IT was in the midst of such a powerful countrywide assertion of the working class that the first central organisation of Indian workers came into being. The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in Bombay on 31 October, 1920. Tilak was a key inspiration behind the birth of AITUC, but he expired on 1 August, 1920, three months before the actual inception of the organisation.

The inaugural session had all the fervour of a new-found proletarian identity, but it could not move out of the Congress trajectory of constitutional reforms. In his presidential address, Lala Lajpat Rai emphasised the role of organised labour as the antidote against capitalism as well as “militarism and imperialism ... the twin children of capitalism” and underscored the need to “organise our workers (and) make them class conscious”; but with regard to the British government he said the attitude of labour should be “neither one of support nor that of opposition.”

The “Manifesto to the Workers of India” released on this occasion by the first General Secretary of AITUC, Dewan Chaman Lall, called upon the “Workers of India” to “assert your right as arbiters of your country's destiny”. It reminded them that they must remain “part and parcel” of the movement for national freedom and urged them to “cast all weakness... and ... tread the path to power and freedom”. Vice-President Joseph Baptista, however, waxed eloquent about “the higher idea of partnership”, emphasising that mill-owners and labourers “are partners and co-workers and not buyers and sellers of labour”.

The second, conference of AITUC (30.11.1921 - 02.12.1921) held at the coal-town of Jharia in Dhanbad district of today's Bihar (reckless and faulty mining by BCCL has unfortunately jeopardised the very existence of this historic working-class centre which also hosted the ninth AITUC session in December 1928 that called for transforming India into a Socialist Republic) was, however, much more emphatic about the goal of the Indian workers and the people at large. “The time has now arrived”, the conference declared, “for the attainment of swaraj by the people”. The Jharia session was an extraordinary event-some fifty thousand people, most of them coal miners and other workers from nearby areas and their family members, participated in this unprecedented show of worker power.