Why Comrade Mallya Failed

How can anyone go on strike without the help of at least one Malayali or Bengali?

People who stand on the deck of their 300-foot private yachts basking in the Caribbean sun with a glass of champagne and surrounded by starlets and supermodels, should not go on strike. It just doesn’t seem right. An interesting photo of 2008 is Jet Airways owner Naresh Goyal nuzzling up to Vijay Mallya, who owns Kingfisher Airlines, after the two reached a business agreement. Mallya, so natural with his arms around Bollywood actresses during photo-ops, looks uncomfortable and stiff. He is smiling, but it is not the benign this-too-shall-pass smile of Goyal. This one is forced, as if he has been overtaken by circumstances. If that was forced, early this month, when he announced that private airlines would not fly for a day unless the Government bailed them out, he wasn’t even attempting a smile. Not even at the absurdity of someone like him—who, with so much perseverance across decades cultivated an image of being the king of good times—being part of a stop-work agitation.

When Mallya and his fellow heads of private airlines decided on the strike, the ghost of Karl Marx must have started scratching his head—now how do I fit this into Das Kapital? There is no dialectics for this. The rule is simple: capitalists exploit, workers strike. And when the reverse happens, its collapse is inevitable. The airline owners got it wrong right from the start.

For one, there was not one Malayali or Bengali among them and you just can’t go on strike without them. The comrades would have pointed out a few follies made by the strikers. They would have told Mallya that he could have expanded the agitation. His argument that because airline companies had private shareholders, in effect a government bailout would be a public service, could have got every listed company on BSE and NSE joining them. After all, every one of them has public shareholders and the Government would be bailing them all out when the need arises. But the airlines chose to only highlight their narrow wants.

The second thing the comrades would have told Vijay Mallya and Co is that even cartels must get the process right. An Indian Express report said that they forgot to send their demands to the Ministry of Civil Aviation. That’s just not done. And the last lesson for the rich strikers would have been that if you are bluffing, be sure to think it through. Keeping travel bookings open for the day they were supposed to be off air is not a way to be taken seriously.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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