Indentured Laborers - The First Non-Resident Indians

When we think of NRIs today, we probably largely think of wealthy movers and shakers like Lakshmi Mittal or Swaraj Paul or Bobby Jindal and the likes of them. a few will perhaps recall the many numbers of Indians who sweat it out in the Gulf countries and some others will recall the professionals – the doctors, the scientists and the IT professionals. But not many perhaps will think of the first NRIs as slaves or rather glorified slaves as the indentured laborers from India in a way were.

If you have read Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Sea of Poppies, you will know. In the 18th century, the labor needs of the rapidly expanding British Empire were met by the slave trade.This was opposed by Christian reformers like William Wilberforce in Britain and William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, tabled a motion in Parliament in 1792 to gradually abolish slavery. In 1807, the shipping of slaves to British colonies was forbidden and in 1808, the slave trade was prohibited. The gap in the labour market was filled by indentured labourers or contract labourers, and these came largely from india. Although these men( and some women); mostly from the cow belt of India and usually victims of political machinations as well as poverty and often both were treated marginally better than slaves, they too were permanently uprooted from their home lands which they would never see again. India was the source for the greatest number of indentured workers to the New World, and approximately 1.3 million individuals crossed the oceans under contracts of indenture.

As Amitav Ghosh’s book recounts, poverty, political upheaval, ecological disasters such as droughts, floods, and famines, and overcrowding were causing increased internal migration and large refugee populations. Conditions were often so bad that although many Indian communities were close-knit and, in some cases, migration overseas actually violated certain caste restrictions, many individuals often felt compelled to abandon their homes and families and seek employment in other areas of India or across the ocean in an effort to improve their situations

Many of the indentured labourers were convicts. Indian convicts transported out in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries helped settle and colonize the overseas European empires. Such workers filled a critical need for labor, playing an especially significant role in carrying out the building and infrastructure projects that were so critical to the institution and consolidation of the Empire. For instance, Indian convicts sent to Singapore built some of the finest colonial buildings here, including the St Andrews Cathedral and Government House. With the convicts came indentured labourers to provide manpower for the ports and railway, Sepoys and Sikh policemen, milkman, tailors and artisans, merchants and moneylenders

The end of indentured labour from India was actually decided through the intervention of the growing clout of the Indian nationalist movement; and it happened as later as in the earliest years of the 20th century- that is barely a hundred years ago. Curzon was the first Viceroy to India to actually consider the plight of the indentured labourer an issue and, although he often had to accept the commands of his superiors in England, he was staunch in pressing the issue and raising awareness. Gandhiji was also instrumental in bringing to light the racism and inequality suffered through the indenture system and low-paying labour. In fact 2016, just eight years away, will mark the centenary of the struggle spearheaded by Gandhiji against continued Indian indentureship from India to Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Fiji and Mauritius, among several other countries, at the height of British colonialism, an event that might well go unrecognized in spite of the now institutionalized pravasi bharatiya divas observed every year.

Coaching Classes : Sweat Shops of Education

The son of a friend recently went away all the way from Delhi to Kerala to prepare for the medical entrance tests. It seems that they have coaching centers there which have tracked the entrance tests of some medical colleges for years and have now got the requisite expertise to say that any one that enrolls with them has a much better chance of cracking the tests than the man on the road who can’t access these privileges.

Nearer home, my newspaper vendor puts in with the daily newspaper, pamphlets of institutes some well known and some not, that would put the neighborhood kids through their board exams, their medical entrance tests, their IIT entrance exams and all other kinds. That there is so much demand for them and that they are mushrooming by the day, makes me feel extremely uneasy. however in the rather bizarre imitation of keeping up with the Jones, and try and beat the competition which is getting stiffer by the day, most people I know will have to make use of one or the other of them. may be some will enroll in more than one such coach shop , leading to the piquant situation where a bright student – may be some one who has topped the IIT–JEE is claimed by more than one institution.

