Twelve years after the Maruti Manesar violence, workers navigate a State-Corporate maze to assert for reinstatement, fair wages
A November 2025 judgment of Gurugram’s labour court captures a forgotten history of a dangerous state and corporate nexus, nation-building at the cost of workers dignity, and a labour movement that refuses to die.
Tanishka Shah
4 January 2026
MORE THAN TWELVE YEARS AFTER an incident at Maruti Plant in Manesar, which led to the death of an HR manager, the dismissal of over five hundred workers and numerous arrests, on November 7, 2025, Gurugram’s Industrial Tribunal-cum-Labour Court issued a judgment denying reinstatement to a Maruti worker.
Crucially, there was no independent evidence connecting the appellant, Ram Niwas, to the 2012 incident and his name was missing from the FIR and the Special Investigation Team’s report. Presiding Officer Kumud Gugnani who authored the award placed emphasis on the management’s alleged “loss of confidence”, and the need to enforce discipline within the workforce and nation-building. An excerpt of the judgment read:
“...Nation building is the most sacred duty of every Indian in the present day trumpian world of cut throat competition. History is witness to the most glaring fact that only those economies have survived and thrived where the workforce was dressed in discipline. Were India to compete with the leading economies of the day she shall have to induce strict discipline in its workmen force. The least that may be expected of the justice delivery department is not succumbing to the oft repeated sentiment of showing empathy and compassion to the wrong doer workman and thus breeding more indiscipline under the guise of beneficial legislation.”
When in December 2025, The Leaflet spoke to Ram Niwas, he noted, “I approached the court with the hope that it would decide a basic question: whether the company followed due process in terminating me, and whether that termination was valid or invalid… I too believe in nation building. But the question is, is a nation built by its labourers or by international corporations? And why do international corporations come here in the first place, if not for the availability of cheap labour?”
Niwas believes, he said, that a nation is built by its citizens, just as a company is built by its workers, “Capital may have belonged to people like Rajiv Gandhi or Corporations like Suzuki, but it was the workers who laboured hard and made the company grow. And yet, this hard work is now treated akin to an enemy by the courts and the state.”
Interestingly, during his 2011 visit to India, Suzuki Motor Corporation CEO Osamu Suzuki had remarked that “indiscipline is not tolerated… not in Japan, not in India.”, a line of reasoning that reflects strongly in the November 2025 award. The then chairman R. C. Bhargava had also publicly asserted that the company “will not tolerate indiscipline and sabotaging of work.”
These statements were made against the backdrop of an ongoing workers’ agitation, at the time, at the Manesar plant where the workers were pressing three core demands: formal recognition of a new trade union at the plant, wage parity and benefits for contract workers, and an end to the practice of compelling workers to sign good conduct bonds.