India's main workers' unions joined hands on Thursday to protest over rising inflation and fuel price hikes, staging demonstrations outside government offices across the country. Annual inflation spiralled to a higher-than-expected 9.06 percent in May from 8.66 percent the previous month, heaping misery on hundreds of millions of India's poor and piling pressure on the embattled government.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described inflation as a "serious" threat to India's growth, and his cabinet has been racing to boost vegetable and other supplies to bring down food prices. Thursday's protests were organised by nine national trade unions affiliated to India's ruling Congress party, to communist parties and to the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), protest leaders said.
"It is a joint programme by nine central trade unions and the (BJP-backed) Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh - which had remained out - is also part of it," All India Trade Union Congress Secretary G.L. Dhar told AFP. Dhar said that groups of workers numbering up to 1,000 were protesting in districts and industrial centres in India's 29 states including disputed Kashmir.
"Today's action is mainly focused on the government's move to deregulate diesel and kerosene prices, which will have a cascading effect on inflation," said Centre of Indian Trade Unions General Secretary Tapan Kumar Sen. "The other focus of our nation-wide protest is on inflation," Sen, a Marxist MP, told AFP.
India has already deregulated the price of petrol to cut down on revenue-gobbling state subsidies. The Indian National Trade Union Congress, which is affiliated to Singh's Congress, also joined forces with the unions to put pressure on authorities.
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