What started in a small way with Agrawal Classes and Brilliant Tutorials nearly 30 years ago has transformed into a big business today. In north India, Kota is a well known hub where the coaching school industry has grown and multiplied. In fact, it has even given rise to ancillary industries like those who rent out rooms and those who supply meals to the numerous people who turn up from the remotest parts of India who take up lodgings here and take rigorous tuitions so that they can crack the IIT entrance tests.

While coaching classes are certainly churning out would be scholars in an assembly line fashion and for small town India, where often there is wealth but lack of opportunity, this seems to be a god sent opportunity to pursue higher education. Very likely, given the state of the formal education system in India, these children would never be able to clear the entrance examinations without the coaching that these institutes would provide.

But what about aptitude? The entrance tests to IIT and elsewhere were conceived to evaluate aptitude as much as or even more than merits. By quantifying examination results, we have ensured that aptitude has been thrown in to a never never land of oblivion. Says Prof. M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-M “by attending the IIT coaching classes, students were learning a wrong lesson that the ends justify the means.” They (students) think there is nothing wrong in missing school to attend coaching. But the student does not realize his real loss." he further says that the coaching institutes were enabling many among the less-than-best students to crack the test and keeping girls from qualifying.

Meanwhile industry body Assocham's estimate of size of the Coaching Class Industry is based on about 6 lakh students attending these classes every year at an average cost of Rs.1.7 lakhs per year and average cost of each student is 1.7 lakhs ,as given by a spokesman of the Industry body provided to TOI. According to Assocham, the staggering sum of Rs.10, 000 crore is being netted every year by private Academies that coach students for admission test,

Meanwhile the common man is caught between a rock and a hard place. There are heaps of private universities and even foreign universities, where admissions are relatively easier but the costs are unaffordable. Publicly funded institutions are relatively cheap (though they are getting expensive), but the road to their door leads through very expensive coaching institutions. and with the state steadily privatizing education in guise or the other, things presumably can only get worse for the present.

The Party Manifesto : Promising Milk and Honey

Political party manifestos will never be great literature but they can be great works of fantasy. One that I have been reading states that Kolkata, the city of my birth could soon dazzle like London, if the electors in West Bengal do the right thing and vote the Trinamool Congress into power. So says Mamata Banerjee, and since she is the sole policy maker in the party, her words can be said to be authoritative. Further, Digha, the Bengal coast line, could rival Goa and the North Bengal hills where the Gorkhas agitate temperamentally could wean away tourists from Switzerland. Of course these are the Lok Sabha elections that are looming on the horizon, so how will Trinamool implement these promises without governing the State. No matter, just wait – the Trinamool vision of a resurgent Bengal promises to turn Bengal into a land of milk and honey.

If you are looking for gravitas here in what was said by Mamata Banerjee in the press conference where she released the party’s election manifesto, you won’t get any. But irony is available in plenty: We've great talents (in the state) but the only thing missing here is clear political vision and mission in our ruling Left Front government," she added, while releasing the party's manifesto for the April-May Lok Sabha polls. So we know now – the Left Front doesn’t have any vision for governance – not a wrong vision, not an obsolete vision, but simply no vision. Trinamool on the other hand, possesses the elixir of life and is just waiting spoon in hand to administer it to the hapless people of the state.

Of course one is used to hyperbole at election times. There is that famous one about Bihar’s roads and Hema Malini’s cheeks; that the roads would be as smooth as her cheeks. That statement is usually attributed to Lalu Yadav but he has claimed that it was former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee who made these comments.

In the light of all that goes into party manifestos, just how seriously should they be taken? The Congress party manifesto released the other day claims that they had made promises in their manifesto of 2004 and that they have substantially delivered on them. Perhaps they have indeed; though this will always be a matter of debate. but what makes the party manifestoes a little more than a glorified academic document – a mere statement of intent at best or even a journey into fantasy land like the Trinamool wish list ; or the quasi academic document produced by the CPI(M), whose manifesto would not be worth even the paper they printed it on, since even the leadership is not expecting to get numbers in parliament that would allow them to get any where near to implementing it.

