The migrant worker is also a woman

Column for Mathrubhumi (translated into Malayalam)

Link:
https://english.mathrubhumi.com/features/specials/even-in-the-covid-19-migrant-narrative-women-don-t-count-1.4777812

The image of the scattered rotis on the railway track near Aurangabad, Maharashtra will come back to haunt us for a long time, even after this Covid-19 crisis ends. In the early hours of May 8, a goods train mowed down sixteen migrant workers, who were walking from Jalna to Bhusaval, a distance of 157 km, to catch a train to their home state of Madhya Pradesh.  They were resting on the train tracks and fell into a deep sleep, one from which they never woke up.

Most of them were young men. In fact, the face of the migrant worker that we have seen on TV screens and in photographs, as thousands of them make their weary way home, is that of a man. Occasionally, you see women and children when entire families leave the city.

But are we missing something here?

In fact, many women are also migrant workers. The poorer amongst them work in brick kilns, as farm labour or on construction sites. The women, who have a basic education, work in the service industry in cities, as sales girls, as beauticians or as waitresses.  There also many young women who are employed in several small-scale industries such as the garment sector, where they live in hostels close to their place of work.

We must also not forget Northeast India, from where thousands of young men, and women, travel a long way to work in our bigger cities. While the workers on daily wages, such as those we see desperately finding a way to return, are the more visible in the current exodus of migrant workers, these young people from the Northeast are equally stressed. They also have no income, no money to pay their rent, and no transport to return home.

Whether women move to the cities accompanying their men, or they move on their own, they face the same struggles. They have to figure out how to survive, often in a hostile environment if they happen to be a racial or religious minority. Young women, in particular, living away from their homes, are vulnerable to sexual violence, as much or even more than what any Indian woman faces if she ventures out into the public space alone.

During these times of Covid-19, the young women from the Northeast, who in any case are harassed because they look different, have been especially targetted. There have been several deplorable incidents of women being spat upon, even assaulted, and called "Corona" because of their looks.  This represents the worst of racial and gender prejudice.

Several economists have pointed out that we are wrong to presume migration is only from villages to big cities.  People also move from smaller villages to the bigger ones, from villages to small towns, and also from the smaller towns to the big cities.

The work of the women who migrate, or the ones who stay back, is in many ways the same. If they move with their husbands, they still have to ensure that there is fuel and water in the temporary shelters where the poorer migrant workers live. Back in their villages, they are burdened with the same tasks as they wait each month for the remittance to arrive.  In either case, even if they find work and add to the family income, it is barely enough for survival. At a time like this, when there is no income, how will these people survive, irrespective of whether they stay back in the city, or eventually make it back to their homes?

This is a story that has yet to unfold, one that will have long-term consequences on the health of the more vulnerable amongst them, namely the women and the children.

The invisible female worker

My column for Mathrubhumi (translated into Malayalam)

They sweep, they swab, they cook, they clean.  Not once in awhile, but every single day.  This would be a fair description of the average woman in India. But amongst them are also those who repeat this daily routine in their own home in someone else's house. India's domestic workers, estimated to be more than 90 million and largely female, are the silent army that ease the lives of millions of women, and men, by relieving them of these thankless daily jobs.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many fault lines in our society.  One of them is the lack of appreciation for this silent army of women. Even as we know that many middle class households are now being compelled to do these jobs for which they paid others, and they are perhaps realising the thankless nature of such work, we hear little by way of appreciation for domestic workers.

Instead, what one is gathering from middle class and elite neighbourhoods in the big cities, including Mumbai where I live, is that employers are actually refusing to pay the women who have worked in their homes for years even though their absence from work is because of the national lockdown. These privileged families think nothing of depriving a poor household of one of the few sources of a regular income.

