When resistance became administrative: How I learned to stop romanticising the labour movement

By Rohit Chauhan* 

On my first day at a labour rights NGO, I was given a monthly sales target: sixty memberships. Not sixty workers to organise, not sixty conversations about exploitation, not sixty political discussions. Sixty conversions. I remember staring at the whiteboard, wondering whether I had mistakenly walked into a multi-level marketing office instead of a trade union. The language was corporate, the urgency managerial, and the tone unmistakably transactional. It was my formal introduction to a strange truth I would slowly learn: in contemporary India, even rebellion runs on performance metrics.

Now and then, we witness protests against the new labour codes. A rally here, a memorandum there, an angry press statement, a photograph of raised fists. It looks like resistance. It feels like resistance. It is framed as resistance. But more often than not, it functions as emotional hygiene—something we perform to sleep better at night, because somewhere inside we already know that nothing fundamental is going to change.

This is not defeatism.

It is diagnosis.

The deeper truth is brutally simple: we have lost the confidence of workers.

Not because workers are ignorant. Not because they are apathetic. But because decades of organised politics—including radical politics—have systematically trained them to expect very little, demand even less, and distrust almost everyone who claims to represent them. They have been mobilised, used, disciplined, photographed, celebrated, thanked, and forgotten so many times that scepticism has become a survival instinct.

Every protest becomes familiar theatre. Every slogan turns into predictable choreography. Every rally ends in the same ritualistic dispersal. Nothing in workers’ material lives shifts in proportion to the emotional energy expended. Over time, the working class learns a bitter lesson: politics does not change reality; it merely narrates it.

There are exceptions. Small, fragile islands of hope. Trade unions genuinely run by workers, guided by intellectuals who understand that their role is not to command but to clarify, not to control but to strengthen. Spaces where dignity, democracy, and humane working conditions are not ideological ornaments but daily practices. These spaces exist. They struggle. They bleed. They survive.

But they are anomalies within a vast system of NGO-managed dissent and bureaucratised radicalism.

We now inhabit a peculiar historical moment. The Indian working class faces unprecedented levels of precarity, dispossession, and fragmentation, yet the organisational imagination of the labour movement has shrunk. Instead of expanding political horizons, much of the Left has retreated into institutional survival, donor dependency, and symbolic activism. Resistance has been domesticated. Radicalism has been professionalised. Class politics has been reduced to project cycles, workshops, and litigation strategies.

Now comes the inevitable interrogation.

Who are you to say this?

What is your qualification?

What is your ideological training?

Who gave you the right to question the golden age of Indian socialism and trade unionism?

Nobody.

I am merely a field worker who has seen enough to lose romantic illusions, but not enough to become fully cynical.

A few years ago, at the age of thirty, I joined a labour rights NGO as a toddler—not because I was young, but because I knew nothing. Like John Snow waiting for his Rose, I arrived hungry for education, hoping someone would open doors to the deeper truths of labour politics, revolutionary history, and organisational strategy.

Instead, on my very first day, in my first team meeting, my team leader—now a Director—assigned me my revolutionary task: bring two new members into our trade union.

I blinked.

Had I joined a labour movement or a multi-level marketing scheme?

By the end of the month, my target was sixty memberships. Targets. Deadlines. Performance metrics. The grammar of corporate management had silently colonised revolutionary language. Mobilisation became recruitment. Consciousness became conversion. Politics became performance.

For a moment, panic set in. Then instinct kicked in. Once a Gujarati, always a Gujarati. My mind began calculating strategies, projections, field conversion ratios. Then I stopped. Why was I thinking like a corporate sales executive inside a space meant to dismantle corporate exploitation?

This moment revealed something essential. Capitalism does not merely dominate externally; it colonises internal reasoning. Even rebellion begins to speak the language of efficiency, optimisation, and productivity.

Welcome to irony.

My ideological journey did not begin with Marx, Luxemburg, or Lenin, but with a fusion of NGO survival tactics and inherited Gujarati business shrewdness. I learned many things. None of them were about workers.

I learned how to survive organisational politics.

How to gossip with tactical precision.

How to escape work without appearing idle.

How to write heroic reports about microscopic achievements.

How to inflate numbers without technically lying.

I learned how to translate suffering into donor language. How to convert exploitation into measurable outcomes. How to repackage despair into fundable narratives.

I learned everything except how to build worker leadership.

There were a few ageing dreamers around—veterans who still believed workers could rule, not as mythology but as material possibility. From them, I learned fragments of what this work could become. But they were outnumbered, marginalised, tolerated more than respected. They existed as nostalgic relics, not strategic resources.

Gradually, the internal ecology revealed itself.

Comrades who did not trust one another.

Factional battles disguised as ideological debates.

