Striking Down the Strike: The Indian Judiciary and the Industrial Relations Code 2020

The strike provisions of the Industrial Relations Code 2020 have been widely read as a decisive legislative blow to Indian workers' collective power. This paper shows that the restriction is older, and judicial. Analysing 161 Supreme Court, High Court and labour tribunal decisions on industrial action (1947–2019), dual‐coded for reliability, alongside leximetric coding of the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 and the IRC 2020, we trace how courts progressively narrowed the space for lawful strike action while the statute stood unchanged — a dynamic we call doctrinal drift. Tribunals protected strikers most; the Supreme Court drove restriction hardest; and an expansive Krishna Iyer‐era counter‐current (1966–1990) was marginalised rather than overruled. By 2019 the operative judicial position was already more restrictive than the statute required. The IRC 2020 codified the structure of that position while cutting statutory protection below even the courts' line. The findings relocate the key site of collective labour rights contestation from legislature to judiciary, and caution against reading the 2020 reforms as sudden rupture.