The free radical who set out to reshape Mumbai’s labour movement, but changed its skyline

The confrontation between labour and capital broke the spine of India’s traditional trade-union movement and cleared the ground, quite literally, for Mumbai’s shift from an industrial hub to a property and financial capital.

India’s own Lech Walesa

Born on 21 November 1932 in Devbag, now part of Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district, Dattatray “Datta” Samant’s journey from medicine to labour activism began in the working-class neighbourhoods of 1960s Mumbai. After doing his MBBS from G.S. Seth Medical College and KEM Hospital, he opened a clinic in Ghatkopar. Many of his patients were factory workers suffering from occupational disease and malnutrition, and it was their stories of exploitation that drew him to labour activism.

Representing workers from quarries and small engineering and pharmaceutical units, Samant bypassed the disciplined Marxism of S.A. Dange and the socialist networks of George Fernandes. He was a populist loner—pragmatic, transactional, and driven by results. His method was simple: mobilize overwhelming numbers to force immediate wage gains. Early victories in the auto and engineering sectors built his reputation as a leader who delivered.

By the early 1980s, large sections of Mumbai’s textile-mill workforce, disillusioned with the Congress-affiliated Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS), threw their support behind Datta Samant in their search for higher wages, better working conditions and the right to be heard in a city built by their labour.

Samant’s charisma and defiance energized the movement. His leadership style relied on direct confrontation, often accompanied by “general exhortations to violence and threats against management”, as the Bombay high court noted in an earlier case, though it found no proof of conspiracy or intent. For a moment, Samant looked like India’s own Lech Walesa, the Polish electrician whose Solidarity movement was defying communist authorities across the globe. Both men were quintessential outsiders speaking the language of the shop floor while championing the working class’s dream of self-assertion.

But unlike Walesa, who eventually negotiated his way into government, Samant’s militancy met a wall of political calculation. Wary of his influence spreading to Mumbai’s docks and transport hubs, the Congress-led state and central governments, backed by powerful mill owners, refused to negotiate. The standoff dragged on for over a year. With no concessions forthcoming, the strike collapsed by mid-1983. More than 50 mills shut permanently, and over 150,000 workers lost their jobs, most of them never to return to industrial employment.

The turning point

The strike’s failure paved the way for Mumbai’s most dramatic real-estate transformation. Nearly 600 acres of prime mill land in Girangaon became a property gold mine, a process accelerated by the 2001 amendment to the Development Control Regulation, which allowed mill owners and developers to bypass requirements for worker housing and public amenities while erecting luxury towers and commercial blocks. The wealth generated flowed to builders and financiers, completing Mumbai’s evolution from an industrial powerhouse to a financial and real estate hub.

The 1982 strike is now seen as the last great assertion of organized labour in India. It revealed that capital and the state were willing to sacrifice an entire industry rather than yield to a mass-based union leader. Liberalization in the 1990s, the spread of contractual employment, and the rise of services further eroded the economic base of industrial unionism.

Riding a wave of working-class sympathy, Samant won a Lok Sabha seat from Mumbai South-Central in 1984 as an independent. But as the mills disappeared and the strike’s legacy soured, his political and organizational influence waned. On 16 January 1997, he was assassinated by hired gunmen in Mumbai’s eastern suburbs. Underworld figure Chhota Rajan and others were charged but later acquitted for the lack of evidence. Whether his murder stemmed from mill-owner revenge, underworld rivalry, or political vendetta remains unresolved.

Four decades later, the silence of the old mill lands still speaks to that turning point. The factories are gone, the unions have faded, but the consequences of Samant’s revolt remain etched in the skyline, a reminder that Mumbai’s wealth was built, and rebuilt, on the bones of its working class.

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