Petty power struggles masked as organisational discipline.

Outwardly, we were champions of informal workers. Inwardly, we behaved like minor government clerks, distributing permissions, favours, and selective justice. We were mai-baap to our members. They listened obediently. They feared displeasing us. The asymmetry of power was glaring, yet rarely acknowledged. We preached emancipation while reproducing dependency.

Sometimes I felt like a feudal lord conducting inspections of poverty.

Source visits turned into luxury tourism. Alcohol. Good food. Reimbursable fake bills. The NGO would pay. Morality became negotiable. Marx remained poor his entire life. I did not possess that courage. I swam in shallow waters, watching seniors drown in deeper ones.

This is not a moral confession. It is a structural reality. When activism becomes a profession, ethical compromise becomes routine. The question is no longer what is right, but what is reimbursable—what is fundable, what is administratively safe.

Around the same time, I was recently divorced and newly single. Outwardly functional, inwardly fragmented. Somewhere between exhaustion and longing, I began searching for emotional repair inside an NGO. It was not a dating platform, but loneliness is rarely disciplined. I blurred boundaries, made premature emotional moves, mistook proximity for intimacy. In the process, I quietly destroyed the possibility of some honest, beautiful friendships before they could even exist.

Why did I do this? I do not know. Perhaps loneliness seeks recognition before wisdom. Perhaps I was trying to rebuild myself in the wrong rooms. Either way, it became another failure—personal this time—layered upon political disillusionment.

Slowly, a question began to rot inside my skull: where are the intellectuals?

Not seminar intellectuals. Not conference revolutionaries. Not paper radicals. But those who build workers into leaders—who teach them to think, argue, decide, and disobey; who treat knowledge as liberation, not property.

We had none.

Instead, we had reports. Beautiful reports. Heavy with numbers. Donor-friendly. Salary-secure. We became professional data manufacturers. Workers turned into digits. Suffering became graphs. Exploitation became quarterly deliverables.

The political economy of NGO activism had fully matured. Funding cycles replaced movement rhythms. Log-frames replaced political imagination. Monitoring tools replaced mass meetings. Every action had to be documented, audited, justified, and measured. Anything that could not be quantified became invisible.

We did build a strong legal cell. We fought cases aggressively. Justice arrived in fragments. But in the process, we mutated into a law firm, not a union. Clients replaced comrades. Petitions replaced politics. Structural struggle was displaced by procedural negotiation.

Law became the horizon of imagination.

This shift is not accidental. Litigation individualises collective suffering. It converts systemic violence into isolated grievances. It transforms political antagonism into technical disputes. In doing so, it stabilises the system rather than destabilising it.

Occasionally, genuine work happened. Lives improved in small ways. But structural change made us nervous. It threatened funding cycles, bureaucratic comfort, and institutional survival. So we preferred safe battles—predictable conflicts, controlled victories.

We quietly resented organisations that did deeper work in our bastis, branding them reckless, irresponsible, or adventurist. Radical courage became organisational liability.

Our cadre was largely composed of middle agents from the working class, fluent in one dialect: commission. Our Director functioned like a vigilant timekeeper—obsessed with attendance, allergic to autonomy, dreaming of building his own organisational dynasty. Pedhi, not movement.

Hierarchy hardened. Bureaucracy thickened. Fear replaced trust. Compliance replaced creativity.

My seniors were deeply compromised. And I was worse—because I saw all this, understood it, criticised it privately, and still stayed. Still complied. Still benefited. Still adjusted.

This is not a confession.

It is an autopsy.

The working class does not distrust movements because of ideological confusion. It distrusts movements because it has observed their contradictions intimately. Workers are acute political analysts. They see hypocrisy instantly. They recognise when their suffering is being used as career capital. They sense when solidarity is transactional.

We do not lack ideology. We lack courage.

We do not lack theory. We lack integrity.

We do not lack resources. We lack imagination.

We protest not to transform reality, but to reassure ourselves that we tried. We organise not to dismantle power, but to manage its excesses. We critique capitalism while reproducing its managerial logic.

And workers know this.

That is why they listen politely and walk away silently.

That is why confidence is gone.

Not stolen.

Not destroyed.

Voluntarily surrendered.

Disclaimer:

This essay is a work of political reflection and narrative reconstruction. Certain incidents, characters, timelines, and details have been altered, condensed, or fictionalised to protect identities and avoid direct attribution. Any resemblance to specific individuals or organisations may be coincidental. What remains entirely non-fictional is the structural reality it seeks to describe. If this text unsettles, disturbs, or provokes recognition, that discomfort belongs not to the story, but to the conditions that make such stories possible.

---

*Coordinator, Abad Amdavad;  working on labour rights, urban governance, and environmental justice