during such united fights. Let us be respectful with each other and let us explore all possible avenues of uniting. Let us work with a firm view that An Attack on One Is an Attack on All!
Dear Comrades,
We are happy that invitation for this Convention received from you explicitly states that you also want to focus on strengthening the united struggle against privatization in the Indian Railways. So our goal is common.
Dear Comrades,
As our name Kamgar Ekta Committee suggests, our goal is to build unity of workers. While we all strive to build such unity, the ruling capitalist class, through political parties and other organizations bank rolled by them try to break our unity using various pretexts. Religion, Caste, Region, Nationality, and Language are more commonly known pretexts. But there are many others.
- By using gender they try to pit men workers against women workers
- Designations such as Engineers, Managers, Officers, Supervisors, and Workers etc. are used for the same purpose.
- They try to divide Permanent workers and Contract workers
- They try to spread a line that members of various unions are the main enemies of each other
- Workers are split on the basis of Political Party affiliations.
In the face of all such divisive tactics we ask workers to unite as a Class against not this or that union or political party or organization but against the exploitative ruling class. We have experienced that by patiently imbibing such class consciousness, workers respond very positively.
Building unity for what is the next question. We, as Kamgar Ekta Committee believe that unless the rule of capitalist class is replaced by the rule of all the working people including peasants and adivasis, of those doing physical labour and mental labour, all the ills of this exploitative capitalist system can’t be eliminated. Same is true for permanently putting a stop to privatization attempts.
As you are aware, the New Economic Policy consisting of globalization through liberalization and privatisation was launched by the Congress government of Narsimha Rao in 1991. The same policy has been implemented by every government of every political party at the centre and states. Privatisation has been pursued aggressively or gradually by different parties depending on the level of resistance put by the working class. The common experience is that the attempts of the working class have been more successful when they have been able to explain the harmful effects of privatisation to the people at large and have mobilized them, starting with their family members themselves.
Privatisation is not the agenda of this party or that party. It is the agenda of the ruling capitalist class led by big monopoly corporations. These monopolies fund various parties to a different extent at different times depending on who can implement their agenda better at the given time.
That is why our fight is against not only privatisation, but against the ruling class. It is not a question of replacing one party by another in government. We need to replace the rule of the capitalist class with that of the working class. This has to be our strategic goal. The tactics that we choose at a given time must be in consonance with this goal.
We believe that we must not spread the illusion that one party of capitalists is better than the other. We must make the workers and people at large conscious that it is not this or that party that is ruling, but the capitalist class under the leadership of the monopolies that is the real ruler of our country. The task before us is to make the working class conscious and organise it for advancing to our strategic goal.
We urge you to consider all this during your deliberations in this Convention. We will be happy to discuss all these matters with you in the future as well.
Dear Comrades and especially Comrade Sarvjit Singh,
We thank you sincerely for giving us this opportunity to participate in this convention of IREF.
Mazdoor Ekta Zindabad!
Inquilab Zindabad!