How Indian states are using FIRs to reframe wage-related workers’ disputes as crimes

In April, a series of protests by contract workers in the industrial belts of Manesar and Noida in the National Capital Region were met with a wave of First Information Reports that list several provisions of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.

At first glance, these FIRs appear to document incidents of disorder – unlawful assembly, rioting, damage to property and attacks on police personnel. A closer reading reveals that they do far more than describe events. They actively reframe a wage-related labour dispute as a matter of public order and criminality.

Labour protests and strikes have been rolling across India since early this year – from Barauni in Bihar, to Panipat, Faridabad and Manesar in Haryana and Noida in Uttar Pradesh.

Different industries, different states, different employers but the same complaints: workers pushed to a breaking point by stagnant wages, rising prices, 12-hour shifts paid as eight, precarious employment conditions and a cost-of-living crisis sharpened by the cooking gas shortage.

What connects the protests is the condition of being a contract worker in India in 2026 – formally employed, substantively unprotected, and now, when they protest, criminally liable.

In Noida, protests by workers in April were first ignored and then met with prohibitory orders and mass detentions under Section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. Nearly 1,100 workers were detained between April 11 and April 16. They were held in Luksar jail for several days, even though the provision is meant for preventive detention, not punishment.

Alongside this, at least ten FIRs were registered, invoking a wide range of serious criminal charges. The workers’ protests were not negotiated. They were policed out of existence.

Reasonable demands as a threat

In the FIRs, wage protest becomes unlawful assembly. Collective bargaining becomes rioting. Workers become a mob engaged in stone-pelting, whipped up by outside instigators. A demand for fair wages becomes a threat.

This is not sloppy drafting. It is intentional. The moment a labour action is classified as a public order problem, an entirely different state machinery becomes available. Labour law requires conciliation, adjudication, a process. Criminal law requires none of that. It only requires an FIR.

A careful reading of the ten FIRs in Noida makes clear what is missing.

There is no mention of the state’s failure to implement or revise minimum wages, despite a legal obligation to revise them every five years. There is nothing about women earning Rs 6,000-Rs 9,000 a month for ten- to 12-hour shifts in garment factories without basic facilities such as toilets. The LPG crisis does not find mention, nor does the fact that workers often arrive at their factories having eaten nothing.

These omissions are not an oversight. A worker who is responding rationally to hunger, fuel poverty and wage theft is not a rioter. To make her a rioter, you must first make her material conditions invisible. That’s the function of the FIRs.

What the FIRs cannot say – and what mainstream narratives of labour unrest have consistently refused to say is the obvious thing: that when the industrial relations system provides no space for workers to articulate and resolve their grievances, what you get is a pressure-cooker bursting. The FIR criminalises the explosion. It says nothing about the cause.

The instigation myth

The FIR attributes the strikes to unions and external organisations, implying that without this outside agitation, workers would have stayed quiet. This is false and deliberately so.

The protests in April were, by all accounts, spontaneous, spreading factory by factory. But the instigation framing strips workers of political agency – recasting them as manipulated rather than aggrieved. This provides the authorities with a legal handle. If unions organised this, you can go after organisers. They can be arrested at protest sites, picked up from their homes at night or placed under house arrest. That is precisely what happened.

Trade union activity in response to a workers’ crisis is a democratic right that remains protected in Indian law. The FIR does not acknowledge this. Long before any court reaches a conclusion, the strike has been broken, the workers have gone back, lives have been destroyed and the lesson delivered forcefully.

The FIR narrative sequence runs: workers assemble → police warn → workers disobey → force is used. It reads like a neutral account of events. It is not. It is a pre-emptive justification for everything that comes after – the lathi-charge, the detentions, the arrests from homes, the FIRs.

By the time anyone asks whether the force was proportionate, whether management or police had escalated first, whether the workers who were beaten and arrested had done anything beyond standing in the street, the answer has already been written. They disobeyed. Therefore, what happened to them was restoration of order.

The bigger picture

The FIRs in Manesar and Noida did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from a decade-long restructuring of the relationship between Indian labour law and Indian capital, a restructuring that reached its logical conclusion in November 2025, when four Labour Codes replaced 29 older laws and were implemented nationwide. Those codes weakened collective bargaining, expanded contractualisation and made hire-and-fire easier. What they took away from workers in legal protection, criminal law is now being asked to enforce in its place.

This is the pattern. Weaken the labour court, strengthen the police station.

This analysis is not new. In 2015, I had noted the same pattern during the unionisation battle of Maruti Suzuki workers in Manesar – industrial disputes being converted into law-and-order problems through deliberate management provocation, police deployed before any violence had occurred, and a labour department that recused itself while the criminal machinery moved in.

The FIRs at Manesar and Noida in 2026 are the Maruti Manesar protest playbook, updated.

Collective labour action is first rendered unlawful through assembly provisions, then escalated into violence through rioting and injury charges, then consolidated as organised criminality through conspiracy – and, in the most serious FIRs, attempt to murder and mischief by fire, carrying life imprisonment.

The material conditions that precipitate protest appear nowhere in the legal record. The workers’ demands do not appear. Their names, often, do not appear. What appears is the crowd, the mob, the unnamed mass, the conspiracy.

The result, taken together, is a shift in how labour itself is governed, less as a subject of rights and negotiation, and more as an object of surveillance, control, and, when necessary, criminal sanction. The FIR is the instrument of that shift. That is what the FIRs do not say – and that is exactly why they matter.

Rakhi Sehgal is an independent labour researcher with over two decades of association with the trade union movement.