TEZPUR: Generations of her ancestors have lived the same life that Arti Munda now lives in a tea estate in Assam — earning meagre wages, denied the legal status of a Scheduled Tribe (ST) despite being a tribal, landless, malnourished, and dying young. She earns ₹167 for an eight-hour work day, which often gets extended, for plucking 24 kg of leaves. During every election, a brief spotlight flashes across the plight of the State’s tea garden workers.

The cold, black brew that she and her mostly women co-workers drink through the day used to be salted. “But no longer. We were getting sick due to high blood pressure,” she says. In 2019, the Assam government announced free sugar for tea garden workers to replace salt in tea. Like a lot of the promises, that too is lost in transit. The tea is tasteless.

In his campaign speeches, Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked his tea-selling childhood and an alleged international conspiracy to malign Assam’s tea. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has promised to raise the tea workers’ wages to ₹350 a day. Tea companies and farmers say that is impossible.

However, the welfare politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government since 2016 has sweetened the life of “tea tribes” — 18% of the State’s population, concentrated in Upper Assam, which goes to polls on Saturday — just enough for the BJP to win the votes of a sizeable section of them. The BJP’s inroads into these communities is almost entirely created by one person — Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was once a key figure in the Congress. “He knows the pulse of the people…,” says a bureaucrat who worked him. Mr. Sarma was the kingpin of the Congress’ hold over tea tribes.

The ancestors of the tea tribes were brought to Assam from central India as bonded labour by British planters in the 19th century — a practice that was prevalent around the world. Till date, the tea industry keeps wages at low levels. According to a study by Oxfam in 2019, supermarkets and tea brands keep 58.2% of the price paid by the retail consumer, while 7.2% goes to the workers. Big estates are on government lands leased to companies, but some are managed by farmers. “Farmers are themselves at the mercy of market forces, and what do they manage to share with the workers?” says Raj Barooah, who owns the boutique tea brand Rujani. His business model seeks to cut down the layers between the producer and the consumer.

“It will take a minimum of ₹500 a day for a very basic life for these workers. Now they are at starvation levels. They have very high maternal and infant mortality rates, high prevalence of anaemia and TB (tuberculosis) infections,” says Jayashree Satpute, a Delhi-based human rights lawyer who has worked on the issue.

Planters say they can absorb a maximum of an additional ₹26 as wages per day. They argue that since workers are also provided housing, education and healthcare as required by law, the effective wages are more than double the cash payments. However, “Schools, health centres and housing are substandard and subhuman,” Royal Soreng, an activist of the Communist Party of India-Marxist in Tezpur, says.

When democracy replaced colonialism, tea tribes became a captive vote bank for the Congress, and their terms of engagement with industry changed little. “Deep in the hinterland, they remained insulated from the politics of the surrounding…They were mobilised with money and liquor a day before the elections,” says Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a Guwahati-based researcher.

Ruling politicians continue to skirt the wage issue, and resentment is brewing among the workers. The BJP government introduced a slew of welfare schemes, particularly houses under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana and cash transfers of ₹2,500 each in 2017 and 2018, and ₹3,000 just before the election was announced. All these were designed by Mr. Sarma. “Welfare schemes have had an effect. The level of poverty is debilitating and these schemes have become largely popular,” says Mr. Soreng. Demands for ST status and homestead continue to fester, meanwhile.

Assertive or autonomous politics by one-fifth of the State population at the bottom can be unsettling for Assam’s politics and economy. “Even a marginal rise in the political awareness of these communities has not been taken lightly by authorities and companies. Reprisal is swift,” says Ms. Satpute.

From the Congress to the BJP, governments have changed, but the exploitative structure of Assam’s tea economy remains intact. “The Congress network among the tea tribes has shifted to the BJP…Those who were managing it for the Congress are now doing it for the BJP. Their campaign is limited to just one point — the symbol has changed, from hand to lotus,” says Mr. Rahman.

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