About 25-30 lakh migrants from other States are working in Kerala today. For them, ‘God's Own Country’ is exactly what the Arabian Gulf is for the Keralites. VR Jayaraj looks at the root of this phenomenon and how it’s a simple theory of physics
Gopal Barua, 29, hailing from a village outside Guwahati, Assam, is now happy with his life as a worker at the stone quarry-cum-crusher unit near Ottapalam in Kerala’s Palakkad district. He earns Rs 600 a day in wages which works out to Rs 18,000 a month — an amount he would never be able to earn in his home State from any job he is capable of doing. His wife Gowri is with him and she is earning too, by working as a cook for the 30-odd workers — all from outside Kerala — at the quarry. The added advantage of this happy life for Gopal is that he is not paying even a single rupee as rent as he is living in the workers’ quarters, which is tin-roofed with walls made of cement blocks and separated into several rooms.
Gopal and Gowri earn over Rs 25,000 a month, a sum he had not even dreamt of making till three years ago while living in his small bamboo-walled, palm frond-thatched house of his parents near Guwahati. “What would I get if I work for a whole month in AssamIJ Something like Rs 3,000IJ Work here is a bit hard, but life is like that,” says Gopal. He dreams of going back home forever after three or four years, building a pakka (concrete) house with enough rooms for his yet-to-be-born children to live in, and giving them the kind of education that the owner of the quarry, who worked in Kuwait for 20 years, is giving to his kids. For Gopal, and the several lakhs of migrants like him, Kerala now is exactly what the Arabian Gulf is for the Keralites.
Gopal is just one of the 25-30 lakh migrants working in Kerala currently. They come from everywhere, especially southern, eastern and middle Indian States of Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Chhattisgarh, etc. You would see people from Bangladesh, but you will never know their real identity because they pose themselves as Bengalis. The exact number of migrants working and living in Kerala will never be known as no mechanism can practically formulate such an estimate. Economists in the State have yet to find out how many billion rupees of the average Rs 55,000 crore the Gulf Malayalees repatriate every year is being taken away by these migrants to their home States.
Replacement migration
like the Keralites engaged in jobs requiring pure physical energy in the Gulf countries, these people live in hell-holes provided by employers at their workplaces — equivalent to what are known as the Arabian labour camps — or in buildings of inadequate or most often non-existent minimum facilities taken on rent in the backyards of the towns and cities. like the ordinary Keralites working in the Gulf, they do all kinds of jobs: Construction, stone-blasting, stone-crushing, septic tank cleaning, brick-making, road-paving, carpentry, tree-climbing, log-splitting, linen-washing and what not! The only job the cynical and perennially suspicious Malayalee would never engage migrant men in is that of the house-servant.
“There are two reasons for this. The first is that even the poorest of the Gulf Malayalees have a feeling that they are a rich class with lots of insecure money and gold stored at their homes. The second is that the average Gulf Malayalee does not want male servants to linger around their wives. And that reminds me of another joke. Kerala has over three million sexually active, sex-starving women at any given point of time. You know the reason,” says a Kochi-based sociologist.
At the root of this huge migration is a simple theory of physics: On this earth of substances, when anything is displaced from the space it occupies, that space cannot remain a vacuum and has to be occupied by something of exact volume. The most interesting part of this is that when this displacement and replacement happens in the human field, it is not just the volume that matters but the qualities of the displaced will also be replaced by equal or equivalent qualities. The negative qualities — rather activities — associated with this process range from counterfeit currency exchanges in the place of hawala and money-funnelling operations between the Gulf and Kerala to narcotics trafficking in the place of gold-smuggling and harbouring of extremists.
“The most interesting part of this replacement migration is that replacement is taking place on all fronts and we will see that this situation cannot be avoided in the evolution of society,” says SK Pillai, a migration studies enthusiast. “Kerala has exported a minimum of 25 lakh people into the Gulf. let us forget for a moment the field of professionals. In the past four decades, almost all carpenters, cobblers, low-grade technicians and mechanics, manual labourers, unskilled workers have migrated into the Gulf for making more money than they were making in Kerala. The labour vacuum it created in the State is unimaginable. Even the traditional coconut tree-climbers are not visible these days. At the same time, the money these migrants to Gulf brought back led to an explosion in the economic activity leading to huge demand for workers. Inevitably, Kerala has to import — like it imports every article from its staple food rice to its fantasy aid aphrodisiacs — labour to fill the vacuum left by all those Malayalees who have migrated to the Gulf. And what we see now is that these 2.5 million Kerala migrants are being replaced by an equal number of people from other Indian states,” Pillai says.
