Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the digital Ramcharitmanas in Delhi on August 31, 2015, the renowned Gita Press of Gorakhpur — which is credited with making Ramcharitmanas and other ancient Hindu texts popular worldwide — had been facing a strike by its workers for more than three weeks.

The current strike at Gita Press, a non-profit organisation which has published more than 58 crore copies of Hindu religious texts of all kinds, has its root in another strike that happened in December 2014. Muniwar Mishra, one of the workers spearheading the strike, says back then the workers were protesting to increase their salaries. “The management had promised to increase salaries: an increase of Rs 900 per month for the skilled workers, Rs 750 and Rs 600 for semi-skilled and unskilled workers, respectively,” he claims. Megh Singh Chauhan, assistant manager, was sent on behalf of the management to appease the workers. Chauhan requested them to resume work, “promising that in the next six months he would ensure a salary hike, or else he would resign,” according to Mishra.

It seemed the two sides had reached an agreement.

The 540 odd workers – 200 permanent, 340 contractual – waited till July this year, but saw no signs of salary increments. The management was ready to increase the wages, but now put two clauses: “one was that the workers wouldn’t demand a salary hike for the next five years,” Mishra says, “the second condition was that the workers would withdraw all legal charges made against the management since 1992.”

On August 7, 2015, Mishra and others made their displeasure known: they gathered and told Chauhan they wouldn’t accept the clauses; and since Chauhan had gone back on his promise, they asked him to resign. The next day, August 8, the management suspended 12 permanent and five contractual workers. Ishwar Prasad Patwari, one of the trustees of Gita Press, says “these 17 workers had misbehaved with manager Chauhan”, who had come to simply settle the dispute over the increase in wages.

According to Gajanana Dwivedi, a Dainik Jagran reporter from Gorakhpur, after more than three weeks of strike, the management has agreed to take back 12 permanent employees, but it’s still not willing to accept the five contractual workers – who have been working for Gita Press for more than a decade. Dwivedi attended the meeting held between the management and workers on August 31, 2015. He says the management was “represented solely by its legal advisor S K Mathur”, who said if the protests continue, “Gita Press might consider relocating to Gujarat or Maharashtra.”

Unsurprisingly enough, this further enraged workers.

Last week, on August 27, 2015, Zee News did a story on the “sad reality behind the shutting down of the historic Gita Press”. While the story didn’t directly attack the management, the reporter spent most of the time showing the terrible conditions in which a majority of Gita Press employees live. “The Zee News story did us damage,” Patwari says, “we started getting calls from all over the world with people concerned about us taking antim saans [last breath].”

The next day Patwari, on behalf of Gita Press, put up a press release on social media in which it criticised the “fallacious news report telecasted by TV News Channel” and presented “the reality in this matter” in 14 points. While the press release rightly points out that Gita Press hasn’t shut down, it evades the question of workers’ salaries, saying the strike was simply a result of “indiscipline by workers” over the last one year.

To be sure, this is not the first time Gita Press has been hit by a strike, says Akshaya Mukul, senior journalist and author of the recently released Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India. In fact, Mukul states that “strikes began in the 1930s itself” soon after Gita Press started publishing in 1927.

Some of this has to do with the philosophy of founders and promoters of Gita Press: according to Mukul’s book, they “were so consumed with their idea of defending and popularizing sanatan Hindu Dharma, they assumed that whoever came under the umbrella of Gita Press would make their personal ambitions and family commitments subservient to the larger cause of religion.”

Mukul says while the management realised their mistake in the first decade itself, they never did much about it. The publishing house at different points of time attempted to subsidise its print business through other profitable enterprises: sale of Ayurvedic medicines and ghee, renting out a portion of the publishing houses’ buildings in Kolkata and Gorakhpur, shoe-making business (strictly non-leather), and so on. But this did not help Gita Press set off the losses made by the publishing business. Significantly, Gita Press takes no ads and no donations. What this means is that the books have always been sold at a price lower than their production cost. The result is that the publishing house pays poor salaries to its employees, who, ironically, take considerable pride in being associated with Gita Press.

Mishra, who is a computer officer at Gita Press, joined the organisation in 1993 on a gross monthly salary of Rs 1,230. Currently he gets paid Rs 9,000 per month. Most permanent employees get paid anywhere between Rs 8,000 and Rs 11,000 per month. “But after PF, advance, and other cuts,” he says, “I only get around Rs 5,000 to Rs 5,500 per month. It’s difficult to manage a family with that money. Gita Press loots its employees in the name of religion,” Mishra claims.

How about the contractual workers? “Their condition is worse,” Mishra alleges, “on paper they are paid a monthly salary of Rs 12,000-14,000, but the management fudges the number of days they work every month; in the end they only get Rs 3,000-4,000 credited into their bank accounts.” Patwari strictly denies this. The veracity of Mishra’s information on contractual workers is therefore subject to investigation.

When I ask Patwari whether the publishing house has given any thought towards changing its revenue model, he replies with a no: “There is no financial crisis at Gita Press. We will continue to sell books at subsidised rates” – in accordance with the principles on which the publishing house was founded.

This doesn’t surprise Mukul, who devoted the last four years studying the past and present of Gita Press for his book. But would the publishing house survive given its present revenue model? “They continue to enjoy a near-monopoly in the production of religious textbooks,” Mukul says, “there would always be enough interest groups who would not let the Press close down.”

Apart from issuing clarifications that Gita Press is alive and doing well on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, the publishing house has been over the last few days expounding on the virtues of devotion to god at the cost of worldly pleasures, involving wealth and family.

Clearly, the strike at Gita Press will go on for a while.