The workers’ struggle of 1953 in Mattancherry in Kochi is an important, and yet relatively less documented, saga in the history of the working class movement in Kerala. The 75-day strike that the workers of Cochin Port waged culminated in police firing and the martyrdom of three workers. But the ruling powers ultimately could not prevent the workers from winning their demands.
Despite India’s achievement of a certain level of self-sufficiency in food production over the decades, the chronic agrarian crisis, often manifested in the suicides of farmers, persists.
Four decades ago, thirty-two Telugu people became martyrs in the fight to build a people’s steel plant in the Indian city of Visakhapatnam.