That so-called "regular income", of course, is itself a scandal. Most often, it falls well below the minimum wage.  There are families who will not give their domestic help even a weekly off.  If the woman falls ill and cannot come to work, her wage is cut.  Few bother to find out where the woman who slaves in their homes every day lives, whether she has access to water, to sanitation, who else is there in her family, how much do they earn and is it enough to cover their expenses including ill-health.

This lockdown is the equivalent of the majority of India's domestic help going on strike.  (Families who have full-time live-in staff are obviously not affected.) But a strike means that the people striking are in a position to negotiate because they are organised.  In the case of domestic workers, there are very few instances where they have been organised, and even these have not yielded results in favour of the women. The reason is that in a labour surplus market, there are always women ready to work at a lower wage.

There have been efforts since 2008 to draft a policy for domestic workers, one that will ensure that they come under the ambit of existing laws that relate to the rights of workers — such as the Minimum Wages Act, the Trade Union Act, Payment of Wages Act, Workers’ Compensation Act, Maternity Benefits Act, Contract Labour Act and Equal Remuneration Act.  But nothing has happened so far.

One reason for this failure I believe is because the burden of domestic work always falls on the woman. In poor households, women do the major part of such unpaid work, which includes fetching fuel and collecting water.  In better off households, even those with domestic help and some modern appliances that reduce the drudgery, these tasks still fall on the women. As a result, our male-dominated political sphere has never understood the urgency of recognising the value of domestic work.

My hope, perhaps unrealistic, is that when this crisis finally abates, households that have had to do their own cooking and cleaning because there is no help will appreciate the contribution of these women, pay them a fair wage and recognise, above all, that they also deserve paid time off.

Pulitzer reminder to India’s media: Always tell the stories the powerful don’t want told

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/05/07/pulitzer-reminder-to-indias-media-always-tell-the-stories-the-powerful-dont-want-told

As long as these stories continue to be told, there’s hope that the media in this country has not dug its own grave.

Once again, Kashmir is in the news. For all the right reasons. And the wrong ones too.

When the Pulitzer Prize winners for 2020 were declared in New York on May 5, the big news for India was the choice of three photojournalists from Jammu and Kashmir, Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand, all working for the Associated Press. They were commended for their photographs taken after India abrogated Kashmir's special status on August 5, 2019.

Apart from the fact that all three are outstanding photographers, the significance of their photographs was that they revealed to us in India, and the world, the blatant untruth in the official narrative. 

We were asked to believe that there was no real opposition to the Indian government's actions. Countering this proved a herculean task for the media given that the government had clamped down hard, shut off the internet and phones, both mobile and terrestrial, and placed the entire region under curfew. Under these circumstances, it was remarkable that information did get out, with Kashmir-based journalists using a variety of strategies to get their stories out.

Photographers were even more challenged, as it was impossible for them to transmit their images without access to broadband. Yet, these three and others succeeded. Those that worked for international news agencies were more fortunate as their organisations were willing to pay for them to either fly down to Delhi to file or upload their pictures. Many of them requested passengers travelling to Delhi to carry their flash drives and memory cards with the images.

The images that succeeded in getting out, such as those for which these three photographers have been honoured, told the other story, one that the Indian government would have preferred remained unrecorded. This is their real significance; they are an unimpeachable record of those days, with each picture literally speaking more than a thousand words.

Anyone who views these images dispassionately cannot but be moved. But in the vitiated politics of today, rather than congratulating the photographers, and celebrating their professionalism and bravery, BJP leaders and their followers used the occasion to engage in the usual whataboutery on Twitter, asking why these photographs and not others, of Indian soldiers and their grieving families for instance, were recognised.

https://twitter.com/sambitswaraj/status/1257610956399656960

The use of the term "India controlled Kashmir" in the captions and a wrongly worded reference in the citation about Kashmir's "independence" being revoked on August 5 sparked another row. The photographers were called "anti-national" for projecting India in a "bad light".  Another suggested that the Booker Prize, which Arundhati Roy won, the Pulitzer and the Magsaysay, won by Ravish Kumar, should all be banned because they were "rigged to support the anti-India narrative”.

https://twitter.com/noconversion/status/1257747768807997441

https://twitter.com/NotAnyKapoor/status/1257950186388598791

And, predictably the volume of the diatribe grew exponentially once Rahul Gandhi decided to congratulate the photographers.

https://twitter.com/shikhar_ji/status/1257653402139611138

It is evident that the professionalism of journalists or photographers simply doing their jobs under difficult circumstances just cannot be appreciated by people averse to any other political perspective barring their own.