Perhaps one day, party or coalition manifestoes would become contractual legally enforceable document and not a statement of intent or even worse an exercise in futile fairy tale writing hoping that out of the dense wordy documents that emerge out of the woodwork, in the election season, some vestige of reality would be visible…. and the dream of visiting Switzerland for the cost of a train ticket in Magmata’s Bengal would be realized. After all, isn’t there a slogan …” hum honge kamyaad ek din…”

India : 85th on the Corruption Index

India’s Central Vigilance Commission has taken umbrage at a recent report of the Transparency International the global corruption tracking watch dog. Transparency International has downgraded India’s ranking from 72 to 85 in the list of world’s corruption-plagued countries. That has upset the chief babu of India’s own corruption watchdog, the Central Vigilance Commission, Pratyush Sinha, who has taken up the matter of India’s downgrading and wanted to know the methodology used to measure corruption across countries. TI’s reply hasn’t been to their satisfaction and that has upset the CVC more.

To most of us living in the country, the CVC’s gesture would look to be mere posturing. this attempt to play around with statistics. It is a bit like the data on inflation – inflation may have dropped to below 1 percent as per the official gazettes, but the potatoes and the cauliflowers at the local vegetable seller don’t seem to be getting any cheaper.

The way things are set up in India, the climate is more favourable to bribe taking and opacity than simplicity of procedures and transparency. Let me give an example: the other day, a friend and a colleague had to get a Trust deed registered at the office of the Registrar of Trusts. After we had put together the Trust deed with the help of a lawyer, and got our photographs and other papers ready, we proceeded to the Registrar’s office. The lawyer encouraged us to leave the matter to him and his staff “Have coffee in my office and I will call you when it is time” was his advice. Once we reached the Registrar’s office, we understood the poignancy of the lawyer’s counsel. There were a bunch of windows and surrounding each was a motley crowd of hands and feet; each trying to make eye contact with the clerk at the other end and simultaneously push through a cluster of papers. The sight would make a typical citizen shudder.

One of the reasons corruption thrives in India is the fact that procedures to get any thing done are so incredibly complex and opaque and there seems to be a deliberate attempt at several levels of officialdom to keep things thus; so that almost invariably, the common man has to take recourse to brokers and middle men to get things done. These men then not only get the things fixed but also act as a conduit for the money that cannot be obviously exposed to the public gaze.

Although e governance has made some difference to the common man by making some aspects of government accessible to the common man, there is a lot to be done. In many instances, complicated and antiquated procedures have simply been mounted on line, and that does not help much.

Coming back to Transparency International and their corruption index, how are the neighbors doing? Well, Bangladesh is at number 147, Pakistan at 134, Nepal at 121, Myanmar at 178, Sri, Lanka at 92. India could pat itself on the back for its South Asia region, except for the fact that tiny and impoverished Bhutan stands at number 45, standing tall.

the Central Vigilance Commission is complaining about the data that Transparency International and quibbling that the number that India ought to occupy ought to be 71 or 73 or some thing in that region. may be instead of squabbling about data, the CVC should send some babus on a study tour of Bhutan to check out just what is it that they do right that we can copy. May copy book style India “jugaar” to reduce corruption will get us better rankings next year than a representation to Transparency International!

Incest : India's Hidden Shame

Incest : Our hidden shame

Two instances of incest were widely talked about in the media over the last week. The first pertained to the Austrian Josef Fritzl who has just been sentenced to life imprisonment for incarcerating his daughter in a purpose-built prison beneath the family home in Amstetten for 24 years, raping her more than 3,000 times, fathering seven children with her and causing the death of a twin son. Sounds too horrible to be true; and the fact that it was his own daughter make it sound even more monstrous.

