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This chapter draws a distinction between the intrinsic and instrumental values of India's development. It argues that since long before independence, there was a consensus on the intrinsic overarching objective of development of India among the polity and society — the eradication of mass poverty within a reasonable time horizon. The chapter identifies accelerating growth, ensuring its appropriate distribution and sustainability, and reforms as instruments for achieving this intrinsic objective. It focuses on the period of the ‘Hindu Rate of Growth’ from 1950–1 to 1979–80, when the infamous License-Permit-Raj was in full sway. It covers the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 and the 1970s when many draconian laws, such as the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) and its amendment, Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) Act, Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), and Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act (COFEPOSA) were enacted. It also discusses the severe macroeconomic and balance of payments crisis of 1966 and economic liberalization of 1966–8.

In India, the question of what constitutes an ‘industry’ for the purposes of the Industrial Disputes Act, a vexed question often arising in industrial law and labour law, appeared to be finally settled by the decision of the Supreme Court in Bangalore Water Supply & Sewerage Board v. A. Rajappa. In Workmen of Hindustan Lever Ltd, the Supreme Court also had occasion to say that the law relating to industrial disputes should be kept free from all the technical and procedural difficulties of ordinary civil law. By enacting the Industrial Disputes Act, the legislature itself has recognized that collective bargaining and strike are legitimate weapons in the matter of industrial relations and the Act itself recognizes and defines strike. There are innumerable decisions of the Supreme Court, the various high courts and several other industrial tribunals where the right to strike has been assumed without any whisper of an objection to the contrary.

This chapter scrutinises violence between workers during strikes. Confrontations occurred not only at the factory gates, as strikers attempted to obstruct workers, but also in the streets that led to the workplace. Political groups often became involved in industrial disputes. Left-wingers sought to extend the strike beyond the workplace through demonstrations, meetings, and marches. Right-wingers sought to ensure the freedom to work, fearful that factory occupations would precede communist revolution. Strikes provided an important opportunity for female political activism. Women strikers stood on picket lines, forcing back strike-breakers and often taking part in punishment attacks of blackleg labour. The factory, mine, and construction yard thus became important sites in the violent political confrontations in interwar France.

This chapter provides a historical account on the use and duties of the army by dividing it into three periods: the pre-1914 period, the inter-war period, and the post-1945 period. The author first traces the possible origin of the use of armed forces in the course of industrial disputes in the twentieth century in 1908. The inter-war period showcased how immediately after the First World War, the peace could only be kept by military reinforcement of the police, or on occasion by way of substitution for the police. The post-1945 period demonstrates that the use of military personnel to replace strikers in carrying out work is essential. The constitutional implications on the discussion of military aid to the civil power, whether it is for the purpose of maintaining order or supplies and services, are demonstrated.

The central contention of the desacralization thesis is that the economic, political, and socio-cultural transformations experienced by English society since 1945 have fatally undermined the kinds of steadfastly supportive sensibilities towards police authority. This demise is in large measure caused by the cavernous social divisions and individualized and pluralistic social relations that characterize late modern England. But it is also viewed as the legitimacy-eroding consequence of the police's controversial involvement since the late 1960s in what has become a regular diet of political protests, industrial disputes, and urban disorders. This chapter aims to extend and develop this thesis as well as qualify and revise it in certain key respects by seeking to distil the contours and substance of what is considered to be a range of contemporary public dispositions towards English policing. Drawing on group discussions and biographical interviews with different strata of the English populace, it identifies five perspectives on policing and the social which have been termed: defenders of the faith, the disenchanted, atheists, agnostics, and the hopeful.