Migrant crime
Keralites need not be told about the illegalities involved in migration (to the Gulf) which start with forged passports, faked visas and extend to crimes on the ground like bootlegging in states with total prohibition like Saudi Arabia, flesh trade in Dubai, smuggling of gold to Kochi and Kozhikode, hawala operation, money-funnelling, and smuggling of counterfeit Indian currencies. Cities in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are also seen by Islamist extremists from Kerala as a safe haven when operations become difficult and the police hunt for them at home. The Kerala Police and the Central Intelligence Bureau believe that many of the associates of extremists like Thadiyantavide Nazeer are holed up in Gulf cities. At least a dozen cases of Kerala-based flesh trade mafias operating in the Gulf have been registered by the State police in the past half-decade. “Gulf in every sense is haven and heaven for Keralites. In migration, such things naturally occur. And so, Kerala, which is now receiving migrants from other States in large scale, is also turning into a host of migrant crimes. Migration brings people and also their politics and habits,” says journalist PVS Warrier.
Kerala had a Naxalite history of its own and current reports say that Maoists have formed their Kerala chapter based on the forests of the Western Ghats. Almost all the old Naxalite groups have been disbanded or evolved into rights groups or leaders have migrated into various professions. But the fact remains that there are people who still share the sentiment of hardline Red ideology. When such emotional backgrounds remain intact, it is not difficult for modern-day Maoists from the region called Dandakaranya, or the Red Corridor as it is commonly called, to find temporary shelters in Kerala to escape crackdown in their States. It is easy for a Maoist to remain invisible among the thousands of migrant stone quarry workers in the Perumbavoor region near Kochi or the colonies of large number of Bengali migrants working in the brick kilns of Budhanoor in Alappuzha district or lead a secret but safe life of a waiter or cleaner in a Kochi restaurant.
Ground reality
This was just a possibility which the police used to consider vaguely till that day in December 2007 when top Maoist leader Mallaraja Reddy from Andhra Pradesh was arrested along with his wife Beecha Suguna alias Sangeetha from a house in Angamaly, some 30 km north of Kochi. The Kerala Police had no big role in this arrest as it was their Andhra Pradesh counterparts who actually made it possible, but the incident prompted the police to keep a vigilant eye on the migrant workers engaged in various job sectors in the State. Soon it was found that there were elements among migrant workers from other States into Kerala who were engaged in illegal activities committed by many Malayalee migrants in the Gulf.
The forests of Idukki in Kerala are famous for one of the best varieties of Cannabis available anywhere in the world (drug enthusiasts call it Neelachadayan, Idukki Gold, etc), but reports now abound of low-quality Ganja being smuggled from Bihar and Assam into Kerala by the migrants following the intensification of anti-drug operations in the ‘gardens’ of Idukki. These consignments have been finding their way into migrant labour camps, Malayalee youths and even the colleges of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
“Sources in the narcotics division of the police say that this inferior quality stuff coming from other States has huge demand in the self-financing colleges of Kerala and Tamil cities like Coimbatore and Salem. The stuff is cheap, the migrants cannot insist on big price as they are not yet an organised mafia and the distribution chain is very hazy as far as the police are concerned,” says a senior journalist.
Skirmishes among the migrants and between groups of migrants in so-called labour camps associated with stone quarries, brick kilns, jewellery work, etc, are other areas that trouble the police frequently. All kinds of crimes — theft, murders, etc — happen in these colonies, as low-income Kerala migrants in the Gulf would tell you about the situations they live in at the desert labour camps. Added to these are incidents of smuggling of counterfeit currencies, suspected to be manufactured in Pakistan. Most of those arrested in connection with these crimes are Bengalis, though the police suspect that they could be people from Bangladesh. But there is no easy way to confirm this. The police say that there is a huge security risk in this as it is well-known that Pakistani terror groups often operate in India through their cells in Bangladesh. And it has already been confirmed that several Islamists from Kerala had been keeping links with the Pakistani terror groups in Bangladesh.
Unlike the internal security agencies in the Gulf countries which can crackdown on such elements at will, the police in Kerala are in a hand-tied situation. In the first place, whenever there is an incident, it is a bit odd for the force to be suspicious of fellow Indians who are here to make a living. It will set a dangerous trend if the police begin to conduct raids for anti-social elements in the camps or demand identity proofs from citizens of this country at every turn on the road. The State labour Department has devised a scheme for the migrant workers from other States for registering them so that at least a vague idea on their number and the nature of the work they are engaged in can be gathered, but the Government cannot go beyond a point in this effort.
“Would the Keralites working or seeking job in other Indian cities like to be treated like thatIJ” asks Pillai. “The problems created by the migrants or occurring in their camps are not at all serious when compared to the problems created internally in the State. This is more of a social problem than a legal matter. Before blaming people from other States for the ills happening in Kerala, Keralites should look at themselves,” he adds.