The other story, more home grown, is that of a businessman, who allegedly raped his daughter over a period of nine years following a tantrik’s advice for getting rich. The traumatised girl, now 21, had been silent about her ordeal but mustered courage to approach the police after her father attempted to rape her 15-year-old younger sister, again on the advice of the tantrik. The mother was arrested by for abetting the crime, and if any thing, the fact that the mother actively helped out as her daughter was being violated makes it if anything; more ghastly.

Just how big an issue is incest in India? Well obviously a topic like this will always be in the shadows and one may have even to look at the definition of the word “incest”. In South India, marriages happen between cousins (especially cross-cousins, that is, the children of a brother and sister) and even between uncles and nieces (especially a man and his elder sister’s daughter). That is culturally acceptable and would not be termed as an incestuous relationship.

A report produced by the BBC a decade ago had opined citing research sources that Close-knit family life in India masks an alarming amount of sexual abuse of children and teenage girls by family members. It said that that disbelief, denial and cover-up to preserve the family reputation is often put before the individual child and its abuse. A report from RAHI, a Delhi based NGO working with child sexual abuse titled “ Voices from the Silent Zone,” suggests that nearly three-quarters of upper and middle class Indian women are abused by a family member - more than often an uncle, a cousin or an elder brother.

Indeed, sexual abuse of children in any form of household setting by a family member in India is among the most urgent forms of child abuse which our society must address. As per women’s organizations and activists nearly ninety-five percent of the abused are girls and more than ninety-five percent abusers are males. Surveys carried out in schools and informal chats reveal that around 40% girls experience incest abuse or sexual abuse in one or the other form in India. How deep the ice berg is can perhaps be gauged by the fact that 6% of all calls made to CHILDLINE (a 24-hour Indian helpline for children in distress) in the last ten years have reported Child Sexual Abuse(CSA) — 6% of 10 million calls! There probably could not be greater statistical validation that CSA/incest is the most under-reported child rights violations in India.

In India, there is no single law that specifically deals with child abuse, and there is no clear delineation of sexual abuse in the Indian Penal Code. Indian laws consider only “assault to outrage the modesty of a woman,” rape by penile penetration, and “unnatural sexual intercourse” like sodomy as punishable sexual crimes.

Although, there are lawyers and child rights activists who are ready to spell, explain, and act against incest and abuse they are still not a critical mass and their views strong enough to be able to impact consciousness of the policymakers, police, lawyers, judges, teachers, schools, mental, physical and sexual health professionals, and all those who could take up the issue.

Although the issues of shame, family honour and plain depravity means that very little statistics are available, it also means that every statistic available speaks not just for itself for a lot many others in the shadows, children and girls who invisible and will because of the abuse and betrayal they have faced, retreat further into the darkness and possibly out of reach of help. For organizations like RAHI, the RAASTA is indeed long and a lot more RAAHGIRs are needed to fight this mammoth dark monster.

Jade Goody and the Sanctity of Death

I have always been fascinated by the Jain practice of Santhara. In this practice, when some one from the Jain community believes that he or she has lived a full life and has fulfilled all their social and familial obligations, they can opt to voluntarily hasten the process of death by going on a fast which lasts till death. Unlike the fasts that Gandhiji popularized and others have also undertaken, this fast is not a protest fast; these men and women are not having any demands that they want met.

Although this practice has some times been understood as suicide; Santhara has none of the emotional turbulence that is typically associated with the term best translated as atma hatya - the taking of one’s life. Here death is welcomed through a peaceful, tranquil process providing peace of mind for everyone involved and is a ritual of great dignity.

The question of how private and how dignified should death be is an important one and the question has been raised before. Probably in recent times, it was first raised while reflecting on the media coverage of the death of Princess Diana in an accident. The editors of many of the leading British tabloids had agreed that they had helped create a mood in which the paparazzi, who were hounding Diana when her car crashed in a Paris underpass, were out of control. Phil Hall, who was editor of the News of the World, said it was a circle of culpability involving the readers who demanded more photographs, the photographers who chased her and the newspapers that published the pictures. “A big Diana story could add 150,000 sales. So we were all responsible,” he said.