Be that as it may, the Pulitzer is a recognition that is well deserved, and certainly a shot in the arm for all journalists working in Jammu and Kashmir under challenging conditions that are not transitory, but virtually permanent. Even as I write this, internet and mobile phone connectivity has again been snapped with the recent uptick in gunfights between security forces and militants.

Those covering the Covid-19 pandemic do not face the kind of daily challenges faced by journalists in Kashmir, but for them too there are hurdles. The story is not an easy one to tell when it consists of numbers and figures on the one hand and tragic personal stories on the other.

By now, the average reader's eyes would be glazing over at the daily headlines of how many more positive cases have been recorded, and how many deaths. These numbers have to be reported – more so after the diktat by the Supreme Court that the media "must" publish the official version.  But this daily dose of statistics can sometimes obscure the real problems on the ground. For instance, the dangers facing frontline workers without adequate safety gear, the quality of the protective gear that India is trying to procure, the attitude of private hospitals in accommodating infected people, the shortages of beds, the unsatisfactory nature of testing, the daily struggles of the urban poor to access healthcare.

It is commendable that some in print and digital media, as well as television, have continued to report such stories and, thereby, exposed the real situation on the ground beyond statistics. A pandemic after all is the story of the lives of people, their fears and anxieties, their ability or inability to access healthcare. Unfortunately, the government still prefers to talk about "positive" and "negative" reports, failing to understand that the media's job is not to project one or the other, but to tell it as it is.

And that is the other uncomfortable reality that the government just cannot turn its face away from because of the media's continuous and determined coverage of the migrant workers story. It has not ended yet, nor will it disappear for some time to come.

We still see hundreds of them setting out on foot with their meagre belongings, men, women, children, determined to traverse hundreds of kilometres. Every story speaks of hopelessness and desperation.

We have also read the stories of hope and heartbreak when the government finally announced, after extending the national lockdown on May 3 by two weeks, that it would arrange trains to take migrants to their home states.

There again, had it not been for the detailed reports in the media that revealed that migrants were not only being charged for the journey, but were also being fleeced by local doctors for the mandatory medical certificate they needed before boarding the trains, the government could have got away with pretending it was doing the migrants a great favour. Only after Congress president Sonia Gandhi offered to pay for the migrants to travel home was there a mad scramble to cover up with more obfuscation about railway subsidies and that 15 percent of the cost was supposed to be borne by state governments. Once again, the record stands in black and white. Thousands of migrants were issued tickets and they paid for them with borrowed funds.

The latest turn in the migrant workers story is even more ghastly: the Karnataka government has decided to stop them from leaving because the local construction industry wants labour to restart projects. It is as if these migrant workers are non-people, slaves who can be put to any task by their masters. That they chose to leave because they had not been paid and did not wish to continue living in pitiable conditions is not acknowledged.

Visit any construction site in the country. You will be horrified at the way workers live, not for a week or two, but for months, even years on end. If after virtually starving for weeks, they pack their bags and leave, should their decision not be respected? How can a government decide otherwise?  Are these not citizens with a free choice about where they work, where they live, and how they live?  How have we come to such a pass that we can actually contemplate treating fellow citizens in this way?

These fault lines in our society, callous governments and an indifferent society that has virtually invisibilised millions of Indian citizens have to be recorded and reported by the media. As long as these stories continue to be told, despite the pressures to under-report or not report at all, there is some hope that the media in this country has not dug its own grave.