I guess that that began the commercialization of death and there has been no looking back ever since. But even so, death and the private life of individuals has been some thing that the Indian media has generally not intruded into. But the rules seem to be changing.

Times Now, the news channel has literally been giving a ball by ball commentary of Jade Goody on her death bed; which really looks macabre. Of course unlike the Diana episode, all this is happening with Jade’s full consent. As she herself says, I’ve lived in front of the restraint cameras. And maybe I’ll die in front of them. And I know some people don’t like what I’m doing but at this point I really don’t care what other people think. Now, it’s about what I want.” And since what Jade really wants is to earn enough cash for her children even in her dying days, the picture is some what complicated.

But while the motives may some what blur the issue of the sanctity of death, it does not obliterate it. A death bed scene cannot really be telecast like a 20-20 cricket match of the IPL. There was a time when terminal illness was treated with a decorum that mirrored a society which was, for all its faults, essentially at peace with itself in respect to the eternal truths of life and death. But today, in a bizarre circus that is scarcely imaginable, tributes to Jade Goody are printed while she still lives, there was an interest in filming her as she breathed her last and apparently her reality show producer, Max Clifford is planning stories as he in true vulture fashion , waits for her death. Even the venerable BBC is readying itself to cover the event when it occurs. It has long been said of our time that we have lost the sanctity of life; now it would appear that we have lost the sanctity for death too.

Lonely at 60

A couple of days ago, I opened up the newspaper to read that an elderly couple living in an upper middle class locality had committed suicide suddenly. There was no ostensible reason for this, but the newspaper reported that they were desperately lonely and a point came when they felt that they could not endure it any longer. They had several children; their youngest lived with them, but the others; married and with families of their own lived within a couple of hundred miles away from Delhi.

This one of course was not the first suicide occurring among the elderly in Delhi, and neither will it be the last. Although the government in Delhi has tried to be responsive to the needs of him elderly in much way – it has a helpline for access by senior citizens, increased policing, free medical aid, bus travel and what not. But all the help that government and civil society organizations can and do provide does not alleviate the pain of loneliness and abandonment that our senior citizens go through.

But this is not just a Delhi thing, though this could well be an urban thing. Last year, BBC had covered the story of Laxmibai Laxmidas Paleja in Mumbai, whose grandson and daughter in law were abusing her and speaks of Laxmi bai’s hapless condition “"I'm old. I couldn't defend myself. I was bleeding all over. I've got bruises all over my body. Then they just bundled me in a car and dumped me here at my daughter's house."

There has been a steady rise recently in reports of cases of elderly being abused, harassed and abandoned in India and it does not need the BBC to tell us that Joint family systems - where three or more generations lived under one roof - were a strong support network for the elderly and they have more or less disappeared – at least in the cities.

But more children are now leaving their parental homes to set up their own. Sociologists say the pressures of modern life and the more individualistic aspirations of the young are among reasons why the elderly are being abandoned or, in some cases, abused.

Delhi University professor Kum Kum Srivastava makes a telling comment when she says that "I think this a child-oriented society, not a parent-oriented one anymore." Meanwhile, demographically, India is getting younger as a nation and the problems and aspirations of the youth alone are increasingly getting centre stage. But even so, India has more 60m men and women older than 65 and the problems of the elderly are multiplying, and with societal trends going the way they are, the problems of the elderly are likely to get more and more sidelined.

Although organizations like Helpage have long been around, typically NGOs and other organizations have a bias towards the poor and the marginalized. This is a bit irrelevant hee considering that many of the emotional deprivation that the elderly suffer are likely to more accentuated in the isolation that upper or middle class living brings. Despite there being a National Policy on Older Persons and several schemes for the physical welfare of our senior citizens, the emotional gap and loneliness is a need that looks set to grow at a much faster pace than can typically be met.